Myths from Flipped Faerûn, Part II: The Compass Court & assorted members of the House of Nature

Here's more D&D Backwards religion from Flipped Faerûn. There will be at least one more installment concerning the House of Nature and its sub-grouping, the Furious Hunt (a.k.a., the Deities of Fury in the typical Forgotten Realms). Because this one is kind of a grab-bag, I do feel like it suffers from a lack of unified narrative and middle-movie syndrome, but there is, I think, some good stuff in here nonetheless....

************************************************

Featured Inhabitants of the House of Nature: (8)

Lathander (NE)

Chauntea (NE)

Ubtao (N)

Syranita (NE)

Cat Lord (N)

Skerrit (NE)

Mentioned Inhabitants of the House of Nature:

Silvanus (N)

Umberlee (LG)

Friends of the House of Nature:

Selûne (LE)

Mystra (NE)

Enemies of the House of Nature:

Helm (CN)

Dead gods:

Murdane (N?)

*********************************

Silvanus may have founded the House of Nature out of love for his daughters and continue to rule it to this day, but his northern throne isn’t the only one to reign over this realm.  There are three other directions from which the realm can be ruled.  Though none of those thrones’ inhabitants have such a bloodline and entourage as the Forest Father enjoys, nonetheless they rule the House of Nature with him as the Compass Council.

 In the east’s rosy sun throne sits daring Lathander, the NE young god of the dawn, drunk on his own capabilities, heedless of consequence or risk.  If you can do it, then it is right, and only failure marks an action as reprehensible ~ this is his way.  Blonde and beautiful, he it is who husbands all living things, driving us to choose the fittest partners and breed the strongest children, the eternal and inevitable improvement of every race of mortal and animal alike.  Purity of blood, he tells us, is what gives him the prowess that is the foundation of his and his followers’ supremacy.⁵

 Beyond the brilliant colors which seep from the Morninglord’s throne can be seen a giant mountain rising tall enough that its top can be seen though its foot be hidden behind the throne’s gleam.  This is the bordering spirit realm, the House of the Triad, built atop Mount Celestia, and from Castle Everwatch in that realm the CN god of suspicion and wariness, Helm, glowers down at the House of Nature.  It is said that in the days of ancient Jhaamdath, whose Twelve Cities of the Sword were ruled only by the power of the enlightened mind, Lathander staged a coup against the other rulers of the gods, seeking the power to assure their perfection.  During this Dawn Cataclysm, his ally and still realm-mate Umberlee of the Furious Hunt (that group of gods which enforces the dictates of the gods) to drown Helm’s lover, the practical and rational goddess Murdane.  When she died, Helm lost the only thing keeping his paranoia in check; he has determined that all of the House of Nature is suspect and scans flitter-eyed and wary for a possible avenue of invasion.

 Across the House of Nature, to the west, the plains fill with crops, tamed and controlled rather than wild and overgrown like the woods inhabited by Silvanus and his get.  From these square fields rules hungry NE Chauntea who drinks deep of murdered blood and gives of that reserve of life-energy to the crops that they might grow tall and fruitful.  One life taken, blood jumping with all the force of fear and scraps of organs scattered throughout the rows, bones for fences and scarecrows, can be divided by her to grow food for a hundred or more, but a calm, willing sacrifice would only have the energy to feed a couple dozen or so, according to her.

 Though Chauntea was married to Silvanus by Selûne, bound to him throughout every phase of the moon from dark to light and back to the dark, she has since taken Lathander to her tilled bed, finding common interest in husbandry and breeding.  This is not kept secret from her husband, who watches them from behind the branches at the edge of the fields, eyes rich as the leafy forest floor in autumn with lust for both bodies.

 The Rashemi witches call the Three in their mysterious and hidden rites, two of which haunt the verdant lands of the House of Nature.  NE Mielikki and Chauntea are joined in these ways by NE Mystra, further cementing the Mother of All Magic’s bond with this realm.  Magic is taken, of course, snatched from every living thing, and if we don’t snatch it from wild or tamed nature, the gods’ associations alone tell you that nature will take it from us.  Everyone bleeds, after all, and it is the blood which moves everything and all motion falters.  Will you be the one to continue moving or will your stillness give that motion to the world around you?

 Outside of this triangle-of-the-heart stands alone the Compass Council’s ruler of the south.  The N Father of Dinosaurs, Ubtao, rules from the dripping jungle throne.  In truth, he prefers to keep his distance anyway, from his fellow rulers and from his worshipers as well.  He keeps his own council, and rarely speaks when the House of Nature’s monarchs gather, even to cast his vote or suggest a way to move forward.  This has been his way since this ancient being, older than the gods, one of the primordials who originally built Abeir-Toril, made his way without pomp or circumstance into the House of Nature shortly after its founding.  He built his realm and claimed a whole direction before anyone even noticed he was there.

 Wilderness is famously difficult to rule ~ it is the very nature of such a place to be untamed.  The Compass Council does not rule like some monarchy, assured in the right of their power by heritage or conquest, or like the democracies one finds scattered occasionally through the realms, wherein the rulers know that they are wanted and can rule from that comfort.  No, the Compass Council rules by means of Syranita.  This NE aarakocra-goddess spends her days circling lazily and ready-eyed above the House of Nature.  It is said that those eyes of hers are keen enough that even Mielikki’s brambles and the woods’ canopy cannot protect one from her sight.  Syranita is fiercely loyal to the Council as a whole, taking no favorites in fear for her divine life, and she reports all the furtive activities of those in their realm to them that they might know and be able to react to any threats to their rule that sprout among their wild subjects.  It is Syranita’s eyes that provide the best shield against the piercing sword of Helm’s, a game of seeking unknown dints in the realm’s armor and of spotting the incursions therefrom, an endless game of watching.

 Syranita’s efforts work like this:  There is a style of prison utilized in some places on Toril, in which the prison is shaped much like a cake.  Circular these prisons are, with the cells of those being held occupying the circumference of the building and the officers of the ruler who hold them occupying the center.  By blinds and other contrivances, the inspectors conceal themselves from the observation of the prisoners, who thus gain a sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence.  The whole circuit is reviewable with little, or, if necessary, without any, change of place.  In these prisons, as in the House of Nature with its skies haunted by Syranita, the inhabitants know that they might be being observed, unknowing, at any moment, even if it is unlikely.  Those who use this system find that it encourages their inhabitants to become more placid thereby, for they can find no comfortable safety in their seditious acts.

 Hidden paths through the House of Nature are the natural home of the N Cat Lord, from which he directs the ways of all Abeir-Toril’s felines.  The stories of old say that the Cat Lord is ancient and yet young ~ that every so often, the Cat Lord chooses an heir, passing on their mantle to a new generation to reinvent what cats are.  There have been fierce Cat Lords with blood matting their fur, and there have been cuddly Cat Lords content to be fed by their mortal servants and offer themselves to be petted, their bellies for scritches.  The previous Cat Lord made his home with Ubtao, a jungle beast possessed of an incongruous elegance and nobility.  He turned the way of the world upside down, treating the leaf-dripping jungle as we do the cobbled city.

 But the current Cat Lord is a creature of those cobbled streets, mangy and ragged-eared, with one snaggle fang that never gets to rest at home behind warm lips, and he makes his home in the small town that houses those who work Chauntea’s fields.  “You think your wooden-doored world is somehow different from the world outside its walls whence you harvested that world,” he whispers to the mortals who hide from him huddled behind the wooden doors of their houses, “that these stones upon which I rest my body have made this place somehow separate from the loamy dirt that they interrupt.  You are wrong, delicious friends ~ nature cannot be buried beneath streets and banished by city walls.  Come out from that stone, escape that confining brick, free yourself from wattle and daub, feel the sun on your face that warms city and wild alike.” 

 While the Cat Lord makes his hardscrabble life in Chauntea’s fields, Skerrit the Forest Walker roams the tree-crowded remaining lands of the realm.  The otherworldly woods echo with the song of his revelry and the dregs of his prodigious consumption of beer can often be seen floating through the House’s waterways.  Just like the centaurs who revere him in the Green Isle of Evermeet, this brutish NE god cares about nothing more than his own basest desires and the neverending party that fills his godly days.  When he needs sleep, he beds in a cave and when his mighty hungers are roused, he goes hunting the wild animals of that realm with rock and branch in hand.  It is said, sometimes, that when a youth or maiden or pretty young thing of some other gender goes suddenly missing and cannot be found, that they have been taken by Skerrit to the House of Nature.  Woe be unto them that have come under the muscled sway of this brute, for their lives will not be long, in the spirit worlds though it may be.⁶

 ⁵  Yeah, flipped Lathander turns out to be a capitalist Nazi god.  That’s . . . disturbing, considering the crush I have on NG canon Lathander, but that disturbance is welcome and useful ~ one of the joys of exercises like this is the chance they offer to notice and process the things in my psyche that present the risk of leading me down paths I very much do not want to head down.

⁶  Yep, flipped centaurs turn out to be much truer to the original Greek depiction of this tribe than the usual D&D version.  They’re essentially equivalent to the modern stereotype of bikers ~ toxic (and intoxicated) masculinity taken to almost parodic levels.

Myths from a Flipped Faerûn, Part I: Silvanus's Bloodline

This thread on RPGnet about essentially playing D&D backwards, if I may steal a bit of slang from the In Nomine community/fandom, kind of inspired a small writing jag in me.  I kinda think this setting might be an interesting one to play in, actually.

With such a majority of evil gods, the world itself would be against the PCs, even if they weren't good.  It might come out sort of Points of Light-ish, of course, but of a different, more settled sort.  Faerûn has far more settled and established nations than PoLand, of course, and accordingly much more intrigue and conspiracy than 4e really had.  It's more dystopic and feels more like these past four years in the United States have felt to me, to be honest.

*****

Featured Inhabitants of the House of Nature:
Silvanus (N)
Mielikki (NE)
Eldath (NE)
Tapann (LN)
Shiallia (NE)
Lurue (LE)
Nobanion (CE)
Gwaeron Windstrom (NE)

Mentioned Inhabitants of the House of Nature:
Chauntea (NE)
Malar (LG)

Friends of the House of Nature from other divine realms:
Hanali Celanil (LE; Arvandor)
Tempus (LN; Knight’s Rest)
Mystra (NE; Dweomerheart)
Sharindlar (LE; Dwarfhome)
Selûne (LE; Gates of the Moon)
Eachtighern (LE; the Land of Faërie)

*****

In the earliest times, when the world was still being set up, Hanali Celanil, the LE elfin goddess of the Seldarine who promotes beauty as not the ultimate but the only virtue and thus that any act is good so long as it is beautiful, came to N Silvanus, whose work it was to set the stage for all of the histories yet to come.  The wild places, the plants and the animals, these were all his efforts.  Her objective ~ which turned out to be successful ~ was to talk with him about the one thing quite dear to her heart: the laws by which beauty can be achieved, the only laws that mattered¹.

There is a certain sequence of numbers that she convinced him to encode in the many spirals of the world, for but a single example, a certain set of proportions that prove most pleasing to the eye².  And it wasn’t just the sight of the natural places that she discussed with him ~ this conversation, as a second example, is why the deadliest flowers have the sweetest scent.

Over the span of unknowable time which this discussion filled, Hanali’s heart gained a new treasure for her to obsess over, to study and perfect: Silvanus himself.  The two joined in the ancient ways of love, and so came about NE Mielikki and NE Eldath, twin godlings growing in Hanali’s womb.

But Hanali was surprised by their never-before-seen half-elfin forms.  They followed no law of beauty she had studied, obeyed no dictate of art that she had set forth!  All long, gangly limbs with not enough torso, heavy human muscles anchored upon twig-like elfin bones, Mielikki and Eldath were anathema to everything their mother valued.

“Nothing you ever do,” she told them and thus they believed, “can ever be good, for you are ugly!”  With these words, she cast the two from Arvandor into a forgotten forest that loomed on the border of that place, all overgrown and misshapen, a scrap of Silvanus’s earliest work from before Hanali visited him.  Mielikki, the more fearful of the two, settled into the thickets and the brambles of the forest’s shallows, making her home amongst the dangerous beasts of that place, while the more adventurous Eldath pushed past these wooded doors and found a picturesque clearing.  Within the clearing was a lovely little pond, with just the tiniest waterfall adding its tinkling to the airy music of bird-gossip and frog-song.  This she made her home.

They were still hiding in these places, these two half-elfin twins, when their father returned to this place to clean and reshape it according to the precepts the twins’ mother had taught him.  He found his daughters, and loved them in the fierce and distant way that only a wild father can.  He vowed that this forest, misshapen though it was, would forever be the House of Nature whence he would manage all the wide world and its ways, saying:

“There is nothing in nature that is bad, for even the fiercest predator has a place amongst its cycles and ways and the most disgusting creatures give food back to the rest of the community, often from literal shit.  You are my daughters, and you can do no wrong for wrong is an impossible thing.  Join me in this House of Nature, and aid me in my work.”

His words found rocky and infertile ground, sending up only scraggly, malnourished shoots in the hearts of the twins, but Silvanus had neither desire nor taste for his daughters being anything other than what they were, so it was enough.  They accepted his offer, Mielikki ensuring the flow of energy by filling the woods with threats and terrors and Eldath by providing secluded, peaceful places where all the unpleasantness that needed to happen for the world to continue could do so without disturbing the many other beings with whom those she harbored shared the world.

Eldath, distrusting of most everyone in all the worlds and (thanks to the words of her mother) mistrusting most herself with those few she found she could trust, lives to this day as something of a loner.  Oh, she plays a distant game with LN Tempus who glories in the rules and conventions of honorable warfare, the two of them positioning and inspiring their followers toward the end of violently but honorably settling great questions and disputes on his side and of ensuring the dangerous peace which allows horrors to happen on hers.  She is deeply wounded, realize.  Some other deity ~ perhaps her own twin, or Chauntea who is the NE ground which fertilizes itself with murdered bodies that crops might grow, or NE Mystra whose followers use magic only to take and who takes from them in turn ~ sponsors her among the courts and gatherings of the gods, but the very uncertainty tells you that the relationship isn’t close.  If it were, we mortals would know who her sponsor was.

Mielikki, on the other hand, living on the edges of the forest where it greets the path and the grasslands, has many more friends and closer, three of whom accompany her wherever she goes, cavorting with the monsters and creatures that swarm her sacred places.  Let me tell you about them.

Tapann, LN hermit-god of the korred fey who is fascinated by the intricate and exacting dances of nature that follow complex rules with perfect motions and who is worshipped by means of their ornate imitation in courtly dance³, was contacted in antique times by Sharindlar, LE dwarfin goddess who protects that stout race by means of insularity, arranging marriages within tight bloodlines to keep the people the people⁴ and empowering her clergy to heal those most like them while leaving everyone else to die.  Sharindlar was thinking of incorporating dance more into the complicated courting ways of the dwarfs, to further tie them together and to make marriages with other races, or even with dwarfs from other houses or settlements, even less likely.  She hoped that Tapann could teach her much, both in the mechanics of a proper complicated turn on the ballroom floor and in arranging the dance to mimic and control the metaphysical ebb and flow.

The two desired a secluded, secret place to have this discussion and this teaching, for dance was still foreign and suspicious to the dwarfs and Tapann, well, Tapann is a hermit ~ he doesn’t do much outside of secluded and secret places.  The korred god suggested one of Eldath’s clearings, but Sharindlar knew well of her reputation and what she fostered in such idyllic places.  Mielikki’s brambles were the compromise they reached.  The wild goddess watched from off to the side, only her red eyes glinting in the moldy dark revealing her presence.  They looked lustful, and the hidden grin beneath them was hungry in a different way than usual.

Sharindlar learned what she had sought to learn and, disgusted by such prolonged contact with a non-dwarf, rapidly fled with the knowledge.  This left Tapann to be approached by twig-crowned, thorn-toothed Mielikki, who remarked upon the inevitable tease of engaging in such a sublimatedly lustful activity with one who would much rather a monogamous relationship with her own mirrored, twinned self.

“The dance of nature often provides a new partner to finish what was left undone by the old,” Tapann said, and the two danced a dance not so different in form but much different in effect.  That effect being the birth from Mielikki’s own body of the NE goddess Shiallia, spawn-goddess.  Shiallia it is who pulls a person into nigh-constant breeding and the feeding of the large clans that resort thereby.  Oh, how pleased Shialia is that one can be pregnant while also providing for, caring for, those you have already birthed!

Selûne, LE goddess of the regularly changing and beauteous moon, temptress who challenges your devotion to your path by luring you away from it (or attempting to), including upon the paths of love and those into the future, goddess of untrustworthy dreams and fickle love, patroness of all those many monsters who hunt in a more pleasing form than that in which they kill, once journeyed among the flower-speckled prairies of the Land of Faërie.  There, she met the LE archfey Eachtighern, the reason horses, unicorns, and pegasi all form themselves into herds.  A wild beauty she saw in him, a fierce and uncompromising loyalty to his people, a devotion to protect them by means of even the evilest act.  So impressed was she that she seduced him and formed from their union the LE unicorn goddess Lurue, murderous enforcer of chastity and avenger of unlawful sex.

Lurue, in her turn, fell into the orbit of the CE lion-god Nobanion, the arrogant noble who takes whatever he wants from those in his power.  His willingness to seize by strength the ability to seize as a matter of simple course attracted her, and she took up with him as his mate, reasoning that her unwillingness kept her pure.  It was not an argument which stayed her horn or her hoof when she stalked the mortal world, but it settled her as she considered her own actions.

None know how Mielikki and Lurue met, but something came of that meeting, a friendship born in monstrosity and bloody vengeance.  The bramble-goddess brought the unicorn and the lion into the House of Nature; she usually rides the former but occasionally can be seen atop the latter.

Gwaeron Windstrom is a different sort of deity entirely, a NE saint and a teacher rather than a descendent of primeval cosmic bloodlines.  He was in his mortal life the kind of man who, obsessed, would devote all of his time to gathering information on whatever individual had caught his notice, and on following them wherever they went.  Inventing love full-cloth in his head, Gwaeron would treat this behavior as the uttermost romance and flirtation.  In time, he would reveal himself and, deaf to the protestations of his victim, consummate the relationship he imagined they had.  Often, the resistance of his victims would call him to tearfully and brutally arrange for their death at his hands.

After several encounters with various guises of the LG hunting beast of the gods, Malar, justice red in tooth and claw, Gwaeron came to Mielikki’s attention.  Repeatedly, this mortal human had avoided notice by Malar; over and over again, he had overcome the Beast and defeated him.  Mielikki rewarded him for this with sainthood, raising him above his mortality and giving him a home in the House of Nature.

¹  Making Hanali Celanil more monk-lawful than cop-lawful, which as an anarchist, submissive, and aspiring devotional-polytheist nun, I prefer anyway.
²  The Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio, if it’s not obvi.
³  Another monk-lawful.
⁴  I did not expect flipped Faerûn to be so anti-miscegenation.  Please understand that this is not reflective of my own belief, and just an attempt to make evil portfolios from good ones.