Torserd Magnusson

Torserd Magnusson is the a diety of the Dwarven Pantheon, creation and son of Magnus Allfather. Dwarves, especially those of the Clans of Magnus, revere him as the Deepest, a conduit of divinity and cosmology, and a tragic figure in dwarven mythology. His descendants and creations form Clan Torserdsson, one of the Twelve Clans of Magnus. Direct followers of Torserd are rare in the Dwarven Kingdoms as he is considered a personification of the parts of magic which dwarves fear and despise; wild, charismatic manipulation of energies rather than trusty and solid logical enchantment.

Torserd is a true neutral deity whose followers are granted access to the Glory, Knowledge, Nobility, Void domains. His holy symbol is an open eye.

History

Torserd Magnusson was created early in the history of the dwarves by Magnus Allfather, who forged him to be the guide of dwarvenkind in the Deeps. He personally directed the excavation of many of the earliest and best roads through the Deeps and is directly responsible for the foundation of many orders of Dwarven Warrior Guilds who specialize in operating at extreme depths or slaying the peculiar aberrations that inhabit the Dark. Torserd is known to have gone partly mad from contracting a condition known as Deepburn, and the city of Khaz Duersterkrak was constructed to seal the Deepest Well, into which Torserd threw himself.

Relationships

Since contracting Deepburn Torserd has not been seen or heard from in Ahren (except through his followers) or Khaz Urheim, the divine realm in the Bardo inhabited by the rest of his kin who form the Dwarven Pantheon. Many of his brotherss and sisters in the Dwarven Pantheon mourn Torserd as dead, though even having fallen down the Deepest Well is not the sort of thing that should be expected to kill a god.

Appearance

Torserd is a gargantuan being alike in proportion and visage to the dwarves, albeit on a much grander scale. He is somewhat pale and has along mane of white hair and similar beard, which are usually shown in iconography as being unusually unkempt.

Realm

His proper divine realm is in Khaz Urheim, a fortified city in the Atlas Mountains which bridges Ahren and the Bardo. However, he has not been seen there in some time.

He is rumoured to have inherently created a second divine realm, either properly on Ahren or else in some other plain, at the bottom of the Deepest Well during the event in which he threw himself down it. If this is correct he would be the only god with a divine realm on Ahren proper, and even if it is a pocket dimension, he would be the only god with a proper claim over two realms, in any pantheon. This realm is known as the Halls of Torserd and is undocumented except by rumours of its existence in the writings of the mortal races of Ahren.

Providence

Torserd takes little intervention in the affairs of mortal dwarves despite his position in their worship. The surest sign of his providence is the sudden recovery of knowledge thought lost - be that finding a book that was mis-catalogued in a library or dwarves recovering an abandoned stronghold with its libraries and writings intact. Some cults of Torserd also see providence in the contraction of extreme cases of Deepburn in situations where the condition is not thought to have been expected to appear.

Servants

Torserd Magnusson has no servants in the divine realm.

The Dwarven Church

Torserd's church is a supplementary worship alongside that of Magnus Allfather. Except in his clan's holdings, his is a rare worship, usually marked only by, oddly enough, the clerics of other gods. He is strongly entwined in dwarven belief with the roads through the deeps that lead into other planes, and with the nature of divinity itself. Some obscure cults of Torserd teach that the correct understanding of his latter teachings would allow mortal minds to unlock the secrets of divinity for themselves.

Worshippers

All Atlassian Dwarves worship Magnus Allfather, and some of those (especially in Clan Torserdsson) worship Torserd in addition. Rank within the clergy is highly structured and determined by status and promotion from above, up to and including the primate of his cult, the Voice of Torserd.

Clergy

Priests of the Deepest wear elegant robes with braided piping, usually in black and silver, symbolizing the dark and the light which dwarves bear into it. 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. His clergy have specialized roles, administering his ceremonies to the small communities that follow him, to prospectors and guides who live their professions in the Deeps, and to the priests of other gods (especially other Dwarven Gods) who seek out their expertise on divine communion in their own training.

Torserd is disproportionately represented in his formal and informal clergy by oracles, who he has blessed (or cursed) directly with divine understanding.

Temples & Shrines

Like much the rest of dwarven architecture, temples and shrines to the Deepest are often masterworks of masonry or stonework, which in wealthy communities are often further embellished with precious metals or gem-mosiacs, depicting occult geometric patterns or stellar constellations. Such structures are usually subdivided internally, with an area for public ceremony and worship (which is rare) 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 house archives of planar or spiritual writings, including the writing of oracles. The most well known of his temples is the Temple of the Deep at Khaz Duersterkrak which is said to contain one end of a gateway linking to the now-divine realm he created when he banished himself into the deepest reaches of the Deeps.

Holy Texts

The Deeplore is a lengthy and dense text of the secrets of divinity, Cosmology, and aberrant states of biology, which deal with foundational knowledge the lowest portion of the Deeps, known as the Dark. It is a large collection, some 1300 pages when written in folio, and usually exists in multiple volumes. These copies are dear and expensive to produce according to the dwarves, as well as being considered secret knowledge and jealously guarded, therefore found exceptionally rarely outside of the libraries of Duersterkrak. Duplicating these documents and providing them to non-dwarves is absolutely forbidden, punishable by Bare-Faced Exile.

His followers are known to amass great libraries of the writings of prophets and oracles as well.

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 prevalent) 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 dwarven closeness to divinity. The church of Torserd, specifically, is almost entirely isolated to the holdings of Clan Torserdsson.