New God Time

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Stellus Yastreb
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New God Time

Post by Stellus Yastreb »

(Or rather, the Cedrification of an existing God)
Image
The High Priest of the Lockenhasp Temple of Mo'll and of Quixy In Exile
in the service of
The Cedrist Temple of Goldshire
in
Solemn Duty and Deference Eternal
to the
The High Priesthood of All Cedrism, Borne of the Benacian Isles
does hereby announce
REVELATION by Divine Conference
obtained from
Ecumenical Mission
to
The Temple of Ulimahinacua
and
The Star Lodge of the Ward of Lumenetra


Arrest your mortal troubles awhile, ye faithful, and harken unto my words.

Your eyes and ears will no doubt have been tortured for a time now, by the frenetic bustlings of a certain young man in the southern reaches of Goldshire. In defiance of his humble beginnings in the monastery of the Origuttulan Order of Ikol, it seems his ancient Piscatorial blood has prevailed and granted him all the stature and vivacity necessary for the rule of those most peculiar of people, the Lunatics.

Under his rule, in the finest traditions of his noble line and its loyalty to Our Temple, he has sought to bring understanding between Our Temple and the more localised faiths of his fief. As the Transcedrist Temple of the Seven Deities in Suthergold has proven, faiths that first appear to kneel apart in their supplications do, in fact, bow before the very same Gods by a different name. So too in Lunaris, the interest of Our Temple has been drawn to the Temple of Ulimahinacua; a small, mystical sect whose origins are perhaps as ancient as Our Temple. Who is this Ulimahinacua, and what did zie do to warrant the construction of a temple to zir worship?

With these questions, the Lunatic Count recently sent me to investigate the bleak yet beautiful shores of the Lumenetra peninsula where the Temple is located. The building itself is small but ornate, cared for by the Elders of the Star Lodge of Lumenetra whose meeting chamber is adjacent. This too is a beautiful place. Once I explained my business the Elders received me with a warm hospitality, allowing me to peruse their many written records and hear their tales of spoken word. These alone were of great help in learning about their deity, whose spirit is said to reside physically in the temple's central chamber and communicates in whispers to those willing to listen.

This is her story of her first appearance among mortals.

Being a tough patchwork of barren plain, lakes, swamps and thick forest, the land now known as Lunaris was not the first choice of settlement for the first humans to arrive in Benacia, and this defined its population from the very beginning. Those few who did venture into its dark reaches did so by necessity rather than choice. They were fugitives, outcasts and lost travellers from the tribal societies of the Benacian interior, and as one may expect they did not amount to much. They made their lives as humble hunters and foragers, and very little else.

Then, starting from the late 3000s bASC, Lunaris shared the same fate as the rest of Goldshire. Coastal colonisation by Treesians, who were then displaced by the incoming Khaz Modani and forced to flee into the interior lands.

Then after b2474 ASC, the Khaz Modani breakdown left a power vacuum. In the rest of Goldshire, this was rapidly filled by the Treesians under the House of Mercaja. But the Mercajas hesitated in their reconquest of Lunaris, seeing no commercial value in its exploitation. This allowed time for the Musican Alliance, a confederation of mercantile city states which had developed during the Khaz Modani collapse, to establish a series of outposts in western and southern Lunaris. In time the Musican Alliance was absorbed by Brookshire under Duke Raynor Me'Jiliad. Duke Ju'Uliave Mercaja of Goldshire was sufficiently irritated by this intrusion into his sphere of influence that, in b2400 ASC, he invaded the Brookshirian portion of Lunaris in the hope of wiping all Brookshirian influence from the eastern shore of the River Elwynn. This was, as history showed, a very silly idea.

Duke Raynor's counteroffensive was as ingenious as it was enormous. With the assistance of an enormous floating pontoon bridge built across the River Elwynn, he sent a huge army into Lunaris which swung north toward Goldshire Hamlet. Behind them came a reserve force, detailed to swing south and conquer Lunaris. Duke Ju' Uliave, in a state of panic, split his forces in Lunaris into two formations. The more elite units, fresh from the conquest of the Musican outposts, would pursue Raynor's army and try to prevent it reaching Goldshire Hamlet. The reserve units would march on the pontoon bridgehead itself, cutting off any of Raynor's reinfocements.

Ju'Uliave's reserve force never reached the bridgehead. On a moonlit night, as it descended into the Crescent Valley in central Lunaris, it suddenly encountered an approaching Brookshirian force descending from the other side. This was Duke Raynor's reserve, which had been detailed to follow the main force across the bridge but instead of heading north toward Goldshire Hamlet, it was to turn south and mop up Lunaris. By all accounts of what followed, neither force had expected to run into the other quite so soon.

And so it was that two opposing armies - each composed of second rate invalids, the mentally feeble, disciplinary cases and other soldiers deemed unsuitable for first line service - met abruptly in a valley in the middle of the night, weighed down by marching packs and mixed in with baggage wagons. Half of them did not even have weapons to hand. Despite this, the situation presented itself so suddenly and terrifyingly as to offer only one solution: to charge headlong at one's opponent before he had time to do the same.

The resulting engagement was as bloody as the most furious pitched battle, lent power by the sheer panic of the combatants and the fact that, despite it being a tactical sideshow, its outcome would be strategically decisive. If the Goldshirians won, they would proceed to the bridgehead uncontested and cut off Duke Raynor's main army, allowing Duke Ju'Uliave to annihilate it at leisure. If the Brookshirians won, the momentum of their advance into Goldshire would be assured and the fall of the Mercajas would surely follow.

The battle was tortuous one, where both sides are slowly ground down but neither faces a high enough loss in proportion with its enemy to call a retreat. And perhaps it would have come down to a fight between two men that night, if the piercing sound of a woman's voice in song had not echoed around the valley and stopped the several hundred combatants still standing.

At first, each man gazed at his opponent warily across the tip of his sword as the sweet voice carried on the air, even above the screams of the wounded and the crackle of the dry grass which had been set ablaze by flaming arrows. The song was of such tonal perfection that it gradually drove each soldier to lower his sword, back off a little from his opponent and search the sky, looking for the singer. The song was sung in an unknown language, to a tune which was never preserved by history except in the future dreams of all who heard it that night, to be forgotten on waking. It was said to be a very simple, almost careless tune like a nursery rhyme, but sung with such earnest power that it matched the stirring patriotic melodies of fife and drum to which the soldiers were more accustomed. Whatever its origin, it was enough to stop the battle in its tracks. When it ended, each man looked at each other as if pondering whether or not to continue fighting.

Then, a series of murmurs and gasps from soldiers in the middle of the battlefield revealed the singer. Some said she came out of a hiding place in the long grass. Others insisted they had seen her materialise out of the very smoke which drifted across the battlefield. Her face was as round and bright as the moon which shone full that night. She walked among the soldiers, and addressed them in a whisper which somehow carried to the ears of every single man on the field:

Look at the moon above you. You fight beneath it as shamelessly as you would in front of a child. You kill in the face of beauty.

I am upset. And I would have you all consumed by madness if I did not know you. I would have your wives possessed with rage enough to murder you as you slept, if I did not know you. I would have the tides of the sea drown you, if I did not know you.

But know you I do. You are the downcast, the rejected, the passed over. You have more in common with the mortals you seek to kill than the mortals in whose name you kill. You are the lame, the feeble, the enslaved, the innocent.

For this I will spare you, if you lay down your weapons and come with me.


And it is said that she led every last man from that field into the nearby forest, singing her sweet song as she went. She disappeared from sight among the trees but her song continued. The entranced men followed the song for days, not stopping to eat or sleep. Many died of malnutrition and exhaustion, but nobody willingly gave up. Eventually they were led out of the forest onto the shore of the raging Shire Sea, and it is here that the singing stopped. On this site they rested and then built their temple, their old allegiances forgotten. In time they drew in native folk from the nearby lands, as well as rejects and misfits from further afield. Many generations later these people would come to be known as the Lunatics, a disorganised rabble from whom a leader eventually emerged in the form of Eriana Moon, to show them the ways of art and sacrifice which have been their purpose ever since.

But what of their deity? She was said to be pleased with the temple her followers had built, and her spirit took up residence within its very walls. Elders said her name was Ulimahinacua, she came from the moon, she governed the tides and the temperament of women, and she had many wise things to tell those who would listen. But her place among the greater divine patchwork has not been known until now.

The Elders of Ulimahinacua's temple told me that none of their revelations had been able to tell of her origin directly, but those same revelations had told them it could be found if the right questions were asked. For millennia, the Elders had knelt in prayer and petitioned their Goddess in vain with every line of query they could muster.

It was then that they invited me to enter the temple's inner chamber, and with my own powers of prayer attempt to resolve Ulimahinacua's origin. So I entered the chamber alone. Its walls and floor were made of polished black jet, studded with white quartz stars of varying shapes. It imitated a depth of stellar field so convincing as to trick the senses and make one dizzy. Slim pillars of identical design seemed to jump out at me from the darkness. The entire ceiling was a glass skylight, stained in pure cobalt blue with a milky white moon in the middle. I carefully swayed to the pale light of this middle point, then knelt in prayer.

"If the sprit in whose name this temple was raised is here to listen, hear me now. I come in the name of My Celestial Lord Mo'll, and My Celestial Lord Quixy", I whispered. "Do you know of these?"

I deepened my breathing and concentrated. But there was nothing.

"Do you know of my Celestial Lord Mors and my Celestial Lady Viviantia, the progenitors?" I continued. "of my Celestial Lord Tempus, my Celestial Lady Breiza..."

And the moment I said 'Breiza', there was a piercing woman's scream so loud and close that it seemed to come from within me. I looked around, half expecting a murder in progress. But I alone was in the chamber.

I refocused my senses and carried on. "Do I address the kindred of Breiza, my Celestial Lady of Peace? Sister of my Celestial Lady Viviantia? Lover and keeper of my Celestial Lord Tempus?"

On 'Tempus', I was suddenly knocked onto the floor by a hard, blunt object to the back of the head. The swirling stars in my eyes now combined with those on the temple walls to create the sensation of flying through space at enormous speed. Quite dazed, I rolled onto my back, facing directly upward toward the glass moon on the ceiling. Its milky white light seemed to grow until it filled my entire vision.

It was then, in a single instant, that I knew the truth as fully as if I had always known it.

Ye faithful,

Ulimahinacua is the love-child of an affair between Our Celestial Lady Breiza and another of the Celestial Temple, one from the House of Light - but whom exactly I do not know. And it can never be known, for it was a liaison in defiance of the love between Our Celestial Lady Breiza and Our Celestial Lord Tempus, the God of war itself. And though the affair was discovered and the wrath of Our Celestial Lord Tempus was most fearsome, it was decided among the Gods that the identity of Ulimahinacua's father must be forever concealed. All the Celestial Temple is agreed on this, including Our Celestial Lord Tempus Himself, who knows full well the horrors that His wrath might incur if he knew exactly who dared interfere with His lover.

Ulimahinacua exerts Her will through the peace of Her mother and the light of Her unknown father. In this spirit, and for the sake of harmony among the other Gods after her illegitimate birth, she fled to the moon in her youth and made it her domain. From there She governs the tides of the sea and the temperament of women, and in conference with Our Celestial Lord Quixy She governs the sanity of all mortals. Aside from that She is a shy Goddess, detached from most other things except where they take her special attention, such as the needless battle which broke out under her full light. But if one petitions her directly with sufficient respect, she will reciprocate - as she does with the faithful in Her Temple.

This revelation made unto me with all the clarity of the fullest of moons, I must hereby recognise Our Celestial Lady Ulimahinacua as resident among the Cedrist Pantheon as the Goddess of the Moon, the Tides and Menstruation. I bid Her temple be afforded all due privileges protections as a Cedrist place of worship, that my own Temple in Lockenhasp shall regard Her will in its doings, and I petition the High Priesthood of All Cedrism to affirm Her place in the Celestial Temple in accordance with the revelation.

By Their Grace, Let it be Done.
________________________

MImageZ
P

________________________

Mekathot Zulta Ly'Piscator
High Priest of the Lockenhasp Temple of Mo'll and of Quixy in Exile
Lunaris, Goldshire

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Kaiser Mors IV
Posts: 95
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2014 9:36 pm

Re: New God Time

Post by Kaiser Mors IV »

The Head Priest of B'caw, God of Spicy Chicken, informs me that the Burner of Throats has commanded him to acknowledge the Celestial Lady Ulimahinacua OR ELSE, and therefore he has done so. Rejoice!
Mors IV Nerrolar
Once then twice, Kaiser of Shireroth
MORS VOS OMNES CONSERVET, SICUT MORS EUM CONSERVAVIT
Knight Companion of the Most Magnificent Imperial Order of the Sovereign Viking Crown (Stormark; awarded to Mors IV)

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