Aškari Cults
In an Aškari shrine, no god speaks from the sky. A black stone face is wiped with oil, water is poured across the threshold, the first coin of the market is left behind, and the door opens. For that day, the city accepts that its guardian is still present.
Aškari is not the name of one god, one book, or a closed pantheon. It is the broad term historians derived from aškar, a word in old human languages. An aškar may be a carved stone, a beaten metal face, a wooden post, a ceremonial mask, a ship’s prow, or a threshold opened only on certain nights. Most believers do not call the object itself a god. With proper care, words, and offerings, it is a face in which a power may dwell.
That makes Aškari confusing to outsiders. A face that guards bridges in one city may be a minor road power or a watcher of debt in another. It is not even certain that two aškars bearing the same name open onto the same being. Their shared claim is not that every city knows the same gods, but that no city stands through stone, tax, and soldiers alone.
What an aškar does
An aškar’s power is measured by the life in which it is placed. Harbour faces may watch the return route, grain stones the hungry season, bath stones sickness, and grave thresholds forgotten debts. A household aškar may protect the safety of a guest, while the quarter aškar decides who is expected to take responsibility when fire, violence, or a broken water line reaches the street.
The relation is not one-sided. “Feeding” an aškar does not mean sacrifice alone: keeping its face clean, speaking its name properly, keeping a promise made beneath it, opening the market on its feast day, or closing its door during mourning are all forms of care. Some say a neglected aškar becomes angry and brings disaster. More cautious Aškari say disaster follows when people abandon responsibility to one another.
Taking a city’s god hostage
In the ages of conquest, the worst insult was not to break a city gate but to remove its aškar. When an army carried the black stone to its own capital, it said: “Your guardian now stands at our threshold.” It served at once as war plunder, religious humiliation, and political hostage-taking.
Moving the stone does not necessarily move the god. Defeated peoples often insist that only the shell was stolen, while the true face remained in a well bottom, an old furnace, or public memory. A returned aškar therefore does not automatically make peace. One city may treat it as the sign of independence; another may refuse the return rite because “the face abandoned us.”
The law of an Aškari shrine is built around this fragility. Does a marriage, debt, labour bond, or refuge oath made beneath an aškar remain binding once the object is stolen? Some cities preserve the place of the oath; others say its witness has been lost. Even now, in quarters emerging from occupation, this is as much a dispute over property and citizenship as it is over a shrine.
Not a priesthood, a network of care
Some Aškari communities have powerful shrine houses and trained rite leaders. In others, a face is tended by an elderly neighbour, a few craftspeople, and the children who clean its step. There is no single clerical ladder shared by all Aškari.
Several roles do recur:
- Threshold keepers know who may claim sanctuary and which promises may be made at a shrine door.
- Face-workers maintain metal, stone, wood, and masks; theirs is craft as much as memory work.
- Offering scribes record small debts, shared costs, and unfulfilled promises rather than only grand gifts.
- Voice-bearers carry a community’s petition to the aškar in feast or crisis. Some understand this as trance, others as trained rhetoric, and others as quarter representation.
This distributed structure makes Aškari durable. Closing a great shrine does not end it; a face may pass to a household hearth, a caravan chest, or a new street made by migrants. The same structure can hide abuse. A keeper may sell sanctuary, or a family may claim that its own aškar speaks for an entire quarter.
Whose faith?
Aškari is no people’s birthright. Humans, Halflings, Orcs, Gnomes, Tieflings, and others can leave offerings at the same face; a person may do so while following another faith. In Aškari practice, “conversion” is often less a declaration of belief than an acceptance of a particular city’s burdens.
Yet sources show that Aškari remained especially strong among enslaved people, debt-bound workers, displaced communities, and people pushed beyond formal institutions. That does not mean those communities are naturally suited to one faith. A great state can expel a quarter from its register, army, or inheritance law; it cannot as easily dismantle the reciprocal care held before a face at the door. That network carries safety, news, and mutual aid.
States therefore treat Aškari shrines differently. Some license them, bind their feasts to markets, and tax their offerings. Others treat unregistered faces as seeds of revolt. For Veyran record law, the question is often not “Is the god real?” but which ground, money, and people a shrine may speak for.
Marks left in history
Carried Faces
In the Eight Giants period, taking city aškars became part of the language of conquest. As slave networks grew, carried faces spread to ports and colonies.
Shrine Registers
The four human empires tried to classify, license, and tax city cults rather than erase them. In Valois, this became one of assimilation’s most contested tools.
The Return of Lost Faces
Closed routes and fallen centres left many communities without their objects. Some reclaimed old aškars; others made a new face from ash, mask, or a carried name.
Quarter Shrines
In the small cities of the Age of Crowns, Aškari feast days joined market, truce, funeral, and debt law. A town could split over who spoke for its shrine.
Present conflicts
The harshest dispute in the Aškari world is who owns an old face. A stone sold at auction, a mask in a state museum, a post in a noble garden, or a metal face in a trade guild’s strongbox may not be mere art or plunder. A quarter may demand its return. Another community may say that its carriers have made it theirs over generations. A third may fear that its return would also revive an old order of caste, debt, or property.
For this reason Aškari is not a “religion of the past.” Its smallest rite makes a claim about the present: who may use this street, who may draw from this well, whose name may be read at this grave, and what truly protects a city once it stops caring for its guardian.
Open doors for play
- A free city announces that its aškar, stolen centuries ago, has returned. The caravan that brought it insists the stone has guarded its own quarter for a hundred years.
- A Veyran official finds remarkably low hunger and crime around an unregistered shrine. The state wants to recognize it; the quarter thinks recognition would kill the face.
- An old imperial storehouse yields hundreds of small metal faces. Each may be a lost city aškar; some are false, some are still homes to something, and some do not wish to return.