Marren Magnusson

Marren Magnusson is the a deity of the Dwarven Pantheon, creation and daughter of Magnus Allfather. Dwarves, especially those of the Clans of Magnus, revere her as the Mother of Herbs, an expert healer in both alchemical and magical means. Her descendants and creations form Clan Marrensson, one of the Twelve Clans of Magnus, though she has some scattered followers in most other clanholds, married in from Yurirsson or inspired by their work in the trades she created. Many strongholds boast at least a few of her followers, either in the form of alchemists or her clergy, who maintain a tradition of serving as divine healers.

Marren is a Neutral Good deity whose followers are granted access to the Good, Healing, Plant, and Protection domains. Her holy symbol is a bloom of edelweiss, which grows high on the Atlas Mountains, and is favoured by the dwarves as a common component in digestive tonics, a very common sort of medicine.

History

Marren Magnusson was created early in the history of the dwarves by Magnus Allfather, who forged her to be the prefect of the lands that would become the clanhold of his followers. She lived in those lands among her people, documenting the herbs of the fertile valleys of her clanhold and the fungi and minerals that grew in their hills. Unlike many of her siblings, Marren grew old and died, and her clan excavated Khaz Glorlode above a rich silver vein to serve as her tomb.

Relationships

Marren Magnusson is on good terms with mortal dwarves and lives on in Khaz Urheim with the rest of her pantheon. She continues in her role as patron of healers and supposedly continues in secret alchemical research. She is known to have been involved in the restoration of Jarand Magnusson's missing hand and eye after his own demise.

Appearance

Marren is a gargantuan being alike in proportion and visage to the dwarves, albeit on a much grander scale. She has a healthy color in her cheeks and is hard to point out an age for - her hair has gone entirely white with age and while she shows some of the wrinkles of time, she is fairer and brighter-eyed than you would expect of an elder dwarf.

Realm

Her divine realm is in Khaz Urheim, a fortified city in the Atlas Mountains which bridges Ahren and the Bardo. While the location of this city is said to be embedded in the soul of every dwarf, as a practical matter only the dead seem to remember it, and the location is lost to both living dwarves and some of the best scholars in all Wisteria. It is possible that the material portion of the stronghold does not have a static position, but appears only as needed.

Providence

Marren's providence is seen in the lucky appearance of medicinal herbs in the wild at just the useful moment, or in bumper crops of the same materials. Many healers will credit her as a muse, particularly on occasions where the solution comes to them in a dream or through sudden absent-minded inspiration.

Servants

Marren serves Magnus Allfather in his fortress, and is served by those dwarves who have earned their divine rest with him in Khaz Urheim, along with the Secondborn, dwarf-like stone golems of giant size.

The Dwarven Church

Marren's church is a supplementary worship alongside that of Magnus Allfather. Her worship is common throughout all the Clans of Magnus, and almost any city that could support it economically will have at least a small chapel or even full temple in her honour.

Worshippers

All Atlassian Dwarves worship Magnus Allfather, and some of those worship Marren in addition. Rank within the clergy is highly structured and determined by status and promotion from above, up to and including the primate of her cult, the Daughter of Marren. Every guild to the alchemical or magical practice of the medicinal arts will have some small chapel or shrine in her honour.

Clergy

Priests of the Mother of Herbs wear elegant robes of white and light green, symbolizing silver, the sun, and the plants she helped the dwarves to understand. They adopt particular manners of the decoration and braiding of their hair and beards that makes them stand apart from other folk, including other clergy - often braiding greenery or blooms directly into them. These clergy have specialized roles, administering ceremonies to the small communities that follow her directly, or serving as doctors or miraculous healers to the communities that support them.

Temples & Shrines

Like much the rest of dwarven architecture, temples and shrines to the Mother of Herbs are often masterworks of masonry or stonework, which in wealthy communities are often further embellished with precious metals or murals depicting her or key herbs from her disciplines. Such structures are usually subdivided internally, with an area for public ceremony and worship and an area for the sole use of the clergy and those who serve the clergy in liturgical preparation, and full temple complexes almost always include an outbuilding or suite of rooms known as the rectory, where the priests serving a particular temple have residence.

Such full temples often also contain full hospitals, with rooms for convalescence and surgery, and laboratories for the preparation of material medicines through the arts of alchemy, to supplement the healing abilities of her priests (for which they are somewhat famous). The most famous of all such temples (and the chief institution of her chruch) is the Silver Citadel at Khaz Glorlode, where Marren's mortal body was itself entombed.

Holy Texts

A text known as Marren's Pharmacopia is a lengthy and dense text of the secrets of herbalism and litanies useful for healing, which deal with foundational knowledge in the work of healers and has been further supplemented with seperate commentaries and essays in the centuries which followed her publication. It is a large volume, some 300 pages when written on velum. These copies are dear and expensive to produce according to the dwarves, and are held tightly. Some copies occasionally get purchased by wealthy collectors (or duplicated by travelling human or elven traders) and wind up in the economies of other nations.

Church History

Among the Clans, the church waxes and wanes in power over the centuries, as the focus of dwarven life shifts between isolationism amongst the clans (when worship of the children of the Allfather is more prevelent) to those times of great crisis when the clans stand united and Magnus is more widely pronounced. The church does not lament these shifts in its influence, but stands ever-ready to prove themselves as the true paragons of charity and the medical arts.