Sunday, 29 September 2024

A Saint for the Hole

I have found a suitable Saint for Seclusion. I figured it ought to be a hermit, someone who enjoyed seclusion. This might resonate also with the ones calling our wormhole colony home.

Saint Vasrayi the Anchorite lived with his parents in a garrison town in Southern Ves-Udor during the reclaiming of Athra. Fortunes turned against Amarr and the town was overrun by a pagan army. His parents were killed, and Vasrayi fled into the great interior desert, taking with him only a book of prayers. He found a cave, at the desert's edge, in the foothills of the ancient mountain range of Satach's Spite. He lived alone there from the age of ten to the age of one hundred and thirteen years old. 

In the cave, there was a clear spring, and near his hermitage there was also a palm tree. Its leaves provided him clothing, and its fruit provided him with the only source of food until his forty-second birthday. Then, a golden eagle started bringing him half a loaf of bread daily. 

From time to time, people made the difficult trek through the desert to visit the Saint, and asked him for advice or answers to existential questions. The first visitor to reach his cave and find out about Saint Vasrayi was a cleric who asked him what he learned from being all this time alone in the desert. Saint Vasrayi answered: "No matter how far in the desert you think you are, there is always someone who finds you". This is typical for the sayings of this Saint: they are at the same time seemingly trivial remarks about what is literally happening, and a deep allegorical wisdom. I think this one can also be applied as a warning to people who think they are safely cloaked in Anoikis...

The particular item of worship that I found in the rent-a-relic catalogue is a sleeve of the palm leaf robe of Saint Vasrayi. I have filed the application (in triplicate) at the Bureau of Outer Rim Consecrations. I'm also ordering a beautiful reliquary to put it on display in Pilrim's Rest chapel.