Sorrakh, the Held Name

Deity of Coercion, Compromise, and the Held Name

Mohinders locks its most dangerous knowledge in private vaults, hidden archives and secret libraries, and calls this responsible stewardship. Aurelthys blesses the arrangement. Vennalune's clerks are trying to break it open.

Sorrakh is neither. Sorrakh is what the vaults are for.

The god's teaching is that a secret's value is never in telling it. A secret told is a secret spent. Its worth lies entirely in the gap between the moment you obtained it and the moment you might use it — a gap that can be sustained for decades and during which the person it concerns will, if they know you have it, do a very great deal to keep that gap open.

Sorrakh's faithful almost never blackmail anyone. They do not have to.

Domains:

  • Coercion: Compliance obtained without force or instruction. Sorrakh's power gathers where someone is doing what is wanted without having been asked, and disappears the moment a demand is actually made.
  • Compromise: The state of being holdable — the fact about a person that makes them movable. The faith studies this the way a physician studies anatomy.
  • The Held Name: A secret kept deliberately unspent, for years, as an instrument. The faith's central discipline and its measure of seniority.

Manifestation and Symbols:

  • Sorrakh is depicted as a closed hand held at chest height, palm inward, contents unspecified in every surviving rendering.
  • Its sigil is a key with no teeth cut — the blank, which fits nothing and could still be made to fit anything.
  • Its presence shows as reluctance without cause. Officials decline requests they would normally grant, and cannot afterwards explain their reasoning even to themselves.

Doctrine and Influence:

  • "A secret told is a secret spent. Spend nothing."
    • The founding discipline, and the reason Sorrakh's adherents are so rarely caught: the offence is mostly never committed.
  • "Never make the demand. Let them imagine it."
    • What a person fears you will ask is always larger than what you would have asked, and costs you nothing to maintain.

Worshippers:

  • The keepers of the Archives Obscura and the sealed vaults of Mohinders, who would describe themselves as archivists and are not lying.
  • Spymasters and senior functionaries, who find the faith late and usually after discovering they are already practising it.
  • Nobody publicly. Sorrakh has no congregations, only practitioners, and its rites are conducted alone.

"I have never asked you for anything. You have been very generous anyway."