Gali hatched in a clutch of Serpentlings deep in a subtropical forest far from the Verdant Ruins, in a nest-hollow beneath the roots of an ancient apple tree. His broodmother taught the traditional Serpentling virtues: patience, stillness, and venom. Gali absorbed the first two perfectly. The third he refined into an art form—and then, being Gali, he discovered apples.
The orchard at the forest's edge belonged to a widow who left fruit on her windowsill. Gali stole his first apple at barely a year old and was ruined for all other delicacies forever. He returned nightly, growing bolder, until the widow caught him mid-theft—and, amused by the tiny hooded snake clutching her fruit in his tail, let him keep it. He visited her for years afterward, trading 'protection' (mostly from himself) for apples. It was his first lesson in leverage, and he never forgot it.
Adulthood arrived with appetite. When loggers and prospectors began stripping the forest, Gali turned predator-for-hire. His talents—climbing, burrowing, perfect stillness, and a bite that ended arguments instantly—made him invaluable to smugglers moving goods through the canopy roads. He learned Thieves' Cant from a fence named Ossler, learned lockpicks from a disgraced guild locksmith, and learned the assassin's creed from a human killer called the Widow of Varn, who recognized in the little snake a natural-born Murder artist. By the time he was grown, Gali had a reputation in the underworld: small, cute, unassuming—and lethal. Contracts came to him. Apples, increasingly, did not.
Then the world ended. Gali remembers little of the last month—only ash on his scales, a shared dream of a glowing figurine, and waking in a cold cave beside strangers with the same blank look in their eyes. Whatever pulled him from his forest also bound him to their task: reach the dimension of Partoon and destroy Gambro's dinosaur figurine before the beasts finish devouring the world.
Gali tells himself he joined the party for the loot, and for the promise that the Verdant Ruins—full of fruit trees gone wild and unguarded—will be his again when the dinosaurs fall. But there is something else, something he won't name: the apocalypse has made him, for the first time in his life, part of a pack. Snakes are solitary. Gali is discovering he doesn't entirely hate the company.
Now a seasoned Assassin of level 7, he serves as the party's scout, lockpick, poisoner, and first-strike weapon. He studies Gambro's cultists, decodes their Thieves' Cant messages, and vanishes into ferns and burrows to watch dinosaur patrols. He still hoards apples in his pack. He still looks adorable. And he still moves fastest when no one is watching—look away for even a second, and—*bam*.
