Verdantism

The hunger beneath the grass¶

Outsiders hear nature faith and picture something mild. Verdantism is not mild. It is the observation that the ground eats, made into a religion by people who declined to look away from it.

Hymephie is the Green Maw. She devours the weak and feeds the worthy on the corpses of the fallen, and the cycle of rot and bloom is not her method but her actual body. Everything that grows is standing on something that failed. A field is not a gift and it is not a partnership. It is a mouth that has been fed, and it yields in proportion to what went into it.

The doctrine that follows is simple and completely unsentimental. Life is not precious. Life is owed. The weak are the meal of the worthy, a field fed properly will feed you back, and none of this is cruel, because none of it was ever otherwise.

Bone gardens¶

The clergy are druids, and their work is agricultural before it is spiritual, which is to say there is no difference.

Every Hymephian community keeps a bone garden. It is exactly what the name says: a walled plot, worked for generations, in which the dead are put down among the crops rather than away from them. The oldest gardens are the most fertile and the most valuable thing the community owns. A druid can tell you which quarter holds which century and what grew best above each of them, and she keeps that written down because it is useful, not because it is holy.

Nothing about the work is done with relish. That is the detail every outside account gets wrong. A druid handling a body is doing a job of quiet, exhausting care, on the reasoning that the dead have one last usefulness in them and wasting it would be the actual disrespect.

The same faith in four different mouths¶

Verdantism is the most widely held creed in Valdrin and the one that looks least alike from place to place.

Among the Goetern it is domestic and restrained, the faith of careful farmers who take life only when there is reason to, and it sits inside the gentlest people in the world without a flicker of friction.

Among the elves it is aesthetic and enormously long term. An Eldrin glade is a bone garden on a scale of centuries, and elves who tend one are not being ironic.

Among the giants it is geological, a matter of pressure and deposit, and the Concord argues about when ground becomes consecrated in units of decades.

And among the minotaurs it was the original faith of the herds, until the School of War offered them a god who wanted the swing itself rather than the meat afterward. That is the only large defection Verdantism has ever suffered, and the druids of the savannah still speak of it as a theft.

Living beside it¶

Hymephians are the best farmers you will ever hire, and they want one thing in return that no charter anticipates: the right to bury their dead in ground of their own choosing, and to go on working it.

Refuse and you will not get a protest. You will get a slow, immovable, entirely polite decline in everything the fields produce, and no druid will ever concede that the two facts are related.