Nasaar

Sovereign of Magic and Mayhem.

Lore pending

This page carries Nasaar’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his sealed archives, 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.

Nasaar is not the Sovereign of the dark. He is the Sovereign of the leash.

Every summoner learns the same lesson in the end: what comes when it is called comes grudgingly, and spends the whole of its service hunting for the gap between the word spoken and the thing wanted. Nasaar’s servants are the ones for whom it does not. What they call, obeys. When their grip slips, what they called goes back where it came from instead of taking a hand with it on the way.

That is not a gift given freely. His followers keep the titles and the signs of the chthonic powers, the kinds and habits of the walking dead, the whole black library of demonology and necromancy — and Nasaar’s price is that they keep it shut. They call up manes and shadows, speak with the dead, wear skins not their own, and go looking for the places where the walls are thin. Somebody has to know where those places are. Nasaar’s answer is that it should be somebody who can be trusted not to say.

Magic and Mayhem are the two ends of one chain, and Nasaar holds both. His clergy are tolerated in Sair — openly, at Sovereign Square and elsewhere — for exactly one reason: when a thing is loose, they are the ones who put it back. Let no one mistake that for charity. They do not hunt a loosed thing for the sake of whatever it is eating. They hunt it because nothing that has been called ever forgets the mouth that called it, and they would very much rather meet it at a time of their own choosing.

There is no light way to worship Nasaar. No tradition teaches him to a lay follower; the least of his servants is already sworn as deeply as a monastic of any other Sovereign.

Traditions that teach him: the Gnomish Iconologist, and — asking more still — the Antiquarian.

His worship day is Sul, the week’s first day, when what will be done in the week to come is bound in advance. He shares Sul with Ouralon, and the pairing is less strange than it looks: both are Sovereigns of binding. Ouralon binds by law and by record; Nasaar binds by name and by rite. On the same morning, one servant recites the law in the forum where all may hear it, and the other goes down somewhere no one can.

Strictures

Both of Nasaar’s traditions ask a great deal, and the deeper asks more. Find your own tradition below; it tells you what it adds to the one above it.

Gnomish Iconologist

• She that binds others, herself is bound. A follower of Nasaar must always wear a form of binding: a chain, a cord, a manacle, an iron ring — visible upon her person when in public.
• A follower of Nasaar must not forget the forbidden names. Each day she must draw a circle and speak within it, each of the dark names of Nasaar she has learned, for one hour (6 turns) — that she may not forget them, and He may not forget her. She must work the rite alone, where no one can hear her. On Sul, Nasaar’s holy day, she must speak them once forwards and once again backwards, and the rite takes two hours (12 turns).
• A follower of Nasaar must obey the master who taught her the names, in all matters of the art, until that master dies or releases her.
• A follower of Nasaar must leave nothing called standing in the world. What she summons, she sends back or destroys before she sleeps; what she cannot send back, she must not stop hunting while she lives.
• A follower of Nasaar must never call what she cannot command, nor call at all where she cannot bind.

Antiquarian

An antiquarian of Nasaar keeps everything asked of a Gnomish Iconologist above, and further:

• A follower of Nasaar’s binding is no longer her own. It is locked upon her by the eldest of her order, and she does not hold the key.
• A follower of Nasaar must take in every name and let none out. Where she learns of a name she does not hold, she must pursue it while any trail remains. Where a name she holds reaches a mouth not sworn to Nasaar — by her tongue, her book, or her carelessness — she must take it back: by silence, by binding, or by the grave.

The one discipline

What she has called, she must send back. What she knows, she must never let out. To Nasaar these are not two rules but one, and the antiquarians are simply those who have understood it: a name spoken aloud is a summoning already begun, and knowledge of a binding is a binding half-undone. A thing loosed from a circle and a thing loosed from a mouth are loose in the same world.

She may teach the sworn. The seal is on the unsworn mouth, not on the art. An antiquarian may take apprentices and make them what she is — but they are sworn first and taught second, and what they learn they inherit her silence over.

She may describe without naming. The seal is on the word, not the warning. She may say that a thing is abroad, what it does, what it fears, and where it was last bound; she may not say the word that calls it. A frightened town is no threat to Nasaar. A town that knows the word is.

The hunt ends when the thing does. Where a follower sends a called thing back, destroys it, or gives it over to another who binds it in her stead, she is quit of it and may sleep. What she is never quit of is the thing she left loose and walked away from — and neither, in the end, is it quit of her.