Myrrhaxis, the Unfixed

Deity of Mutation, Drift, and the Unstable Law

The Verdant Divide is a valley where the flora answers to sound and emotion, the runoff streams are hazardous in ways that change between visits, and the Scale Flickerstorms rewrite the local rules of magic without notice. The Followers of Irion call it a weeping wound. Myrrhaxis calls it honest.

The god's claim is not that the world is chaotic. It is that the world's laws are slow-moving variables that everyone has mistaken for constants because a human life is too short to notice the drift. In most of Iridia this is an abstraction. In the Divide, and in the Spindle Mire on the Concordant Tread where Myrrhaxis holds ground, it is observable weather.

Domains:

  • Mutation: Change in the thing itself rather than its circumstances. Myrrhaxis's power gathers around anything becoming something it was not built to be, and is indifferent to whether that is an improvement.
  • Drift: Slow movement in what was thought fixed. The faith's characteristic study: measuring the same thing for decades to prove it is not the same thing.
  • The Unstable Law: A rule that holds until it does not. Myrrhaxis's clergy hold that every law is this kind, and that the reliable ones are merely drifting slowly enough to be convenient.

Manifestation and Symbols:

  • Myrrhaxis is depicted differently in each rendering by requirement, and any shrine whose images have converged on a single form is considered to have lapsed and is repainted.
  • Its sigil is a measuring line whose marks are unevenly spaced — the ruler itself unreliable.
  • Its presence shows as instruments disagreeing. Two identical devices give two readings. Neither is broken. The faith regards this as the god speaking plainly.

Doctrine and Influence:

  • "You are not standing on bedrock. You are standing on something slow."
    • The founding teaching, delivered to novices as a comfort, which they do not initially find it.
  • "Measure it again in thirty years. Then tell me it is a constant."
    • The faith's method and its only real ritual, which has made its scholars unexpectedly valuable to Scholar's Rift.

Worshippers:

  • Nomadic scholars and surveyors of the Verdant Divide, who keep decades-long records of a valley that will not sit still.
  • Smugglers who work the Divide's shifting routes, devout in the practical way of people whose lives depend on knowing a path has changed.
  • A minority faction within the Cult of Dy, who hold that Myrrhaxis's drifting law is what makes the Coincidence's uncertainty possible in the first place — a theological argument the main Cult finds tiresome.

"It was true when you learned it. That is all anyone can say about a law."