The Stranger

Sovereign of Chaos and Change.

Lore pending

This page carries the Stranger’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his cults, 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.

The Stranger is the Sovereign of everything that will not hold still.

His followers are hard to follow and harder to keep. They leave no track, find their way through country nobody has mapped, and walk a whole party clear of what was waiting in it. Corner one and she is gone before you know she has decided to go. What they cannot walk around, they change: a beast into some other beast, their own shape into one that suits the afternoon, their own face into one nobody has seen before, their own tongue into whichever the room requires. The deep ones breed crossbreeds — things that have not existed until now and were, on the whole, not asked for — and there is a rumour about what the deepest of them do to their own bodies, in a rite named for a goddess nobody will name.

Chaos and Change are one thing to him, and the change comes first. Chaos is only what change looks like from outside, to a man who liked the arrangement.

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

The Stranger keeps no day. Every other Sovereign in Sair has a morning in the week; he takes whichever one you were not watching. His followers hold that this is not a gap in the calendar but the whole of the doctrine, and they are insufferable about it.

Strictures

Both of the Stranger’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 the Stranger must wear their clothing out of place in some way — a button fastened askew, an odd earring or a mismatched pair, a single painted nail — and never in the same way for two consecutive days.
• A follower of the Stranger owes no rite on any day of the week. She must make her offering the first time in each week that something takes her genuinely by surprise, and the offering takes one hour (6 turns). A week that passes without surprising her is itself a failure, and no offering will mend it.
• A follower of the Stranger must not pass a day unchanged. Each day he must alter something about himself that another could notice.
• A follower of the Stranger must keep no name, no face, and no trade longer than a season. What she was in spring, he is not in summer.

Antiquarian

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

• A follower of the Stranger must break any habit another has come to expect of them. Let a man say she always does thus, and be right, and he must never do thus again.

Change

A face is not only flesh. A follower with no magic to spare has not thereby been excused: different hair, a different walk, a different name in a different town is a different face to everyone who matters. The Stranger asks that she not be recognised. He does not much care how she manages it.

Her trade is what a place thinks she does. The Stranger has no quarrel with her scholarship — she may study the same question all her life. His quarrel is with the innkeeper who knows what she is. She may not be the herbalist of the same village two seasons running.

A week without surprise is mended by going and getting one. No prayer answers it, no offering makes it good, and no amount of explaining that the week was simply quiet will help. She is in violation until something has genuinely surprised her, and the remedy is to go somewhere she has not been and do something she has not done until the world obliges her. It usually does not take long.

Surprise is not a thing she can arrange. A rite she scheduled, a shock she paid a friend to deliver, a corner she turned knowing full well what was round it — none of these count, and a follower who thinks they might has misunderstood him so completely that the misunderstanding is itself a kind of worship.