On the Pain-Tasters of Najis.

Najis is the godhead of harm and healing, and the cycle of endurance and suffering that they perpetuate. While not uniformly sadistic in their depictions across the known world, the cast of the deity's clergy and most fervent devotees tends to be somewhat grim. It is the only known cult in which self-flagellation is a competitive sport, and the 'self' part is often omitted.

Even so, the god's focus lends its followers a keen understanding of the bodies of living things, and the myriad problems and ailments that can befall them. While they may approach infirmity with more spiritual glee than more mundane healers, the priests and surgeons instructed in the ways of Najis are often skilled and sought-after doctors all across the Basin. Sought-after, but not necessarily wanted- one of the more infamous pieces of commonly known Najisi stricture is the forbiddance of any and all anesthetics during procedures: pain is life, and so the absence of pain is an abominable miniature death.¹

The most (in)famous of these healers are the Pain-Tasters.

Barber Surgeon (Zweihander RPG)
Dejan Mandic

While their name is a bit too on-the-nose, their expertise is remarkable regardless of whether you have a high or dim opinion of the order as a whole. The Pain-Tasters are alumni of the highly prestigious and highly secretive Sodality of the Blissful Scourging, a medical school and seminary in Serminwurth with another extremely on-the-nose name.

The Sodality is open only to Najisites of demonstrable faith and fervor, and the vast majority of students already have successful medical careers prior to their induction. Students are forbidden to leave the school until they have either dropped out or completed their training, which is a process that can take up to a decade or more. More than one disappearance or suspected murder in the city has been explained by a new entry to the Sodality simply forgetting to alert every relevant party in their life of their aspirations before cloistering.

Most students do not complete their training. The isolation, coupled with rigorous daily schedules and study regimens that blur the material with the arcane, can lead many to burn out within their first year or two. Surprisingly, these dropouts are often allowed to leave and resume their lives in the outside world, though they all share some dismay when they wake up and find that much of the knowledge they acquired at the school has been obliterated by an as-of-yet unknown agent--possibly a potent and specialized drug--employed by the school.²

Because of these measures, very little slips out about what actually goes into training a Pain-Taster, and its members are quite tight-lipped about it. It doubtless involves mastery of any and all bleeding-edge knowledge and technology of medicine, as well as liberal addition to the 'bleeding' side. It is also possible that they undergo a series of inoculations against any diseases they could conceivably encounter during their practice: Pain-Tasters are well known for how fearlessly they throw themselves into highly contagious situations, yet rarely ever seem to grow sick themselves.

The rumor that the government of Serminwurth hands certain condemned criminals over to the Sodality for clandestine vivisections is unsubstantiated, but it would surprise absolutely no one if it came to light as truth. They possess insights into the physiology of humans and many other living things that could only be obtained through intimate familiarity.

Once a Pain-Taster has graduated from the Sodality and donned their ceremonial mantle of knives and needles, they have a wealth of options available to them. Most hospitals in any given area will accept them outright- if not as full-fledged members of their staff, then at least as advisors and specialists kept at a cordial arm's length. They may emphasize their religious training and become members of the formal religious hierarchy. Or, they go wandering in search of new avenues and methods of practice.

Some of the best details on Pain-Tasters outside of Serminwurth have been recorded in Deneroth, where a permanent office for one has been in place ever since the founding of the city by Laizij. Here, a senior Pain-Taster operates out of a small Najisi shrine that has nonetheless been granted the flattering title of "basilica". This taster acts as the personal doctor for the city's Steward, as well as the Directorate of Ivory Tower University.

The voluminous notes taken at the latter location has teased out many details about Pain-Tasters over the centuries, much to the chagrin of the Sodality. But in the interest of maintaining the relationship between the two cities, Serminwurth does not object to these incidental gleanings.

Foremost among the abilities of a Pain-Taster is their skill at diagnosis. This is where their name comes in, and they live up to it every bit. They can reportedly see, smell, feel, or occasionally even taste the onset of an illness hours or days before visible symptoms appear in a patient.

They can identify broken bones or ruptured arteries at a glance, and even make educated guesses at the exact breed of parasite infesting someone based on the 'look' of their eyeballs or the smell of their bodily waste. They operate on the threshold where preventative medicine is no longer possible, and treatment and pain are the only paths forward- precisely as Najis would will it. Their senses seem to have been honed by years of study and memorization of subtle cues coupled with experience, but something about it is downright preternatural.

Just as they are skilled in determining what will happen, they are unerringly accurate with what has happened. Pain-Tasters can act as coroners, able to detect even subtle causes of death some time after the event, at least so long as the cadaver has not undergone considerable putrefaction. The most famous instance of this comes again from Denerothi records, in which the senior Pain-Taster of the basilica determined the cause of death of Laizij.

The rumor that had spread like wildfire upon the discovery of the Eternal Scholar's body was that he had been poisoned, or smote by black magic conjured by everyone's favorite scapegoats, the followers of Dherna. The taster was able to determine quite confidently that he had died of blockage related to a truly prodigious collection of gallstones. The taster reportedly came to suspect this after ingesting a piece of Laizij's raw, jaundiced skin. After the requisite amount of bureaucracy was waded through to receive a permit to perform an invasive examination, the gallstones were found. 

The chronicle then takes an extensive sidetrack relating the legend of how these stones were inscribed with motes of wisdom that were then sought after or scattered with the winds, in good Denerothi fashion. But the procedure itself is corroborated in similar cases elsewhere, adding to the Pain-Tasters' lengthy list of qualifications for everyone else's reluctant respect.

¹ To say nothing of the fact that one common depiction of the afterlife in the inner esoteric circles of Najis-worshipers is a perfect perpetuation of life-affirming, exhilarating pain via stabs and scrapes.

² This memory erasure does not appear to be flawless, however. Mersind, once an aspiring biologist and anatomist of Serminwurth, was expelled after breaking some sort of grave taboo during his second year at the Sodality. Yet descriptions of the pale, enigmatic man suggest that he fled the city with his memories of the school almost fully intact a decade and a half ago. Ever since then, his former colleagues have been keenly interested in returning him for examination, and to put a stop to his more well-known excesses (while also seizing all of his collected data for their own research).

The God of Dust

((In honor of World Rat Day, which is apparently a real thing, I thought I'd slightly tweak and then finally implement a little idea I came up with a long time ago.))

 

"Three garbs have We- dust, cobwebs, and skin of flea. Long is Our tooth, for we hide from the blinding torches of truth."
- A snatch of skitterrhyme scrawled above a waste receptacle slot in the Basilica of the Blissful Calculation (Dormitory #12).

"[...] Lastly, all members of the Dutiful Staff and Most Enlightened Faculty are encouraged to remain alert, as you doubtless have been without need for admonishment nor reminder, of the traces of queer murine totemism which have of late infiltrated the Lower Colleges..."
- Agendum 261, CMOE DIX.

"Is this what the kids are into these days? Inventing gods? Incorrigible."
- Senior Editor Onsaro Adelbramp; Provost of the Board for Historical Ordination, Associate Vice-Dean of Affairs for ITU Publishing, and clueless old dodderer.



The Ivory Tower University, despite its pledge to pursue universal "truth" is not exempt from creating its own myths, folklore, and an urban legendarium murky and tantalizing enough to keep even the most exhausted undergraduate study groups riveted during cramming season¹. There is nothing wrong with myth-making by itself. In fact, I would consider it something of a sign of a healthy community- it means that their society is still thinking, dreaming, and being creative. However, certain myths sometimes lead one to wonder just what in the world that community was dreaming about when it thought them up.

A favorite example of mine is the God of Dust & Lost Things, popular among the residents of the Lower Colleges. The God of Dust is, when dignified with the attention of our resident theogonists, designated as a "small" god- both figuratively and literally speaking.

Its influence is said to be limited to the area in and around the ITU campuses, though some especially smitten young students claim that its reach even extends into the lower city and the world beyond. It exists where dust, dead insect husks, shed skin cells, and other detritus of the ages accumulate, dwelling in shady corners and forgotten storage rooms. When it takes a physical form, it is said to be fond of appearing as a small black rat with a skeletal head and tail. In this form, it finds and steals away any small, half-interesting item which anyone has ever lost. The god's warren somewhere deep below the university is said to be snarled with enormous stacks of knickknacks, bits and bobs, odds and ends, and a veritable ocean of lost change in denominations that are no longer recognizable, let alone acceptable as legal tender.

The god is lonesome, but not lonely. It has no altars, no priests, and no proper worshipers. Only the occasional undergraduate gives lip-service and offerings to it in the desperate hope that it will bring back some item which they have lost. This is done by leaving another item of minimal but equal value in a small, dark corner somewhere and then returning to the spot a few days later. The desired item is rarely left in its place, if any at all is given. It is unclear if the god has difficulty understanding human reasoning, or if some bored individual makes the rounds at night, looting places where the skeletal rat is believed to dwell. Sometimes it does seem to work, however, and this serves to reinforce a less-than-joking belief in Ol' Dusty. Rough, sketchy, and discreet images of rat skulls denote popular sites of invocation across campus.

One side effect of the playful, surreptitious "veneration" of the god among young undergraduates is the proliferation of a form of poetry known as Skitterrhyme. Skitterrhyme was originally a type of praise poetry directed at the God of Dust. The earliest recorded ones jokingly extol its "virtues" such as doing absolutely nothing with its massive yet useless hoard, or boring holes in the walls to keep tired academics awake at night. They displayed an extremely rudimentary rhyme scheme and virtually nonexistent meter, but over time the arrhythmic style became more sophisticated and mathematical. The words themselves also began to be coded with meaning, until finally the staccato hymns began to be used to gossip and share secret messages in public. There are about a dozen different cyphers for skitterrhyme today, spread out across the various dormitory houses of the ITU.

A popular story is that the god presides over an entire court of lost and little things, some of which could be the cast-off remnants of other, forgotten gods.

It is both the creator and ruler of a race of animated dust bunnies, who hold the god in distant reverence while going about their lives collecting dander and evading the brooms of the indefatigable but woefully underfunded Custodial Corps, which is often the butt of jokes among the student body- and the faculty, for that matter. The dust bunnies are believed to know the secret of how to summon and gain the permanent favor of the god, but none have ever been found living to question.

The ultimate enemy of the God of Dust is said to be a great, desiccated sparrow corpse which was reanimated by the spirit of the wind, to blow all dust away forever. Sparrows, alongside squirrels, are a ubiquitous and often very annoying sight around the university, so it is somewhat of a natural antagonist to set against this strange underdog.

The earliest attested references to the God of Dust & Lost Things is from an encyclical reminding members of the university staff and faculty to report any and all instances of skitterrhyme or unsanctioned and/or ironic religiosity to the old Committee for Mythological Ordination. This encyclical was published a few years before the committee was disbanded in the wake of Article 921, which de-problematized certain rites in the interest of expanding minority religious freedom on campus. Because this publication dealt with an informal belief in or at least playful acceptance of the God of Dust which was so entrenched in the Lower Colleges that the excruciatingly blind upper councils took note of it, it is safe to assume that the god had existed for at least a few decades before that point, placing its origin as far back as one hundred and fifty years in the past, at the time of this writing.

I personally suspect that the legend was created, or at least greatly contributed to, by our small but consistent body of exchange students from Serminwurth. While it is presumptuous of me, I can think of no other city that affords such respect to the rat without trying to ascribe any sort of lofty, unrealistic ideals to it.



¹ Which is to say, all semester ever semester.

Hope is a Rat.

In the early morning of the fourth day in which we camped at the roadside during our gradual procession south, several of the draft animals were startled from where they had been improperly tethered, promptly running away. According to one of our guides, the upset had been caused by one of the ornery mustelids of the region stumbling into the animal area and attacking a workhorse. It was seen snarling and clinging to the animal's flank even as it galloped out of the area.

Fortunately however, no lasting damage was dealt to any of the panicked animals, they were all rounded up, and almost no more was seen of the badgering marten. The good fortune did not extend to Ciudo, however. Our linguist was one of the volunteers who went out in search of the animals--or more accurately, to be used as a blundering sheep dog meant to scare them back into the arms of their handlers--and while doing this, he apparently encountered the animal, which bit him. As he shook it off, he stumbled back and fell off of the sheer side of a short knoll and cut his shoulder up on the way down.

He wished to shrug the injury off when he returned to camp, I think because he was already considerably embarrassed by his behavior and treatment over the past few days of our expedition. I can sympathize with the feeling, and I should keep in mind not to coddle or patronize him. But Sarq insisted on making a full examination of the wounds and cleaning them up accordingly, having come to take his role very seriously.

It was routine, and the injury would not be harmful, I am happy to say, but Ciudo complained when Sarq insisted on washing the cuts out with one of the liquids given to him by Elrusyo. He remarked that it seemed entirely pointless except to make the cuts hurt more, and burn. Sarq explained that it was indeed unpleasant, but that it was necessary to the prevention of infection.

Ciudo and a few others began to give Sarq a look now like he was suddenly talking about esoteric ritual, but I vouched for him by stating that an increasingly popular theory nowadays was that inflammation, fevers, or disease can take hold when their motes enter a body through any opening, cuts included. I explained that this was the latest learning to be accepted by the ITU, after having disseminated from Serminwurth over the past several decades. My intention was to add an air of authority to the theory by dropping that name, but it only seemed to increase Ciudo's incredulity.

He remarked that it did sound like something from Serminwurth- macabre, hopeless, and wealthy in new ways that you can die or be killed.

And while I cannot entirely disagree with that sentiment, given the genuinely reprehensible actions of certain alumni of the city's less ethical colleges, I did tell Ciudo that the people of that city can be very passionate and hopeful at times.

Hope in Serminwurth, I explained to him, is a rat.

You can find rats everywhere in that labyrinthine city, particularly on the streets of the ground-level where the poor tend to dwell. But they live in all districts and at all heights of the dark grey city, sometimes without much molest so long as their numbers are within a prescribed "safe" range. Food is even tossed to them in and around areas dominated by statues of rats.

The city owes its independence to those scrabbling heroes, after all.

Once upon a time, in the early years of the Haraalian succession wars, Serminwurth--as the westernmost center of the empire--came under the hegemony of a particularly infamous grandson of the Ersuunian god-chieftain. He was a man named Seddah, and he was known for his ruthlessness on the battlefield, as well as general cruelty off of it. His army was comprised of personally loyal elements of the now thoroughly divided and decimated imperial army, as well as mercenaries and bandits, or former soldiers who had turned to brigandage before being welcomed into Seddah's somewhat morally lax chain of command. While the old guard liked to put on airs that Seddah was going to eventually expand and save the empire from itself, it seems more likely in hindsight that he was just staking his own claim while the world burned.

The army besieged Serminwurth after negotiations broke down between it and the governing body of the city. The siege was protracted, lasting between six and nine months depending on the source referencing it. It had been somewhat of a hopeless one from the start, because the army's encirclement and the city's lack of allies in that harsh time meant that supplies would not be coming. But it the effort had been made because it was possible--almost likely--that another roving group of successors would pass through in the interim and dislodge or disrupt Seddah enough for the city to repulse what was left. Such a thing had happened in Meroth two years earlier, when Rhotil the Last swept in from the north with an enormous cavalry army and drive his half-brother Olfeer southeast. Rhotil continued to pursue the other army south past the borders of the empire, eventually resulting in the Avalanche of Raan and all of its hilarious comeuppances, leaving Meroth relatively unscathed.

Fortune did not favor Serminwurth, however. Food and water dwindling, the governor eventually renegotiated with Seddah and opened the gates to the army to prevent the wholesale slaughter and sack of his people and city. To Seddah's credit, the slaughter and sack which did follow was restrained, and relatively in line with all of the other violence occurring in that time.

The horsemen marched in on top of the bound body of the governor as they entered the city in a classic expression of victory, slowly rendering him a pink stain across the cobblestones of the city's gate-street. Today you can still see a long line of rosy cobblestones adding a splash of color to the dour streets, though contrary to popular belief these were put in place specifically as a memorial to the man and others who died during the occupation.

The people of Serminwurth simply had to endure this at the time. Food grew scarcer, the wealth of the city was seized, and the compromised bodies of those who had survived the siege were now faced with an outbreak of diseases, chief of which was Nambarish Pox.

The disease is not in any way identifiable as Nambarish- the name merely comes from the coloration of the blotches, spots, and welts formed on the body of a person infected by the pox, which are supposedly similar to some of the small, rindy citrus fruits grown in east-central Nambar to the west.

The pox is transferable through a distressingly wide range of vectors, but the one most commonly remembered today is by contact with rats who carry it. The disease appears to be endemic to the area in and around Serminwurth, because the people of that city were quite used to it, and had adopted ways of combating the disease. A particularly creative servant of Najis is credited as having developed the local form of inoculation, in which the spittle of the ill was collected, boiled, diluted, and then poured into a cut in an otherwise healthy individual to force them to face and overcome a less severe form of the pox.

Here, Sarq interrupted to assure Ciudo that this was not what he had been washing his wounds with. The group laughed, uneasily.

To those with no access to what was considered at the time (though still somewhat today) an insane procedure, they simply endured to the point that their descendants developed something of a resistance to the disease. Outsiders, on the other hand, were highly vulnerable, and experienced the full gamut of symptoms which could often result in fever, coma, and death.

When the pox again flared up in the occupied city, its population did nothing to halt it.

And then, the people worked to deliberately propagate it.

Rats began to be caught and bred, ostensibly as food for the starving masses, but in secret to infect them with the pox, which was harmless to the rat and did not even manifest in the animal, and then to release them into the portions of the city most heavily populated by Seddah's soldiery. When the higher ranking members of the army demanded treatment of the local doctors, the surgeons and herbalists dressed their cures up in pomp and mystic circumstance, all while ensuring that the infected material introduced to the officers was not diluted or treated in the slightest. Many ended up being beheaded when their wards grew sick and died, but they reportedly walked up to the chopping blocks content with the damage they'd done to their oppressors.

Eventually the army grew sick and disorganized enough that a general revolt became possible, and the dour city-dwellers pushed them out of Serminwurth. There is no official record of Seddah's death, but there is no shortage of possibilities offered up by the city's culture today. One popular play focused on the end of the occupation involves a pit of rats, and an apocryphal torture device obliquely referred to as a "juicer".

The city was slow to recover, and to the reckoning of some--particularly the elite in Deneroth--it still has not reached the height it once occupied. But the people had reclaimed their self-determination, and almost as a side effect their academics developed the practical knowledge they'd gained from the weaponized disease to inform many future medical discoveries and innovations.

Hope is a rat in Serminwurth. Never truly dying no matter how hard you might try to root out all of its nests and warrens, always demanding attention in the back of your head with its constant scampering and gnawing. And, if you're not careful, its stinging bite can infect you with the drive to overcome all hardships.

Or a horrible inflammatory disease.

One of the two.