Selkaris, the Second Voice

Deity of Testimony, Evidence, and the Heard Case

Selkaris is not the god of verdicts. It is the god of the part before the verdict, which it insists is the only part that matters.

Its position is that almost no injustice in Iridia was committed by someone who knew they were wrong. Injustice is nearly always what happens when a decision is made about a person by people who never had to listen to them. Fix the listening and most of the rest fixes itself — and where it does not, at least the wrong was done with open eyes.

Its clergy are professional nuisances. They turn up at hearings nobody invited them to and ask who has spoken for the absent party. In Triz Valley, where every transaction is a negotiation and the losing side of a bargain rarely gets a second hearing, they are tolerated the way weather is.

Domains:

• Testimony: An account given by the person it happened to. Selkaris's power gathers wherever someone is being allowed to speak for themselves and evaporates wherever they are being spoken for.
• Evidence: What can be shown rather than asserted. The faith is indifferent to how convincing a thing sounds and interested only in whether it can be produced.
• The Heard Case: The rare proceeding where every side actually got to answer. Selkaris holds this as the highest achievable good, and regards the outcome as almost beside the point.

Manifestation and Symbols:

• Selkaris is depicted as a figure with its head turned away from the viewer and inclined slightly, in the posture of someone listening to a person outside the frame.
• Its sigil is two cups on a level beam — not weighing, merely both present.
• Where Selkaris attends, an argument takes longer than it should. Someone always remembers one more thing that needs saying, and the hurried party never quite manages to close the matter.

Doctrine and Influence:

• "A case nobody answered is a rumour with a seal on it."
  • No finding is binding on a person who was never allowed to reply to it, however carefully it was reasoned or however senior the hand that sealed it.
• "Show it, or you are only telling me what you would like to be true."
  • The demand Selkaris's clergy make of every claim, including their own. It has made them unwelcome in most courts and indispensable in a few.

Worshippers:

• The Scroll Binders, masters of pacts and agreements, who had no patron until they noticed they had been serving one all along.
• Traders and arbitrators of Triz Valley, where you do not live so much as bargain, and where a hearing is worth more than a friend.
• Anyone who has lost something by default, judged absent, and come back wanting the record reopened.

"I do not care who is right. I care who has not yet been asked."