Dithrir, the Kept Count

Deity of Measure, Precedent, and the Kept Rota

The City of Or thanks Thalgrin for the forge. Nobody thanks anybody for the fact that the forge is staffed on the third shift of a festival week, which is a harder problem and a more fragile one.

Dithrir is the god of that second thing.

It is the Harmonizer's Will worn down to the working scale: not order as a principle but order as a list on a wall that somebody has to update. Its clergy are registrars, rota-keepers and standards officers, and their devotional practice is indistinguishable from their day jobs, which the faith considers correct rather than a shortcoming.

Domains:

• Measure: The agreed unit. A foot, an hour, an ingot's weight — arbitrary, settled once, and load-bearing forever after. Dithrir's power gathers wherever people are using the same standard without checking it.
• Precedent: What was done last time, treated as binding until someone argues otherwise in the open. The faith regards this as the cheapest form of justice available to a busy city.
• The Kept Rota: The duty roster honoured when honouring it is inconvenient. Dithrir's clergy hold that a rota kept only when convenient was never a rota.

Manifestation and Symbols:

• Dithrir is depicted as a figure holding a tally-stick with no expression whatsoever, and is by consensus the least interesting god in Iridia to look at.
• Its sigil is a notched rod — the standard length, from which all other lengths are cut.
• Its presence shows as things simply being covered. The shift is staffed. The gate is manned. Nobody can recall arranging it and nobody notices until the day it fails.

Doctrine and Influence:

• "The measure is not true. The measure is shared. That is better."
  • Dithrir has no interest in whether a standard is objectively correct, only whether everyone is using the same one — a position its rivals find shallow and its adherents find liberating.
• "Turn up on the bad day."
  • Anyone will keep a rota in good weather. The faith counts only the shifts worked when there was a reason not to.

Worshippers:

• The Council of Or and the guild registrars, whose civic ritual runs quietly alongside Thalgrin's forge-worship without either priesthood much minding the other.
• Quartermasters, weighers and shift-keepers across the dwarfhold and the Harthrûn metallurgists who need a standard ingot to exist.
• Anyone who has been let down by a rota, a congregation that recruits itself with great reliability.

"You have never thanked me. Good. That means it held."