Shargon

Sovereign of Wave and Whelm.

Lore pending

This page carries Shargon’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his tide-shrines, his drowned places, 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.

Shargon is the deep, and the deep is not listening.

You cannot make a deal with the sea. You can throw it something and hope it is busy eating that when your turn comes, and this is the whole of what passes for prayer among Shargon’s people. He is the wave that takes the harbor wall and the boat behind it and the town behind that, without malice and without pause, because taking is simply what deep water does. Where Banor’s wild keeps a law a hunter can live by, Shargon’s keeps none at all — the flood signs no treaty, the undertow makes no exceptions, and the drowned are not consulted. His followers command the cold water and the weather over it — they raise ice out of open sea, call the wind around them, and make the water do things water should not — they breathe where a man drowns and put the dread of deep places into anything with a spine. And the deep does not lend this for nothing. It takes them back by inches — a film over the eye, scale creeping up the forearm, gills opening in the throat, groping things where the hands were — until they are more its than ours. A follower of Shargon is someone the sea has begun to eat, and who has decided to help it.

The deep is fed, not bargained with. An offering does not oblige Shargon to anything; a fed thing is only a little slower to turn on you, and his followers have made their peace with that being the best terms on the table. They give the water its due every day of their lives, and the last thing they give it is themselves.

Traditions that teach him: the Archaist.

His worship day is Wir, deep in the week, when the tide runs highest and the drowned are said to be closest to the surface. He shares Wir with Banor, the wild land and the wild sea, and the hunter and the deep-worshipper have been neighbors and enemies since the first coast. Banor’s people take from the wild and answer for it; Shargon’s give themselves to it and answer to nothing. Ask a follower of Shargon which of them keeps the wild better, and he will tell you the hunter is still pretending he is not part of the food.

Strictures

Archaist

• A follower of Shargon must keep the deep’s mark on him — a token taken from something the water drowned, carried wet or salted and never dried out. And where the deep has begun to take his flesh for its own, he must show it and never hide, cut, or cure what the sea is making of him.
• A follower of Shargon must give the deep its due each day: he returns to open water a share of what the world has given him — sunk, poured, or drowned — and where no water will take it, he opens his own veins, for blood is mostly sea and the deep knows its own. The offering takes one hour (6 turns).
• A follower of Shargon must never be the wall. He may not raise a hand to hold back the wild water for the sake of the tame and settled — the levee, the sea-wall, the drained fen, the harbor that thinks itself safe. He need not throw them down; he must simply stand aside and let the water decide.
• A follower of Shargon must feed the deep when it rises. Where flood, storm, or the stirring of the depths comes within his reach, he must give it a life to take — a beast, an enemy, a thing he has caught — so that it takes what he has offered and turns its hunger where he points it. He may not flee and leave it to feed unguided.

The drowning

The deep keeps no covenant, and neither do its priests. Nothing Shargon’s follower does binds Shargon to anything — the offering buys no safety, the sacrifice earns no love, and a follower drowned by the very sea he served all his life has not been betrayed, because he was never promised.

The mutation is grace, not affliction. The deep marks its own by remaking them, and a follower welcomes each change as the sea claiming a little more of its own. To cut away a gill, to seek a cure, to hide the scale under a glove and pretend to be a man still — these are the one apostasy Shargon’s people recognize.

Never the wall — but the wild is not the enemy. The stricture forbids defending the tame against the wild water: the works of men that wall the sea out and drain the marsh flat. It does not forbid a follower fighting for his own life, sailing a ship, or standing with the people he travels among — his companions in the wild are not the settled world, and a drowning man is owed no special hatred just for wanting to keep his head up a while longer. What he may not do is take up a shovel on the levee when the flood comes, and hold the line for the town behind it.

Feeding the deep is not a standing slaughter. The tribute is owed only when the deep genuinely rises — a real storm, a flood, the depths stirring in earnest — not as a daily quota of murder. When it comes, the offering may be prey, a beast, a caught thing, or an enemy he turns the water against; Shargon has no preference, only appetite. Away from the raging water, a follower kills as little or as much as he likes, and it is between him and the tide.