Terinar

From West Of Vipers Gate
Nature
Light
Human Condition
Peace, Revelation
Society
Necropolis

Terinar is often depicted shrouded in a warm white robe so none of their features are visible. They carry a lantern on a long pole, and walk with inevitability. They are generally related to the final days of a person, as well as the end of empires, or events. Their temples are the many necropolises of the dead, often considered the only place where the inhabitants are truly at peace. And truly knows all they need to know.

Common Festivals:

Terinar's biggest festival is during an Eclipse, where the coroners and family members go to the Necropolises and gather bones from their resting places, and place them in their ossuarys.

Her second largest festival is the more common one that happens after the first snowfall of the year. Then, teenagers of nearly marrying age go out, and write the names of others in the snow, hoping to see which name melts last, telling them who they will marry.

There is a secret ritual, which few know exist, and many who speak of it also do not believe it themselves, where, during the longest night of the year, Necromancers gather with their unholy corpses, and holding a light on a pole, walk the outside of the graveyard widdershins, as a tribute to their lady.

Some say, that if on one of her more regular holy days you feed a wafer of bread to a fully ossified skeleton and pray to her, she will answer a question through its mouth.

Terinar Encyclos

Terinar is sometimes worshipped in their Encyclos aspect. Still fundamentally related to endings and revelations, Encyclos devotees see that the true ending is no ending - the ending is the beginning and all fates exist in great Cycles. The future is preordained as it has already happened and to know the past is to know the future.

The circle is seen as the most sacred shape in the cult of Encyclos; a curve with no beginning or end, where the end and beginning are one. Certain related shapes are also considered holy:

  • Discs, by filling the interior, symbolize that the circle encompasses all and is the only true end
  • Annuli represent parallel fates or an existence in flux
  • Rings are highly idealized as a circle of circles and the preferred way to realize the circle in the material world. Some Terinar Encyclos meta-analysts will have a ring fitted to a finger tight enough to be unremovable; additional rings symoblize more specialties and masteries.
  • Some adherents contend that spheres and balls more perfectly represent the circle of circles but most consider this heretical
  • The Möbius Loop is universally regarded as the most dire of omens.

Encyclos scholars are pioneers not only in the study of geometry (although almost universally of curved shapes) but also of the endless cycles, the mathematical field of patterns which repeat without end. All holy places of Terinar Encyclos will tile the surfaces with elaborate but regular patterns.

Terinar Encyclos stands in opposition to Terinar Finitas, the much more common and well-known aspect of Terinar, whose adherents preach that everything must have a definite end. Both cults have a fascination with predestination, but Finitasians see a revelation of the end yet to come where Encyclosians see a future that has already happened.