Rowa

Sovereign of Life and Love.

Lore pending

This page carries Rowa’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of her faith — her groves, her festivals, 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.

Life and Love are one word to Rowa. To love a thing is to make more of it.

Her followers are farmers, herders, foresters, and midwives to the whole green world, and they are not sentimental about any of it. They know every plant in the wood and what it is for — which one closes a wound, which one is worth boiling down, and which one to leave exactly where it is. Beasts come to them and stay: a follower of Rowa keeps company with animals that will not go within a bowshot of anybody else, and the older ones travel with a retinue that has feathers in it. They read the sky and the trees answer them; they bend a beast to their will and send word on a bird’s back; they call a season’s growth out of a seed in an afternoon, and the greatest of them tell the sky what to do. Let one of them settle in a wood long enough and the wood itself goes strange — green out of season, welcoming to some and pathless to others, acre upon acre of it, until the place is less a forest than an opinion.

Rowa keeps no ledgers and weighs no debts. She has one instruction, and it is more.

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

Her worship day is Zor, high in the week, when there is still time to do something about what you have started. She shares Zor with Szorowai — love and fury, which are nearer neighbours than the followers of either care to admit. Both are appetites. Both are owed. And both, it is worth noticing, reckon in threes.

Strictures

Both of Rowa’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

• A follower of Rowa must always display a holy symbol of Rowa somewhere on her person when in public.
• A follower of Rowa must tend something living for at least one hour (6 turns) each day — be it a field, a beast, a garden, a sick man, a pot of herbs on a windowsill. On Zor, Rowa’s holy day, she must put something living into ground that is not her own, and tend it in prayer for two hours (12 turns). She may thereafter never tend it, harvest it, or claim it.
• A follower of Rowa must never destroy a growing thing wantonly.
• A follower of Rowa must put something back for whatever she takes out of the green world.
• A follower of Rowa must take no life but at need. Not for sport, not for trade, not for convenience, and not because she is angry.

Antiquarian

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

• A follower of Rowa must take no life at all by her own hand.

The green world

Need is food, defence, medicine, and passage. A follower may eat, may fight for her life or another’s, may take what heals, and may clear what genuinely bars her road. Need is not a full larder, a good price, a trophy, or a temper.

Putting something back is not arithmetic. Rowa does not count. A follower who fells a tree and plants one has satisfied her; so has one who takes a deer and sees a doe through a hard winter, or who eats a farmer’s bread and leaves his field better than she found it. What she wants is the world larger at the end of a life than it was at the start. The follower who reckons this to the copper has misunderstood which Sovereign she serves — that one keeps his own day.

Another’s hand is another’s hand. The antiquarian’s stricture binds her own; it does not bind her friends, her henchmen, her hirelings, or the world. She may travel with killers, keep them, pay them, and be glad of them. She may fight herself — strike, break, bind, disarm, drive off, and put a man on the ground and leave him there. What she may not do is finish him.

She may eat. A life taken by another is not a life she took, and Rowa has never asked a follower to starve in a wood full of rabbits on a technicality.