Shaarat

Sovereign of Strength and Steel.

Lore pending

This page carries Shaarat’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his drill-yards, 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.

Shaarat is met in the drill-yard, at the edge of what the body can do.

He makes soldiers, and he makes them the long, unglamorous way — the drill run until it is reflex, the march under load, the hundredth repetition of the one cut. His people are drilled past flinching, hard to hurt, and harder still to put down; his blessing rides the arm that swings and the edge that lands, biting where a duller blade would turn and falling heavier than the arm behind it. Where his banner stands, men do not break.

Strength, to Shaarat, is a thing you are owed nothing for and must prove again every morning. He has no patience for the strong man who rests on yesterday, and none at all for the one who claims a strength he has not.

Steel keeps no secrets. What a blade is worth is known the moment it meets another, and Shaarat asks his followers to be the same: to meet the test openly, take only the victory they earned, and keep faith in arms even with the enemy.

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

His worship day is Mol, the day the forges fall silent and the drill-yards fill, when a follower proves against others what he has spent the week proving alone. He shares Mol with Ontaar, and the two are the same bar of iron from its two ends: Ontaar forges the blade and Shaarat is the arm that lifts it. A sword in the rack is only metal. On Mol the forge is cold and the ring is loud.

Strictures

Archaist and Dwarven Forgepriest

• A follower of Shaarat must bear a holy symbol of Shaarat upon his arms — struck into the shield, set in the pommel, worked into the harness — carried into every fight and never hidden away.
• A follower of Shaarat must drive his body to the edge of its strength each day, at drill, at arms, or under load, and give the first bout of it to Shaarat — the sweat is the prayer. The training takes one hour (6 turns) at the least.
• A follower of Shaarat must take up arms in the common defense. When danger falls on those near him, he answers it with his own strength and does not stand haggling a price while it does.
• A follower of Shaarat must never refuse an honest challenge to his strength or his skill at arms, nor cut down a foe who has yielded, nor break faith once he has given it in arms — no blow struck under a truce, no word of quarter taken back.
• A follower of Shaarat must win his own place by his own arm. He may not claim a victory another won for him, wear a rank he did not earn, nor suffer his strength to be reckoned greater than it is.

Faith in arms

The honest fight is a matter of faith kept, not of tactics forsworn. Shaarat is a god of soldiers, and soldiers win by ground, by surprise, by the ambush and the feint — none of which he forbids, for there is no shame in outthinking an enemy at war. What he forbids is the broken word: the truce betrayed, the yielded man butchered, the challenge answered with a knife in the dark. A follower may take every advantage the field offers and remain Shaarat’s to the bone. He may not give his word and break it.

A challenge must be a fair test to bind him. He owes an answer to a rival of his own mettle, sword against sword — not to a dragon, an army, or a mob, and not to a bully who has stacked the terms so that only a fool would accept. Shaarat asks courage, not stupidity; the strong man knows the difference, and the god trusts him to. Nor is a follower forbidden to retreat, to regroup, or to live to fight again — running from a lost field is not the same as running from a fair challenge.

Answering danger is not dying for strangers. The common defense binds a follower to fight when peril is upon those around him — not to bargain, stand aside, or hold his sword hostage for a fee — but it does not bid him charge a dragon alone or throw his life onto a lost cause. Shaarat wants his strength spent, not wasted; a follower may still choose his moment, guard his own first, and fall back to come again. What shames him is the blade kept sheathed for want of a price while men who needed it went down.

Quarter given is quarter honored — both ways. A follower grants quarter to the foe who yields to him and may ask it of the foe he yields to; what he may never do is take it back, or offer it false. To Shaarat this is not mercy but plain honesty, the same honesty a blade keeps when it meets another: the fight is over when both hands say it is, and a man who says yield and then strikes has told a lie with steel.