Cult of Dy

The Cult of Dy is the oldest surviving church of The Coincidence, and the only one of the Nine's congregations that most Iridians could name without thinking.

It began, as its own records cheerfully admit, as a misreading. Early scholars noticed that the resonance pulses emanating from the scales did not repeat—that the ARC drifted, that no two cycles measured identically, and that the variation resisted every attempt to find a pattern in it. Most concluded the instruments were imprecise. The Cult of Dy concluded that the world was telling them something, and that what it was telling them was nobody is steering this.

They have been arguing the point ever since, and it has aged better than anyone expected.

Doctrine

The Cult holds that unpredictability is not a flaw in creation but its most important safeguard. A world in which outcomes could be reliably arranged would, within a few generations, belong permanently to whoever arranged best—and the Cult is quite specific about who it thinks that would be. Its sermons name the Oblique Concord more often than they name any god.

Three teachings carry the practice:

• The throw is not an answer. Casting for a decision does not reveal the correct choice. It removes a chooser, which is the entire point.
• Read the pattern, do not complete it. Resonance patterns are studied at length and deliberately never extrapolated. A cultist who predicts the next cycle has committed the central error of the faith.
• It will fall on you too. Adherents who complain of their own misfortune are held to have misunderstood the position, and are gently made fun of.

Practice

Chapters are small, scattered, and constitutionally incapable of coordinating with one another—a condition they regard as doctrinal rather than logistical.

• The Cast is the Cult's best-known rite and its most controversial: a decision of genuine consequence handed to the dice and abided by, regardless of outcome. Settlements have been founded, dissolved, and once memorably relocated by a single throw.
• Trial by Chance is the practice outsiders find hardest to forgive. The Cult maintains that a verdict reached by evidence is a verdict reached by whoever assembled the evidence, and prefers the die. Whether this is profound or appalling depends almost entirely on who is standing trial.
• The Wandering sends adherents out with each junction of the route decided by the throw, for as long as provisions last. A surprising number of the Cult's converts are people who met a wanderer who should not have been there.

Sootgrove

The Cult's rites are anchored to Sootgrove, the Coincidence's domain on the Concordant Tread—a chaotic trialland where the roads shift by the throw and justice arrives spectral and erratic. It is one of the very few domains belonging to one of the Nine that can be entered at all.

Rival theologians attribute this to carelessness. The Cult points out, reasonably, that a domain nobody can reach is a domain that cannot ruin anybody's plans.

Standing

The Cult of Dy is tolerated in most of Iridia and welcome in very little of it. Merchants dislike it, magistrates distrust it, and the High Concord regards it as a nuisance whose arguments are becoming inconveniently popular.

Its own members would tell you that being disliked by everyone organised is the clearest evidence they are correct.

"Someone was going to decide. We threw instead."