Szorowai

Sovereign of Rage and Ruin.

Lore pending

This page carries Szorowai’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his rites, his outcasts, 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.

Szorowai is the wrong you did not let go of.

Everyone is wronged. Most people swallow it — count the cost, weigh the odds, decide it is not worth the trouble, and go on smaller than they were. Szorowai is the god of the ones who do not swallow it - ever. His followers fight in a rage that will not be called back once it is loosed, a fury that only burns hotter for the wounds it takes, and the deepest of them hand that madness to others, boil the blood in a man where he stands, and take him apart. A follower of Szorowai bleeds himself to strike harder, and reckons it a fair trade.

Wrath, to Szorowai, is not a thing to be mastered. It is a debt the world runs up and refuses to settle, and the only honest answer to a debt is collection. His followers do not forgive, and they do not forget, and they carry the record of it cut into their own skin — a mark for every wrong that still stands open, kept from healing until it is paid.

A wrong paid back even is a wrong half-forgiven. Szorowai is owed more than he was cost, always, and a follower who takes an eye for an eye has shorted his god. The measure is threefold, and it is not justice. Justice is for gods who can bear to be even.

No one worships Szorowai in comfort. His followers are outcasts as often as not — too much fury for any hall to hold — and the god does not seem to mind. A man with nothing left to lose collects better.

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

His worship day is Zor, high in the week, when there is still time to do something about what was done to you. He shares Zor with Rowa, the Sovereign of Life and Love, and the two are passion’s two faces: on the same day, one follower makes more of the thing she loves and the other unmakes the thing he hates. Love and fury have always been nearer neighbours than either likes to admit — both are appetites that never know when they have had enough, and they part ways only on which direction to spend. She never counts what she gives; he counts nothing but what he is owed.

Strictures

Archaist and Dwarven Forgepriest

• A follower of Szorowai must cut into his own flesh a mark for every wrong done him.
• Each day he must spend one hour (6 turns) at dusk tracing these marks and recalling the wrongs they stand for. On Zor, Szorowai’s holy day, he must reopen the mark of every wrong still unpaid (taking at least 1 hp of damage).
• A follower of Szorowai who is wronged must repay it threefold, by his own hand. He may not forgive the wrong or sell it to another.
• A follower of Szorowai must not wear a calm face over an angry heart. He may not make false peace with one he means to ruin, nor let a wrong be thought forgiven.

The debt of wrath

Threefold, and never even. What a wrong is worth, a follower reckons for himself, in the coin the wrong was done in — blood for blood, shame for shame, loss for loss — and he repays it three times over, always more than he was cost. This is not the true measure; it is deliberately too much. Szorowai is a god of excess, and the follower who prices his vengeance fairly is worshipping somebody else.

By his own hand. A follower may take all the help he can get in running a wrong-doer down, but the ruin at the end of it must be dealt by him. He may not hire it out, nor let another’s blade pay his debt, nor call it settled because the man is dead by some other cause. The debt is his, and so is the collecting.

He may bide, but he may not forgive. Nothing says when a wrong must be paid, and in this one thing the Fury is patient: a follower may carry an open mark for thirty years, waiting for the hour and the strength. What he may not do is forgive it, trade it away, or let it heal unpaid — for a wrong let go is a strength given up, and Szorowai gives his followers their strength on the one condition that they never do.