The Way of Return

Overview

The Way of Return is the organized religion of the Thaluren and their civilization, the Returning Concord. It is the only organized religion on Caeldon with no god at its centre.

Its question is whether a return is rightful. Its teaching is the old rule of return: remembered run-lines, holy spawning waters, ascent seen and remembered by the run, and the care of vulnerable eggs and hatchlings. Its pilgrimage is the return run itself, a journey of hundreds of leagues past weirs, poachers' nets, and the grey run-followers that gather off the estuary mouths, and its holy places are the return-waters.

The faith is as old as the Concord's sacred custom. It took its godless form during The Closure of the First Nesting Confluence (c. 178,000-c. 162,000 BR).

A Faith Without a God

The Thaluren once prayed to a god. When egg blight struck their oldest spawning water, they called on Ulaun the Stilled Hour for stillness, and the stillness she gave held their clutches in a prison that could never hatch. When she faded, the faith that survived kept the rule of return and refused the god.

Thaluren do not deny that gods exist. They hold that the return-waters must not be entrusted to one, because a god can be asked for the water to stop, and the run cannot. Gods may be respected in other peoples' waters; they are not invoked over spawning. A stranger caught praying over a Thaluren spawning ground is driven off, and some have not lived to be driven.

Keepers of the Way

The Way needs no separate priesthood. Its keepers are the Concord's own offices, described on the Returning Concord page, held as sacred: Run-Watchers who say whose ascent is rightful, Sanctuary Custodians who keep the spawning grounds, Clutch-Watch Circles who say whose clutch is kin, and Sea-Settlement Speakers who hold sea life to the old spawning rules. To serve in any of them is to serve the Way.

Custody and Open Run

The Way divided over the closure into the two wings it still has.

• The Blightward Keepers hold that damaged sacred waters must be kept faithfully, contained, remembered, and never abandoned, even when they can no longer be used.
• The Open-Run Concords hold that a rightful return may be redirected to alternate waters, provided memory-debt is carried towards the damaged source.

Each regards the other as keeping the Way imperfectly. Their quarrels end, when they end at all, not by revelation but by whichever wing holds the water and can keep the other out by force, as in The Second-Channel Feud.

The Run as Pilgrimage

Escort-heroes. Every run has its escorts, and the Way honours them as other faiths honour martyrs. Thaluren laments name the escort who held a narrows against a Blightward band in the Second-Channel Feud, and every escort since has sworn at the estuary mouth to hold the run's back against shark, net, and spear. Young Thaluren learn to count a run's dangers in a rhyme: the grey ones at the mouth, the weir-men's nets, the long-jaw in the weed, and the still water at the end.

Pearls and poachers. The blighted clutches of the First Nesting Confluence left pearls in the silt, and every poacher on the rivers has heard of them. Blightward custodians kill trespassers at the water and leave them in the shallows; pearls still turn up in corridor markets, and the Way counts every one a clutch robbed twice. Thaluren who find such a pearl on a Human neck have been known to follow its wearer for a season. Corridor treasure-sellers have learned to say a pearl came from the sea.

Place in Medieval Life

For Thaluren the Way is present in every crossing between sea and river, every clutch counted as kin, and every argument about who may ascend where. Other peoples often fail to see it as a religion at all, because nothing is prayed to. Thaluren regard that as the point.

Its encounters with other faiths are mostly about water. Kavari nursery-waters and Gnome harbour custom both meet the Way where its return-waters cross theirs, and the Way answers each of them in the language of rightful return rather than of competing gods. Its gravest fear lies on the far current roads, where the Unreturned, runs that never came home, keep pace with the living, and the Way has no rite to give them.

Tensions

• No voice above the offices. The Way's keepers are four offices, and nothing stands above them.
• Honour that begins to ask. The deep-witnesses are honoured without being prayed to, and the honour asks nothing of them.
• Gods on the current roads. The Way forbids invoking a god over spawning, not over the sea.