The Almanachus,

or, the Book of reputable knowledge pertaining to the matters of the Werld

Weight & measurement

haberty-pace

Haberty-pace is the prefered Eyrsh standard and replaced all regional varients by order of Wode Eyebre II. Though old scales or rulers might be found for sale in the rummage shops of Good Hope or in an old barn in the Wye, they are no longer legally permissable for usage and will not be accounted here, curious though they be.

length

The primary unit of counting for distance is the foot. The foot is precisely 10 inches long. There are three feet to a yard. There are a thousand yards to the mile and ten furlongs to the mile, by which the furlong is one hundred yards.

We are told, by chance, that some people in the Antipodes or some other unknown place use a measurement known as the meter, which by coincidence is precisely the length of of our Eyrsh yard. The odds of this occurance are astounding, and clear proof of the divine perfection of the Eyrsh yard that some other barbarians would even unknowningly accord their measurement after ours.

Timekeeping

days of the year

by Celerim Heimry Waxflesh, Grove-count of Markswrecqs
VIII 83 Mintober

There are several calendars which record the days, tenths, seasons, and years, though by custom all have agreed upon the Astrolog of Holystaine as the most correct of them. As there are precisely 381.125 days to the year, a leap day is added every eight years, known as the White Queen’s Day, which brings the calendar back to perfect alignment.

The 381 days are broken up into thirty-eight tenths supplemented by the extracalendar day of Mother’s Day, added at the end of the year.

Each tenth is itself divided into ten days, of which four are named: Kalend, the None, the Ides, and the Hour. Days are not counted up but rather one counts down the upcoming day. As Kalend is the first day of the tenth, the sequence of days thus goes:

Kalend of [tenth]
4th til the Nones of [tenth]
3rd til the Nones of [tenth]
The Forenones of [tenth], or 2nd til the Nones of [tenth]
The Nones of [tenth]
The Ides of [tenth]
4th til the Hour of [tenth]
3rd til the Hour of [tenth]
The Forehour of [tenth], or 2nd til the Hour of [tenth]
The Hour of [tenth]

In Landing the old custom is still common, especially among the older or more rural peoples, which is said to have its origins on the Antipodes. It goes as:

Sunday
Moonday
Trewsday
Foreday
Wodesday
Second
Thursday
Freeday
Sterday
Hourday

In Westremothe, Twyier, and Loewe, the Mothic form is prefered, which goes as such:

Calenne
Hirsces, or Dea gron
Dea rog
Dea sourt
None, or Dea d’Ouid
Dea gel
Dea d’êmith
Dea blue
Dea oit
Hor

tenths of the year

The tenths are named in the following sequence, with the meaning of the name—as far as is known—in parentheses (nb. many of these names are so obscure, few native Eyrsh speakers know their meanings):

Wyetenth (holy-tenth) Wy
Hoaring (frost) Hg
Skunktide (time of the skunk) St
Coming (inbound migration of birds) Cg
Horninga (horns growing in) Ho
Bruetenth (beer brewing-tenth) Br
Bloomstenth (flower blooming-tenth) Bl
Foreyear (the new year was once counted on the first day of spring) Fy
Lenten (springtide holy-tenth) Ln
Grestenth (grass-tenth) Gr
Midgetenth (mosquito-tenth) Mg
Wententh (meaning unknown) Wn
Mintober (meaning unknown) Mt
Breaktenth (break-tenth, meaning unknown) Bk
Suntenth (sun-tenth) Su
Wedenth (weed-tenth) We
Maxmisce (meaning unknown) Mx
Rasptenth (tenth the raspberries come in) Rp
Midsummer Ms
Frogtenth (frog-tenth) Fg
Hasing (hazy, or muggy) Hs
Heytint (hey harvesting-tenth) Hy
Herbenth (herb gathering-tenth) Hb
Hemptenth (hemp harvesting-tenth) Hm
Quithe (meaning unknown) Qu
Renth (Rain-tenth) Re
Gilbing (the yellowing of plants) Gg
Autumn Au
Ganstenth (goose migration-tenth) Gn
Perimalthus (meaning unknown) Pm
Fogtenth (foggy-tenth) Fo
Barnfast (barn closed/secured) Bf
Hacktenth (woodcutting-tenth) Hk
Lardenth (lard-tenth) Lr
Blodenth (blood-tenth, from the slaughtering of animals) Bd
Wittniss (white-ness, from snowfall) Wn
Darktenth (dark-tenth) Dk
Midwinter Mw

dates

Dates are written in the sequence of greatest to smallest:

Wheel year tenth day
Eg. VIII 22 Fo 3

By analogy, dates for days are counted from the Hour down, so 3 would be the 8th day of the tenth, the third til the Hour. 4 would be the 7th day, the fourth til the Hour. 9 would be the 2nd day, the fourth til the Nones.

Mother’s Day and the White Queen’s Day are written: IX 4 Md and IX 8 Wq

Dates can be written numerically, which is less common.
Eg. III 29 Cg 7 as 3.29.4.7 or III.XXIX.IV.VII

Mother’s Day and the White Queen’s Day would be rendered 9.4.1 and 9.8.2 respectively.

When a date is spelled out in full, it is written in the opposite sequence.
Eg. The Forenones of Bruetenth of the twenty-second year of the ninth Wheel.

Of the Osing-way

by Professor Regnier Frobisher, Head of the College of Divinity, the Scola
VIII 86 Barnfast
Revised by Professor Tiffin Carver, Reader of the Garant School of Divinity, Harrow
IX 45 Horninga

the nature of folkish belief

Among the Thederim there is no single word for what Westerners often seek to name as a single thing. The Thederim do not commonly speak of a bounded “faith” that one enters and cannot depart, nor of belief as an exclusive pledge. Rather, their customs and understandings are lived as part of ordinary life: the keeping of days, the tending of shrines, the speaking of names, the avoidance of certain acts, the telling of old tales, the making of offerings, the taking of vows, and the disputing—endlessly and with relish—of what these things might mean.
For this reason, when the learned must speak of the matter in a single phrase, Osing-way is serviceable, though imperfect. The word is encountered most often in its plainest sense: a way-path to a shrine, grave, standing stone, holy hollow, or other place where osings are known to gather. By extension it also denotes the body of rites, observances, and devotions conducted along such ways. It does not necessarily denote a single doctrine, nor does it require assent to a single account of the world. In Thederim speech, the “why” and the “how” are rarely forced into agreement; correctness is more often measured by doing than by saying. Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.
The Thederim will sometimes speak instead of nature—not merely trees and weather, but the proper shape of living: the pattern by which people, beasts, spirits, and seasons interlock. Much that a stranger might press into “theology” is, for the Thederim, a question of whether a life is lived in keeping with nature, or against it.
During the last fifty years—owing to increased intercourse with Westerners, the needs of diplomats, and the habits of schools—there has arisen a more orderly account of the Osing-way than many householders would ever attempt. This account is useful, but it must be handled with care. The Osing-way is, by temperament, paradoxical: it admits contradiction without shame, prefers the suggestive over the exhaustive, and treats vagueness not as failure but as room for the Werld to remain strange.
What follows, therefore, is a map—not the land.

a note on old orders: cyrl, wyling, eyrl

The Folk-from-across-the-Sea were not one people in their origin, yet they carried with them a familiar ordering that appears—under many names—across the Antipodes:

Cyrls, free farmers and householders,
Wylings, priests and custodians of rites,
Eyrls, warrior nobles and patrons of war-cults.

The ships that made landfall did not carry these estates in equal measure. Most were crowded with cyrls; few bore many wylings or eyrls. In the old lands, priest and noble often propped one another up; in the new, severed from the weight of ancestral property and retinue, such arrangements withered. The formerly enslaved cyrls, being the multitude and the muscle of settlement, quickly established the radically egalitarian moral temper resentful of all bondage that would come to be treated as ancient law: that men and women are born equal in standing, whatever their parentage.
This matter is not merely political. The Osing-way mirrors the society that keeps it. Where class is thin and mobility is real, a religion that insists upon fixed spiritual castes will not be long endured. Over generations the inherited myths were reordered, reinterpreted, and—where needed—re-homed upon Werld soil.
Even so, the old tripartite ghost lingers in the broad division that scholars commonly use when speaking of Thederim tradition: Folklore, the Courts, and the Psealms.

the three strata of the osing-way

I. Folklore: osings, ylmre, wonders, and terrors

Folklore is the low myth of the Thederim: household tales of osings, ylmre, monsters, witches, wizards, and the hidden rules of luck and spite. It is carried chiefly by speech and habit—mother-to-child, neighbor-to-neighbor—and has shown remarkable stability since the Landing. New stories are forever being grafted on, but the oldest cores change little. The greatest alteration, more often than not, is simply this: events once set “elsewhere” are relocated into the Werld, with beasts and plants adjusted to match the country.
Folklore is not “lesser” in its power. Many scholars learn—too late—that a proverb muttered over a threshold may govern more behavior than a hundred sermons.

II. The Courts: shrines, orders, and the Six Queens

The Courts are the organized heart of wyling practice: networks of shrines, vows, calendars, and custodianship. They are commonly understood as a long synthesis: remnants of older war-cults and priestly authority, braided together with practices learned from Wels and Elandie as the Folk assimilated and intermarried.
As the eyrls dwindled in worldly authority, many priests gradually turned away from gods of rulership and conquest—figures too closely resembling the old aristocratic bargain—and toward powers more chthonic, nearer to hearth, grave, childbirth, sickness, weather, oath, and wheel, though the process was gradual and generational. It was the Sesbrean and Vilbraennean Reforms of the IV Wheel which produced the Courts in forms recognizably akin to those kept today.
The Courts are six, each associated with one of the Queens. Because the wylings no longer hold social supremacy, membership and service are open to all who can endure the discipline and the obligations.

III. The Psealms: song, city, and the memory of glory

The Psealms are the song-memory of older noble rivalry: tales once composed to praise heroic ancestors, justify old claims, and recall battles against monsters and chaos. In the Antipodes these songs belonged chiefly to eyrl-houses; most cyrls neither knew them well nor needed to.
In the Werld, however, the shape of the thing altered. Even where households did not preserve the old Psealms, they remembered what such songs were for. Within a few generations new cycles were being made—less for bloodline than for clan, band, and above all city. These works spread quickly, often taking a middle ground between practical folklore and the more inward rites of the Courts: entertaining, political, and sticky in the mind. Among the best-known are the Wolfing Cycle and the Eyriad.

of osings and offerings

A common axiom of Thederim thought is that all matter is ensouled: beast, plant, stone, metal, river, and wind. Learnèd disputation may refine the claim—some arguing that “soul” is distinct from matter, others that it is the very same substance seen under a different aspect—but in practice the consequence is plain: the Werld is full of presences.
Osings are presences unbound to a single object. One may think of them as souls made person-like: spirits inhabiting nature, animate and inanimate; or as the “faces” by which the ensouled world can be addressed. They range from petty household osings to mighty Queens. Even when speaking of the Queens, Thederim commonly resist the word “gods,” preferring instead: osings of surpassing power.
Dealings with osings are often transactional, though the wise will add that the osings themselves set the price, and that what they value is not always what a supplicant expects. Offerings, abstinences, and proper speech matter less as “bribes” than as the manners by which one approaches a will that is not human.
Notably, communion with osings is not confined to the Courts. Ritual trance—sometimes aided by mushrooms, smoke, fasting, chanting, or sleeplessness—has long been the province of folk-practitioners: dryce, galdners, and others broadly named witches. In theory anyone may attempt such commerce; in practice, the attempt is perilous and talent is unevenly distributed, thus the role of tercines, the college of priestesses specially trained to offer the correct sacrifice on behalf of supplicants.

the mother and the six queens

The Thederim all speak of a single Creator as the Mother—unknowable, infinite, and withdrawn from the Werld. The Mother is said to have birthed six daughters, the Queens. Yet even here the Osing-way refuses neatness: most will insist the Queens are not “deities” but osings, and that divinity is a category mortals invented to flatter themselves into comprehension.
The Mother is rarely worshiped directly. She is too great, too far, and too uninterested. The Queens are nearer: not necessarily kinder, but nearer. It was, after all, the White Queen, not the Mother, who created all men and women in Her image.
Though endlessly disputed in detail, all agree the Mother, self-begat, emerged from the Cosmic Egg, which She made. Standing upon the shell, She formed the Werld out of the spilled contents, forming the land, the sea, and the sky. The shell itself became the great baetyl of the Navel of the Werld in the Omphales.
Afterwards She fashioned the Father out of wood and brought him to life by placing an egg within his chest. Mounting him, the Mother then became impregnated with the White Queen. The Mother then sent the Father down from Heaven to gather materials across the Werld to build a crib for their daughter. From this point the traditions diverge in their telling, but most liviers agree that the Father, upon returning to Heaven, beheld the White Queen and desired Her and stole Her away. The Mother struck him down with Her lightning sword, castrating him and casting him from Heaven. Pathetically, he crawled the Werld searching for his severed member, but the wrathful Mother sent down three ravens who gobbled his parts, granting them the spark of intellect, speech, and consciousness.
Thereafter, disgusted by Her creation, the Mother withdrew. In this withdrawal the Thederim find their chief answer to the question of evil: She does not tend the garden. The Werld has been abandoned. In the quasi-livier Apocrypha & Unwanted Things, the Mother, disgusted by the Father’s betrayal and deeming the Werld a failed work, turned Her attention to the making of new and more perfect worlds.

reincarnation and the selfsame soul

Reincarnation is among the central habits of Thederim thought. Upon death, it is commonly held, the Black Queen decides what life follows.
Because reincarnation is not understood to be bound by the order of space or time—one may die in the future and be born again in the past—many philosophers argue toward a startling conclusion: that all lives are, in truth, the lives of one soul lived in innumerable shapes, known by scholars as radical solipsism. From it follows the moral idiom sometimes called selfsameness: to harm another is to harm oneself, because one must one day live that harmed life; to cheat is to be cheated; to kill is, eventually, to kill oneself.
Those who favor this doctrine will sometimes address strangers as selfsame-brother or selfsame-sister, not as sentimental piety but as literal metaphysic.
There is also, among the bolder disputants, a strain of argument that time itself is illusory, and that “before” and “after” are conveniences of the body rather than truths of the Werld, though this belief is by no means universal.

The Doom of the Son of the Sun

by Hare Peer Willemson, Historian of the Wode Concamera
VIII 49, Bruetenth

The writers who have most influenced the common understanding of these matters are not the chaunters and seers, who speak in riddles, but those of a sober temper, who delight in causes and character. For it is plain that even in myths the gods are made to act from passions familiar to men, and that the fates of worlds often turn upon the same things that turn a household: envy, desire, a wound to pride, and the strange steadfastness of those who will not endure dishonor.
Now the Father—whom some call the first-born soul and others the last—was by nature sharp of wit and vehement in will. He could not bear that the Mother’s workmanship should stand independent of him, and, being unable to mar it by strength alone, he set about it by craft. And because he understood that light is the bond of all living things, he judged that if he could steal the Sun, he might not merely harm creation but unmake the very conditions under which it persists.
So he assumed the form of a swan, for swans are pleasing to behold and are especially dear to the White Queen. In this he showed both subtlety and insolence: subtlety, in choosing a shape that would draw the Yellow Queen near without fear; insolence, in profaning a creature held sacred by his Daughter. The Yellow Queen, being by disposition attracted to beauty and movement, followed him into a thick wood; and at the end of a stagnant pond there was a small cave, into which the swan flew. When She entered after him, the Father caused the mouth of the cave to collapse, and the ruin became as one solid stone, so that the Sun was imprisoned in rock. From this came the Eternal Night, during which living things languished and the Werld approached extinction.
In this crisis it is the White Queen who is praised, and not without reason. For She did not rage in the fashion of those who are quick to anger and quick to tire, but persisted with the patience of a lawgiver pursuing a single case. She traveled through the whole Werld seeking Her Sister and found nothing, until at last She came, worn with labor, to the very pond where the deed had been done. There She saw a swan upon the water; but when She approached it, the bird hissed at her, which swans do not do when they are in the White Queen’s company. By this She perceived the deception, and with Her sword, Eyenbite, She struck off its head. Then a thing occurred which the myth-makers always take pleasure in: for instead of blood, poison poured out, and filled the pond, making the water itself a vessel of corruption. And immediately She heard the Yellow Queen calling from within the stone. The White Queen, therefore, smote the rock with the same sword and severed it, as if stone were cloth, and brought forth Her sister.
But the consequences of one act, even when it is just, are not always just in themselves. For the Yellow Queen, having been long shut up, bathed in the pond before departing, and the poison entered her. Thus She conceived the Son of the Sun, not by any marriage or consent, but by the residue of violence. This is why the wiser among the liviers say that the Werld is not governed by simple oppositions of good and evil, but by entanglements: even rescue carries a seed of calamity.
And the severed head of the swan, having served its purpose, did not die as other things die. It sloughed off its feathers, shed its skin, and rose again in a new and monstrous form; and this was the Wirm. In the moral of the tale it is plain enough what is intended: that deceit, when cut down, does not always perish, but may return as a more naked and terrible thing. And the Wirm is said to be the Father’s former evil given body, so that the world might behold, and later judge, what had previously been hidden in counsel and intent.
Now as to the Son of the Sun, the doctrine of the Selfsame Soul is introduced, which many receive because it accords with the sense that the same faults recur through ages, as if history were one man making the same error under different names. They say there is but one soul in all the universe, reincarnated nearly without end; and that in its final course it shall be the first born on the Werld: the Father. But when the Father dies, his soul shall go immediately into the Son, so that the Son is the Father again, but given the opportunity to become what the Father refused to be. For the Son is appointed to slay the Wirm, which is the Father’s wickedness made visible; and in this, redemption is not escape but confrontation.
The End of these Things is tied to the tolling of the Three Bells of Doom, which the poets describe as if the Werld itself were a great machine whose turning keeps order. The first bell tolls when the Unyielding One breaks free: a vile wizard whom the White Queen once subdued and bound in compelling chains, setting him in the planet’s core to turn the gears that spin the world. Yet he, being of a mind that delights in loopholes, shall deceive the Red Queen into releasing him; and by this act the hidden races beneath the mountains will awaken, and the guebbelins will rise and assemble under the ettins.
When the Werld ceases to spin, the second stage of ruin shall follow in a manner that is both grand and instructive. For it is not by a single blow but by the failure of order that the greatest destruction occurs. The mountains shall tumble, the stars shall fall and burn the earth, the seas shall evaporate, and life shall perish. Then the second bell will toll, and the Queens with their osings will make war against the ettin hosts, and though they will prevail, they do so at great cost—showing that even divine victory is a kind of loss when the field itself is ashes.
But the third bell will toll, and the Wirm will appear not from earth but from the night sky, and first will devour the Moon and then attempt to devour the Sun. Here the fate of all things shall reach its proper climax: the Son of the Sun will emerge from the rays of his mother and battle the Wirm, and slay it. Yet the Wirm’s venom is fatal, and the Son shall die. Some say he will weep for the Wirm even as he kills it, which, if one chooses to interpret rather than merely recite, suggests that he recognizes in the monster something of himself—an evil he did not invent but must nonetheless end.
At last the Mother shall return, drawn by the Son’s cries. Yet She cannot save him from death; and so She does what is greater than saving a life—She will end the cycle. She shall forgive us, the Selfsame Soul, and time itself shall be brought to a close; and thereafter will She make a new World, which they call Paradise. Thus fate concludes not with the triumph of power but with the primacy of mercy, and teaches, if it teaches anything, that the highest act is not to conquer the enemy but to refuse the endlessness of punishment.
Such is the account, as it is commonly told among the liviers; and if there are contradictions in the details, this is not surprising. For in matters so old and so exalted, men preserve the shape of meaning more faithfully than the measures of fact.

Queens, osings, demons, & beasts of wonder

by Gaven bythe Wells, Lecturer of the College of Divinity, the Scola
IX 46 Lenten

the queens

The unlearnèd pretend the Queens may be arranged in a tidy lineage, with a tidy chronology, and a tidy set of “correct” attributes. This is a comforting fantasy for those who cannot abide the truth: that we live in a Werld in which the divine is neither indexed nor cooperative. The Osing-way has never obliged them.
The order of the Queens varies by court, city, and century; and where a charice insists upon certainty, one may generally assume they defend a local custom rather than the heavens themselves. We shall therefore speak of the Queens as they are commonly encountered in practice: by their powers, their cults, and their reputations.

the white queen

The pantheon is headed—whatever provincial rivalries may say to the contrary—by the White Queen, youngest of the Queens, and (in the most widely received liviers) the only child born of the consummation of the Mother and the Father. Other liviers, especially those cherished far from Eyr, multiply the Father’s paternity with suspicious generosity; a few go so far as to name all but the Yellow Queen as his daughters. This is one of those disputes which is most often a sign of local pride.
The White Queen is the Hermaphrodite Queen, and in Her own person demonstrates the original equality of man and woman. She fashioned for Herself a phallus, and by it impregnated Herself, emulating Her own conception. From Her body came three sons and three daughters—two dark-skinned, two tan, and two pale—whom every Court acknowledges as the progenitors of mankind, however they quarrel over which child first stepped into daylight.
She is, in the plain sense, the Mother-Father of humankind, and behaves as one would expect a proper parent to behave: with fierce favoritism toward none, and sharp impatience for those who bring trouble upon the household.
Folklore is full of Her battles against ettins, guebbelins, and ylmre, for the White Queen has never been content to “reign” in the ornamental manner preferred by lesser spirits. She bears Eyenbite, a sword said to cleave any substance as easily as one cuts woven cloth—save for woven cloth itself, which perversely resists it. She is likewise famed for Corunice, Her drinking horn—also called the Horn of Plenty—which pours wine without end, to the great delight of poets and the considerable expense of tavernkeepers who would rather the public not take such stories too literally.
Her dwelling is Heafneburh, set upon the Big Moon (called also the White Moon), and She governs its comings and goings. It is no surprise that Her sign is the crescent moon.
It is likewise no surprise—though it does irritate certain polities of the Pentarchy—that the White Queen is held to be the especial Queen of Eyr. Being occupied with the defense of the Werld against chaos, She rules Eyr by proxy, having anointed the wode to govern in Her stead.
She is also reckoned the Queen of Magic, standing uncomfortably astride the old division: drit and drycraft (inherent, feminine power) and galderie (learned, masculine craft). It is fashionable in the lecture halls of inferior institutions to claim this “contradiction” proves the Osing-way incoherent. It proves only that the Werld is not a pamphlet.

the black queen

The Black Queen is often understood to be the next most important Queen (though the Court of the Starry Night in Good Hope maintains She actually has primacy over the White Queen). She is the judge of life and death, determining the fate of all who die. She knows all because She befriended the three ravens of time who, because they gobbled up the Father’s bits, are able to tell Her everything. Because of this, Her priestesses have a long tradition of oracular power and prophetic abilities.
The Courts are divided in the ranking of the three Celestial Queens: while the civilized all understand the primacy of the White Queen, many of the peoples and nations of the Werld are divided on the question of who follows Her in importance: the Black Queen, the Yellow Queen, or neither, maintaining that all are equal after the White Queen. The latter two are foolish stances to hold, as it is the Black Queen who is the most important after the White Queen.
The Black Queen is the judge of life and death, determining the fate of the dead. Her edicts are perfect, as Her unrivaled wisdom is aided by Her eternal and loyal friends, the Three Ravens of Time, who see and know all which was, which is, and which will be. Each night they fly beyond the stars to Her domain in the Eternal Void to whisper all which they have seen into Her perfect ears.
Though pale to Her knowledge, Her tercines have a long tradition of oracular powers and prophetic abilities. The head of the order of these witches, the One-who-turns-the-Wheel-of-the-Werld, presides from the Garth & Guard of the Omphales. These witches—some tercines, some charece, others simple holy women and alchemists, some even Barbadines—are the only peoples in the Werld who still practice blood sacrifice, though in a form peculiar to their order. Though the daily slaughter for the so-called ‘Sun God’ of the ancient, pagan Wolfings is the most famous example of human sacrifice in the Werld, since the Landing blood-letting has been demanded by the tercines of the Court of the Starry Night. When mutilation of the body for the purposes of sacrifice was wisely abolished on penalty of death by the Wode Sesbrea, the tercines of the Black Queen cleverly circumvented this ban by offering Her their menstrual blood upon the altar, which is what grants them their great gift of visions.
The Black Queen is the only Queen to be a virgin and have no offspring, refusing to attach Herself to another and in so doing bias Her perfect judgement. She appears in a number of legends in the Psealms and folklore, generally being sought out for Her knowledge of all space-time or to return someone from the dead. Some accounts popular in Good Hope—and thus worthy of suspicion—state that it was the Black Queen and not the White Queen who rescued the Yellow Queen after She was imprisoned by the Father within the Stone. It hardly needs to be stated that this is absurd.
In most depictions, She’s actually quite funny and light-hearted, at odds with Her terrifying appearance and countenance, playing games—especially riddles—with the dead before She decides their fate. Her sword, the Silver Sword, shall slay the Unyielding One at the Unraveling of Time and in so doing save what has not been lost from being lost forever.
In the Pentarchy She is depicted as wearing a starry crown—either one star or six—while in the east She is just as often depicted wearing an ostrich feather as a crown—likely Birdkyne influence. Her symbol can either be three ravens or six stars.

A Brief history of the militaries of the Thederim

by Hare Professor Heimry Hide, Reader of the Wode Military School
IX 46 Midsummer

eoring

The earliest armies of the Thederim—if they can be called that—were dedicated to the pursuit of capturing cattle. These violent, ritualistic raids were known as eor. The purpose of eor was to both display individual bravery and increase tribal or household wealth, which was ranked and valued in cattle.

Though there certainly must have been cattle raids against the Welsings about Landing, these are neither recorded nor ranked as eor, as though the Welsings had great herds, raiding them was not seen as honorable. This is not to say it was not done, but it was seen as no more remarkable than gathering berries or hunting raccoons. This is because, as Epercalice records in his now lost Aftreyse, that the Wels men of fighting age had mostly killed themselves in a brutal struggle about the time of the Landing. Many of the Wels widows married Folkish warriors for protection, bringing their wealth with them and promoting eor amongst the Folk.

Epercalice tells us that eor was governed by many rules, and one ignored those laws at their own peril. Failure to comply was considered simple banditry and punished by outlawry or death. A warrior eoring may only carry an ax, sword, or spear, and may only use their weapon against someone bearing arms themselves—though wrestling or nonleathal combat was permissible against any, and many prisoners were taken hostage and held for ransom in this manner. Eor was permitted once every ten days during the day and twice per year during the night, and any raid conducted during the day must cease at sundown.

No one man was permitted to take more than twenty head of cattle, nor could the homestead raided be deprived of all their cattle—at least ten must be left behind, which, as Epercalice notes, means that no homestead with ten or less cattle may be targeted for eor. Raiding a small homestead was considered so ignominious, Deocretes tells us, that any warrior involved would rather exile or slay himself than show himself to his kin again. In her groundbreaking analysis of early Folkish society, Eoring and Equality, Fr Belsante Rocque argued that eor was an egalitarian means of redistribution which prevented the concentration of wealth in any one single family. Though it has been estimated via grave goods that four out of five were male, in theory any cyrl who possessed a weapon had the right to go eoring, allowing even the poorest and least prestigious families a footing to both establish an honorable reputation and a means of producing wealth.