Banor

Sovereign of Horn and Hunt.

Lore pending

This page carries Banor’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his lodges, his rites, his clergy, his place among the Sovereigns — has not been written yet. What is here is complete and canon; it is simply not the whole page.

Banor is the oldest bargain there is: something has to die so that something else can eat.

He is not against the killing. He is the god of doing it right. Where Rowa nurses the green world and takes a life only at need, Banor hands his followers the spear and tells them to go and take theirs — and then binds them, hard, to the one law that keeps a hunter from becoming a plague: take what you will use, use the whole of it, and leave the wood able to feed your grandchildren. His followers can read a day-old trail across bare rock, talk to the thing they are hunting, and call the herd, the wolf, and the old tusked things out of the deep wood. The nearest of them are given a beast to be kin to, and the deepest learn to shrug off their own shape and run as it — for to Banor the hunter and the hunted are the same animal seen from two ends of the spear, and a man who has never been the prey has no business being the predator.

The hunt is a courtesy, paid both ways. The beast is owed a clean death and an honest chase; Banor is owed his share; and the wood is owed enough left living to fill the gap. A follower who takes more than that is not hunting. He is just killing, and Banor has no use for him.

Traditions that teach him: the Archaist — and, under another name, the Orcblooded Shaman. The orc tribes of the old mountains call him Baalkan and hunt the same god by nearly the same rites, and this is the one kinship in the whole pantheon that nobody bothers to deny: a Sovereign-Host huntsman and a Baalkan shaman, meeting in the deep wood, know each other on sight. Where the dark powers wear two names to hide that they are one, Banor and Baalkan wear two names and admit it freely — a hunter’s god has nothing worth lying about.

His worship day is Wir, deep in the week, when the hunter is furthest from the hearth and closest to the country. He shares Wir with Shargon, the Sovereign of Wave and Whelm, the wild land and the wild sea — and the two are the tame edge and the drowning deep of one wilderness. Banor’s wild has a law in it and can be lived with. Shargon’s has none and cannot. A hunter keeps the first and fears the second, and knows in his bones they are the same country.

Strictures

Archaist

• A follower of Banor must bear a token of horn, tooth, or bone, taken from a beast he hunted and killed himself. It is remade whenever a worthier kill offers it.
• A follower of Banor must offer Banor a share at dusk each day — meat from that day’s hunt, or food and drink where the hunt gave nothing — for one hour (6 turns). It is the same offering the Baalkan shamans make at the same hour, and the two faiths hold it a good omen to make it together.
• A follower of Banor must take his meat by the hunt and honor what he takes: he uses the whole of a kill and lets nothing he has taken go to waste.
• A follower of Banor must never hunt a kind to its end, but leave it always enough to breed; and the kind of his own totem beast he must never hunt, eat, or wear at all.

The law of the hunt

Banor is a god of the kill, not of mercy. He does not ask his followers to spare the beast or to hunt only at need — that is another Sovereign’s road. Banor’s follower kills gladly and often; hunting is how he prays. What Banor forbids is not death but waste: the trophy taken and the carcass left, the meat spoiled through carelessness, the whole valley emptied of deer because it was easy.

A hunt is the taking; a fight is not a hunt. The courtesies are owed to what a follower runs down for the taking — the game, the beast he means to use. A wolf that comes for his throat, a bandit on the road, a thing in a ruin that would eat him, is an enemy and not game: he kills it as he must, owes it no share and no clean chase.