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Janos A'Roihan
Profile: Janos is about what you'd expect from an Andoran: medium height (around 5'9", but he may grow an inch or two more), with mid-brown hair and matching eyes. His build is solid and lean from time spent around the Warder Yards. He's handsome, but not exceptionally so. Personality-wise, he's very quiet; he tends not to speak unless he thinks what he has to say is important, and as a result he has a knack for fading into the background. Biography: I wish I knew where I grew up. Oh, I remember it well enough – it was a flyspeck farmstead in the middle of nowhere in Andor. It had three fields of grain, two apple trees, and a garden in the back. There was a little outbuilding that housed a single cow and a double handful of chickens. The house itself was large, or maybe it only seemed that way to a child. I had two sisters and a brother, and our parents worked us hard. They weren’t cruel about it; it was just that running the farm was a lot of work, and we learned early on that if you didn’t keep working, things fell apart. Unless you were a dog, of course. We had two dogs, and they never did any work at all, but nobody ever complained about them. All of that changed one summer day. I was nine years old when the Aiel murdered my family. Not even the dogs survived. I didn’t know they were Aiel at the time, of course; just that they were tall, and lean, and that they hung their victims from one of the apple trees. We hadn’t done anything to them; we didn’t even know they were there. I was trying to sneak away, while the house was burning behind me, and I ran headlong into someone else. They were grown-ups, too; a tall, red-haired man with a sword, and a shorter, dark-haired woman. I thought at first that the man was one of the ones who killed my family, but he wasn’t. They took me with them, and protected me while I recovered. Not that I was really hurt; my body was fine. All the injuries were on the inside. That was how I met the people who eventually became my foster parents: Ashfalcon and Talia. They were on their way to Cairhien on business. At first I didn’t really understand what they were. Talia told me that she was Aes Sedai, but I didn’t really know what that meant. It was only later that I learned that Ashfalcon was asha’man, a sort of male Aes Sedai; at first I just thought he was her Warder. They weren’t anyone important back then, just Aes Sedai and Asha’man. We met more Aiel outside of Cairhien, and I learned more about them – and about my new father, who had once been one of them. Both of them seemed to want me to know how to defend myself; they let me study a little with the Aiel, and Ashfalcon taught me fighting when he had time. That wasn’t very often, though, and we didn’t stay in Cairhien long. Just long enough to finish what the two of them had come to do. Afterwards, we came here, to the Grey Tower. I remember being very impressed the first time I saw it, and thinking that the Shaido would never get in here. The more I saw inside, the safer I felt; it was the first time I’d really felt safe since my family died. I’ve been here for almost six years now, working and playing and learning. I’ve trained in the Warder Yards, and studied in the library, and done chores, and run messages. The only time I’ve really been in trouble was when my foster parents vanished a little while back, and I think everyone knows that wasn’t my fault. Father tested me for the Spark, yesterday, and found that I can channel. He seemed surprised, as much as he ever seems anything, but I wasn’t. I still remember the day my first family was killed, and why I escaped. It wasn’t the Aiel who set our house on fire. It was me. So, um, can I be a Soldier
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