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The temple’s official teaching has it that the Reach is held by seven living gods. Most adults know that this is not quite true. Two of the seven are not living, and have not been for some time, and the temple’s courteous evasion of this fact is the longest-running open secret in the faith.
Their names are Mara and Nymira.
The temple does not say their names in the standard daily liturgy. The temple does not commemorate them on the formal feast-days. The temple’s priests, asked directly, will say that Mara and Nymira have gone on — a phrase that does no theological work and does a great deal of social work, because it permits the conversation to proceed without either lying or admitting the lie.
What the laity says, when the laity is being honest, is what their grandmothers said: Nymira’s star went out before any living memory, and Mara’s star went out within memory we still keep.
Nymira of the Wild Green
Nymira’s domain, in the old way, was the wild green — the forests and grasslands and unworked land of the world that was. The old stories say that her places stood on the great continent before the Unmaking, that they covered most of it, and that when the world broke, the wild green broke with it. The temple does not include these stories in the teaching. They survive in the songs, the nursery rhymes, and the half-remembered phrases of farmers in spring.
Her star went out so long ago that no living person remembers a sky that contained it. The temple’s records — what little they admit to having on the matter — place her fall at more than four hundred years before the Reckoning, which, by the calendar measured in years After Unmaking, makes her absence essentially older than the present world itself. Some scholars of the Wren Academy have proposed that Nymira and the Unmaking are related in a way no one has yet established. The Academy publishes the proposals in journals only Academy members read, and the temple does not respond.
What survives of her in folk-practice is a single small ritual: in late spring, on no fixed date, an older woman — almost always a grandmother, almost always in a fishing village — will tuck a single green leaf at the edge of the household altar, often at the foot of the seventh seat. The leaf is from any tree. It is left for a single afternoon and removed before evening. If asked, the grandmother will say she did no such thing. The leaves accumulate, by spring’s end, on most reach-isles. No one removes them officially. They dry and fall. The temple sweeps them up with the rest of the altar’s spring debris and does not comment.
Mara of the Deep Currents
Mara’s domain was — and the verb was is the one the laity uses when they think no priest is listening — the deep currents of the Mistsea. Every ship in Aetheria is held aloft by aetherstones, but every ship is also, in older theology, carried by the deep slow movements of the Mist itself, the long unseen flows that no chart maps and no navigator fully understands. Sailors do not believe their ships are merely lifted. They believe their ships are moved, and that the moving is a kindness, and the kindness must come from somewhere.
In the old way, the moving came from Mara.
Her star went dim within living memory. The eldest in any reach- village can name the year, though most will not unprompted. The elders’ children remember their parents speaking of it. The elders’ grandchildren — most adults today — were small in the year of her fall, or born just after, and remember it as their parents’ worst grief, the kind of grief that did not pass but settled into the household furniture.
The temple, on the morning Mara’s star failed to rise, did not publicly mark the event. The temple’s official position then, as now, was that the star was dim, not gone. The seventh seat at every altar in the Reach was dressed, that morning, with the same cloth as the previous evening. The temple did not say what the cloth was for. The temple did not have to.
In the four hundred years since Nymira and the twenty-five years since Mara, the laity has worked out, without the temple’s help, a small folk-practice for both:
- Mara is honoured, where she is honoured at all, with blue cloth and sea-glass at the seventh seat (see The Seventh Altar). The honouring is not loud. Most adults do it without thinking
- Nymira is honoured with the spring leaf, brief, anonymous, and by old women who deny it
- The Memorial of the Two Stars (a folk-festival, not on the temple calendar) falls on two unspecified days each year — one in late spring, one in late autumn. Households light a small lamp. Some leave it in a window. The temple does not officially observe these days. Many priests, in private, light their own lamp
What it means that the gods can fall
This is the question the temple does not invite. Most priests, asked politely, will say that the gods do not fall. The gods withdraw, recede, sleep. The language matters to the temple. It does not matter as much to the fisherman’s wife who lost her brother to the Stormring in the year Mara went dark and has dressed the seventh seat in his memory ever since.
The Old Way honours the two who fell openly, and asks nothing of anyone. The Silent Choir argues that the falling is deliberate — that the gods are letting the world go, and that this is not a tragedy but a coming of age. The temple of the Seven, holding its quiet middle ground, dresses six seats and one and goes on.
The dressing is not a small thing. It is what the temple has, in place of an answer.
“My mother lit the lamp every spring and every autumn until she died. She never said why. She gave me the small clay bowl the autumn she went, and she said only, ‘someone has to.’ I have lit the lamp every season for nineteen years. My daughter is too young to ask yet. When she asks, I do not know what I will tell her. I hope I will know by then. I think I will tell her what my mother told me.”
— from a household notebook, kept anonymously, recovered by an itinerant scribe at Pike’s Reach, undated