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.

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 abberations 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.

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 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.

Providence

Yurir 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.

Servants

Yurir 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

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.

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 Deepestr 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 volume, some 300 pages when written on velum. 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 dwarven holds. Duplicating these documents and providing them to non-dwarves is absolutely haraam.

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 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 dwarven closeness to divinity.