Dolorah

Sovereign of Sun and Sacrifice.

Lore pending

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

Dolorah is the sun, and the sun keeps nothing back.

It pours light and warmth on everything beneath it, asks nothing in return, and spends itself down to do it — and Dolorah asks her followers to burn the same way. Where Shaarat fights for the honor of the fighting and does not much mind who is standing behind him, a follower of Dolorah fights for precisely the people at her back, and would find a victory that cost her nothing to shield them a strange and hollow thing. Her followers carry light into dark places and burn out what has been festering there — making day where there was none, calling the sun down in a blaze, and driving out what the dark has left behind — and they turn back the walking dead the way the dawn turns back the night. They lift what has been laid on the afflicted and put heart into a failing line, and they try the open word before the drawn blade, for Dolorah would always rather win a thing without breaking it.

The light is carried at cost to the one who carries it. That is the whole of the bargain, and Dolorah states it plainly to every follower before she takes a single one: you will stand in front, you will spend first, and some day you will spend everything. Her clergy are not the ones the sun shines on. They are the ones who agreed to be the sun.

Traditions that teach her: the Archaist.

Her worship day is Far, near the week’s end, when the light has done its work and the harvest is in. She shares Far with Ollarasht, the Sovereign of Feast and Fortune — the sun and the luck of the harvest it ripens. Dolorah is the steady giving that fills the field; Ollarasht is the wager on whether it rains the day you cut it. The two make a poor account of each other, and Sair has never been able to do without either.

Strictures

Archaist

• A follower of Dolorah must bear the sun of Dolorah openly upon her, in the light where all can see it, and never hidden or put away.
• At first light each day, a follower of Dolorah must face the rising sun and renew her charge — to stand in front of those who cannot, and to spend herself before she spends them. The dawn office takes one hour (6 turns).
• A follower of Dolorah must set herself between the strong and the weak. She may not abandon to harm any helpless soul that her body or her blade could shield, and her own safety she spends before theirs.
• A follower of Dolorah must offer the open hand before the closed one — peace, or quarter, or the chance to lay down arms — and keep faith with any who take it. She wins in the light or she loses honestly: never by ambush, by poison, by treachery, nor by any power drawn from the dark.

The cost of the light

The shield is a vow to stand, not a vow to die. Dolorah asks a follower to spend her own safety first — to take the blow meant for another, to hold the door, to be the last across the bridge — but a sacrifice that saves no one is only a wasted follower, and Dolorah counts that no gift at all. She may choose her ground, fall back to fight again, and refuse a death that buys nothing. What she may not do is walk away from someone she could have shielded because shielding them was going to cost her.

The helpless are those who cannot answer the harm at hand — the child, the wounded, the unarmed, the one held down. They are not her fellow adventurers, who chose the road and can hold their own, and they are not the enemy in front of her, who is neither helpless nor owed her body. The vow is a shield for those without one; it does not make her a shield for people who never needed it.

The open hand is offered, not thrown away. Dolorah bids her follower try the bloodless path first — the parley, the terms, the way out that lets everyone live — but a thing that cannot be reasoned with is owed no speech, and an enemy who answers the open hand with a blade has ended the conversation himself. A follower who has offered peace once and been refused owes no second offer, and may then fight without stint. Dolorah is the sun, not a lamb; the same light that ripens the field will set a corpse alight where it stands.

Her own hand only. The vow against the dark means binds the follower, not the company she keeps. She will not poison, ambush, or raise the dead — but she may travel with a scout who knifes sentries in the night and a witch who does worse, and be glad of them. Dolorah asks her to keep her own hands in the light. What the rest of the party does in the shadows is between them and whatever they pray to.