Ontaar

Sovereign of Fire and Forge.

Lore pending

This page carries Ontaar’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his forge-temples, 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.

Ontaar is met at the anvil, not the altar.

He takes a follower up the long way — apprentice, journeyman, master, and at the end grandmaster — and asks in return only that the follower keep climbing. His people make things, and make them to last: a blade that holds its edge past its maker’s death, a hinge still swinging when the hall around it has fallen, work that outlives the hand that shaped it. The best of them put more than skill into the iron — they can wake a fire from nothing, set it living along a blade, and raise from a ruined forge a heat that will not die.

Every follower of Ontaar owns a mark — a maker’s stamp, a signed flourish, a way of finishing an edge — and sets it on what she makes. It is not vanity. The mark is a promise, struck into the metal: I made this, I stand behind it, and I have put my name where you can find me if it fails. Ontaar’s followers are the ones whose mark is worth looking for.

A thing made well is a prayer that keeps praying. Ontaar wants no hymn the forge could not sing. The good weld, the true joint, the tool that serves three generations — these are the whole of his liturgy, and a follower honors him best by never being ashamed of anything that leaves her hands.

Traditions that teach him: the Archaist and the Dwarven Forgepriest alike.

His worship day is Mol, the day the forges are banked and cold and even the busiest smith keeps his hands still. He shares Mol with Shaarat, the Sovereign of Strength and Steel, and the two are the same bar of iron at two ends of the work: Ontaar makes the sword, and Shaarat swings it. Neither has ever thought much of the other’s half, and neither could do without it.

Strictures

Archaist and Dwarven Forgepriest

• A follower of Ontaar must always display a holy symbol of Ontaar, worked in metal she forged and finished with her own hands — never bought, never cast for her by another.
• A follower of Ontaar must set her hand to her craft each day, making or mending something with her own hands, and give the first working of the day to Ontaar — offered, not sold. The daily work takes one hour (6 turns) at the least. On Mol, Ontaar’s holy day, she keeps the forge cold and rests from strenuous labor — she does not set out to work, fight, or delve of her own choosing. Where an emergency or an order compels her to labor or take up arms regardless, she does what the day demands and takes no pay for it.
• A follower of Ontaar must set her mark on everything she makes, and stand behind it. She may not sell her work as another’s, nor another’s as her own, nor send out unmarked anything she would not sign.
• A follower of Ontaar must never knowingly pass off false work — a hidden flaw, a soft weld, a fair face on a rotten join. What she cannot make sound, she says so, or she does not sell.

The mark

Standing behind the work is not standing surety against the world. A follower answers for her own fault — the flaw she worked in or the flaw she missed — and answers as her means allow: she makes it good, remakes it, or returns what she was paid. She does not answer for fair wear, nor for a tool misused, nor for a blade that met something no blade could have met. Ontaar forged a great many things that have since broken. He is not ashamed of one of them.

The daily work need not be grand. A mended strap, a sharpened edge, a nail drawn straight is a day’s devotion kept. What Ontaar will not accept is the day on which a follower with two working hands set them to nothing — the offering is the making, and any making will do. Save one: on Mol the empty hands are the point, and the follower who cannot bear to keep them still has misunderstood the god as badly as the one who never works at all.

The Mol rest is rest from strenuous labor, not from staying alive. A follower banks her fire and lays down her tools, and lays down her sword beside them: no commissions, no sales, no work at the anvil, and no setting out of her own will to fight or to delve. She may travel at an easy pace, defend herself and those near her, and do what any day may ask of a living soul — what she may not do is choose the day for hard labor or for arms.

Spoil is not pay. Where a true emergency or a lawful order forces the day upon her — a wall breached, a road beset, a blade wanted before dawn, a lord’s command — she does what must be done and takes no pay for it: no fee for the labor, and no share of any reward from those she aids or rescues. But what she strips from the aggressor who made her draw her sword is spoil, not pay, and that she may keep as she would any fortune of the field. Ontaar begrudges no smith the arms of the man who forced her to fight on his day; he begrudges her only the wage she would have earned by choosing it.

The mark is the follower’s own, and it is hers for life. It is granted when she is judged fit to sign her work unsupervised, and struck from no one lightly; a follower who forfeits her mark — by fraud, by disowning her work, by setting it on another’s — has lost the one thing Ontaar reckons, and must earn it back at the anvil like any apprentice.