Sylth is the god of the last door. The temple teaches that all doors lead somewhere, and that Sylth holds the keys, and that what is on the far side of the last door is — in the old phrase the priests still use — not a place we name. The phrase is not evasion. The phrase is the doctrine. Sylth’s domain is precisely what cannot be named: the rest after the long work, the door that closes behind you, the keys that fit the lock and were always going to.
He is the patron of undertakers, gravediggers, doorkeepers (the role is older than its modern, mundane sense), nurses at deathbeds, and the ferrymen of small reach-isles whose work is to bring the dead home for burial. He is also, more quietly, the patron of those who wait — the spouse beside the bed, the parent watching the long illness, the friend who sits with someone whose mind is leaving. Sylth’s order does not recruit by interview. The order watches. When the order recognizes someone who has spent long years at the bedside of dying people, it invites.
His altars are the most architecturally distinctive of the Seven. The main figure is a doorway — not a person, not a symbol on a flat plane, but an actual small built doorway in carved stone or set wood, roughly child-height, set into the temple wall. The door is closed. The door does not open; in most temples, it is structurally sealed. Set into the door is a single iron key, hammered into the wood from the inside so that only the head and shaft are visible. Worshippers leave their offerings — small carved beads, locks of hair, sometimes a single written name on a strip of paper — at the foot of the doorway. The offerings are collected by Sylth’s priests at week’s end and burned in the temple’s eastern fire, which is kept lit through the year for this purpose alone.
His priests wear undyed black linen — not woollen, not formal, just the cleanest practical cloth — with a single iron key on a leather cord at the throat. The key is the priest’s own. It is given on induction, and is the only object a Sylth-priest is required to keep through their service. A priest who loses the key must return to a senior priest of the order and ask, in the old phrase, let me wait again; the new key is given without comment. There is no shame in the loss. There is, by tradition, always a new key.
The Long Watch, on the night of the thirteenth of Mistmonth, is Sylth’s principal feast and the year’s longest night. Households leave a single lit candle by the door from sunset to sunrise, in memory of the dead. It is a quiet festival; it is considered improper to hold loud parties on the Long Watch, and most people do not. Sailors at sea light a candle inside the stone-room. The temple distributes small plain candles to anyone who needs one, free of charge, the morning before. There is no other ritual. The candle burns. The night passes.
His folk-rituals are domestic and unceremonial:
- A house in which someone has died is, by old custom, entered the next morning by a Sylth-priest, who walks once through every room and out the front door. The walk is silent. The priest does not speak to the household. The household understands. The dead is, by this small act, let through
- A traveller departing on a journey from which they may not return — a long crossing in winter, a venture into the Veiled Waters — will sometimes give a small object to a household member with the instruction: if I do not come back, give this to the priest in spring. The objects are accepted. Most are returned in spring, laughing. Some are not returned, and are quietly given to Sylth’s priests, who burn them on the eastern fire
- A child who asks where the dead go is told, in many reach-households, Sylth has the keys, and Sylth’s keys fit. This is the entire answer. Most children, on hearing it, stop asking
Sylth is not invoked for protection, for healing, or for life. The temple will not perform his rites for any matter that requires keeping someone alive. He is the god of what comes after, and what comes after, in his teaching, is not the worshipper’s burden to know.
“My grandfather kept the candle for my grandmother for forty-three years. Every Long Watch. He outlived her by exactly that long. The last Long Watch he kept it himself, the year he died, the candle burned through the night and into the morning, and went out at the hour she had died, and not a moment before. I do not believe in miracles. I cannot account for that candle. I light it every year for both of them now.”
— from a letter circulated privately on Pike’s Reach, undated, attributed to Mistress Lien