The School of War

A god who asks for the swing¶

Ragundiazal is called the Thousand Blades, and what separates him from every other war god in Valdrin is what he does not want.

He does not want the dead. He does not want plunder, or a tithe of the spoil, or a temple raised out of enemy stone. He wants the act. Flesh is tested, courage is tempered, weakness is crushed beneath the march of steel, and the moment of the blow is itself the prayer. What becomes of the body afterward does not interest him in the slightest, which is how the School of War and Verdantism can share a battlefield without sharing a single word of doctrine.

The consequence outsiders choke on is the one the faithful find most obvious. Every death proves the strength of the faithful. Every death, including yours, including your brother's, including the whole of a broken line that held four hours longer than anyone had a right to ask. A Ragundian funeral is not mourning. It is a citation.

The battle-priests¶

The clergy are battle-priests and they fight. Not symbolically, not at the rear beside a standard: in the line, with everyone else, on the principle that a priest who has not been hit this year has nothing to say.

They are also, and this surprises people, the finest military instructors in Valdrin. The faith grants that blades bow to duty and no gold binds them, which in practice means Ragundian soldiery serves without wages and retires without a pension, and no Ragundian state has ever had to argue about the cost of keeping men under arms. It is the cheapest army in the world, and the reason there is always one standing.

Two peoples, one god, and an argument about who found him¶

The School is the state creed of the Sahid Empire, where it is disciplined, administrative and taught in war colleges, and of the Gorehorn Clan, where it is none of those things.

The Sahid say they carried Ragundiazal to the savannah. The herds say the savannah already had him. Sahid doctrine now agrees with the herds, having lost three armies to them and having nowhere else to file the loss, and holds that the minotaur is the Thousand Blades' own handiwork rather than a convert. That is why battle-priests go on pilgrimage to a people who buried three of their expeditions, and why the Crown has never been entirely comfortable with its own church.

Living beside it¶

A Ragundian population is the least expensive and least manageable garrison you will ever be given. They will fight for you unpaid, and they will not stop fighting because you have stopped wanting them to. The faith has no doctrine of surrender, not out of conviction but out of disinterest: a surrender is a moment in which nothing is being tested, so it was simply never covered.

Their holy days are Bladefeast and the March of Ragundiazal. On both, expect duels in your streets, fought by mutual consent under rules your watch does not know, producing injuries your surgeons must treat and grievances your magistrates cannot hear, because both parties consider the matter closed and correctly handled.