San Verus

San Verus is one of the Redemptive Saints of the Bastonian Pantheon, elevated to godhood by the Enemy to stand in opposition to the Great Saints of the Almighty. Once a human from Bastonia, he was a powerful mage in his own right, responsible for decades of chaos and destruction in The Frontier Counties prior to his death. It is unclear in the legend how he came to be a saint, with some saying that the Enemy courted him and turned him mad in exchange for greater power and divinity, and others saying that it was his own attainment of divinity that drove him mad, with the Enemy simply manipulating him after the fact. Few dare worship him at all, and those who do are often more inscruitable than even the followers of The Enemy.

His symbol is an an eye with a lightningbolt fracture through it, and his sacred weapon is the flail. It is said he holds snakes as sacred.

History

Long after the Battle of the First Wall, San Verus was born a mortal man in the Frontier Counties, where he came into frequent contact with orcs and their strange systems of belief. A sorcerer - usually understood to be of the Aberration bloodline - he also placed himself in frequent contact of both the denizens of Pandemonium and the Abyss. He was an irreverrant individualist, cultivating a small following who believed him to be divine (or at least divinely inspired), and causing great chaos and destruction throughout an unnaturally long life.

The details of his death and ascension are lost to history, and Verus's own mind is so damaged that no account from him should be considered truthful in any event. What is known is that he is usually either allied to, or at least in the sway of, the Enemy, who is held within the belief system of the Bastonian Pantheon to be the source of his own divinity.

Relationships

San Verus is feared by most of his Pantheon, though from a few he has graduated to pity, rather than abject fear. He is destructive and seems to have lost the capacity for normal reason. Even his allied saint, San Meteo, views Verus as too unpredictable to be relied upon.

The most likely truth, and the line preached by the Almighty, is that regardless of origin, Verus is under the manipulation of the Enemy and could likely be neutralized if somehow pulled out from under his sway.

Appearance

Verus's appearance is often subjected to illusion. His truest form is that of a broken man of impossible age, with unrully, thinning, shoulder-length grey hair and tattered filthy robes, once black. It is said that his eyes contain the depths of The Abyss.

Realm

San Verus is nominally welcome in Heaven, but only by invitation and always under guard. Riven as he is by chaos, it is actually the nature of the universe that he occupies The Abyss rather than hell, where he occupies a domain known outside that plane as the Bosom of Creation, a manse of impossible internal size whose shifting maze of corridors and rooms is said to lead to all times and all places.

Providence

Verus's providence is unlooked for. The positive attention of this god often drives his followers mad with his constant appearance as vision or dream, and the absurd, contradictory, and cryptic half-truths he reveals. Of all the gods in the Pantheon he is second only to the Almighty and the Enemy in his creation of oracles, as these make up almost the sum total of his mortal followers.

Servants

The Abyss is empty and without form in the areas nearest his realm, and it is said that Verus wanders, trapped by his own lostness and dissociation, within his realm without a servant to his name.

The Bastonian Church

The bastonian church is unified in the worship of The Almighty, which is observed by not just her direct followers, but even by those patronized by the other Saints of the Pantheon. The church teaches the performance of good works and the cultivation of compassion as the roadmap to ultimate salvation and an afterlife spent in Heaven.

Devotees of San Verus, if they are referred to at all as anything other than heretics or witches, are sometimes called "Verans".

Worshippers

From time to time, circumstance gives rise to those within Bastonia who have the spark of evil within them, touched by the Enemy or spat out by San Meteo. These pathetic few, seen as mad by those around them given their peculiar talk of visions of Saints-That-Aren't and displays of otherworldly power, are slowly drawn by their heritage, circumstance, and the oppressive ignorance of those around them into San Verus's fold.

A few who are charismatic enough among this number occasionally form small sects on their own, recruiting especially from the underprivileged and otherwise manipulable into joining cults whose only true common thread is becoming violent to occasionally even the point of self-destruction. Mass suicides of Verus's followers are common, believing they will join him at the Bosom of Creation.

It is unclear if these apotheoses are actual, or lies spread by Verus into the minds of his followers to engineer their deaths for some other purpose.

Clergy

Owing to the need to practice their religion in secret, and the nature of his providence to further increase the outcast nature of his faithful, Clergy in his worship are rarely publicly known and tend to be nomadic. When they find places of relative safety to settle, such clerics often take root as wilderness prophets, even occasionally as healers, and attract cults to themselves through their own charisma and the gifts given them by their god.

Temples & Shrines

Like much the rest of Bastonian architecture, temples and shrines to the Almighty are often masterworks of masonry or stonework, which in wealthy communities are often further embellished with stained glass and frescos, depicting a popular saint in the region or scenes from the sacred texts. Such structures are usually subdivided internally, with an area for public ceremony and worship (which is frequent) and an area for the sole use of the clergy and those who serve the clergy in liturgical preparation, and temple complexes almost always include an outbuilding or suite of rooms known as the rectory, where the priests serving a particular temple have residence.

San Verus is rarely depicted in the artistry of such temples. The shrines created by the cults that spring up to him are as varied as are the lies he tells his followers, typically made profane by the violent rituals he demands of his followers in an attempt to test their devotion or have them carry out his own inscrutable experiments.

Holy Texts

Cults of San Verus occasionally promote a holy text among themselves, often their leader's own profane ramblings. It's unclear that any writings of any kind survive from Verus's time or have been promulgated by him since his arguable entrapment within the Abyss/

Church History

The churches of San Verus have been as numerous as crises within Bastonia, and are often the cause or focus of such crises, blamed for the locals for everything from crop failure to plague to unexpected disappearances. Several Knightly orders, mostly of San Lukas, have made hunting down and destroying such cults their primary driver of service.

Holidays

As a Redemptive Saint, San Meteo does not have a feast day. If he is invoked at all by the main church, it is never in adoration, worship, or recognition, but always as a cautionary tale or the foil of a morality play.

Among his own kind, rituals of worship vary from date to date, usually tied to a celestial event or phase of the moon. Almost always, blood sacrifice, very often of humans or other mortal races, is demanded. Sometimes these sacrifices are culled from among his own followers, and sometimes they are culled from the surrounding area. In the area where his followers are most numerous, this frequently brings them into conflict with the Orcish Nation.

Favoured Animals

To the extent that anything is held as sacred with regard to San Verus, snakes are considered sacred by many of his followers, for various reasons.