Origins of the failth
Aelthir, the Keeper of the Eternal Song
Intermediate Deity
Titles: The Eternal Scholar, Keeper of the First Song, Lord of Lore, The Remembered Voice
Symbol: An open book whose pages form the strings of a silver harp
Alignment: Neutral Good
Portfolio: Knowledge, music, memory, history, inspiration, teaching
Domains: Good, Knowledge, Magic, Music*, Rune
Favored Weapon: Rapier
Worshipers: Bards, scholars, wizards, historians, teachers, scribes, musicians, explorers
Cleric Alignments: CG, LG, NG, N
Holy Day: The First Verse
Aelthir
"What is written may burn. What is built may fall. But teach a song to a thousand voices, and truth becomes very difficult to kill."
Aelthir is the god of knowledge given voice. He teaches that knowledge has little value when hoarded and that the greatest purpose of learning is to pass understanding from one generation to the next.
To Aelthir, music is knowledge made immortal.
His priests preserve libraries and ancient manuscripts, but they place equal importance upon stories, songs, poems, oral histories, and even tavern ballads. A seemingly foolish children's rhyme might contain the distorted memory of a kingdom destroyed three thousand years ago.
Aelthir is usually depicted as a slender, ageless man with silver-white hair and robes covered in constantly shifting musical notation. He carries an ancient harp called The First Instrument and a weathered book known as The Unfinished Chronicle.
Curiously, neither is ever depicted as complete. The harp always possesses an empty place for another string, while the final page of the Chronicle is always blank.
Aelthir teaches that this represents a simple truth:
There is always another song to sing and something more to learn.
Dogma
Seek knowledge, but do not merely collect it.
Question what you are told. Study the past. Listen to those who remember what books have forgotten. Record discoveries and teach what you have learned.
Music is among the greatest vessels of memory. A library may be destroyed by a single torch, but a song carried by travelers can cross oceans and survive the fall of empires.
Never intentionally destroy knowledge unless its continued existence presents a grave danger to others.
A teacher who gives knowledge freely performs a sacred act.
A student who asks a difficult question honors Aelthir more than one who simply memorizes the answer.
The Church
Temples of Aelthir are known as **Halls of the Eternal Verse.
They are usually part library, part school, and part performance hall. Even small shrines maintain collections of books, maps, musical instruments, and local histories.
Silence is rarely required.
Visitors might hear a lecturer debating philosophy in one room while musicians rehearse in another. Scribes copy manuscripts beside traveling adventurers recounting discoveries to temple historians.
The clergy actively seek lost knowledge.
Priests frequently accompany adventuring parties exploring ruins, forgotten civilizations, ancient tombs, or unexplored lands. Their purpose is not merely to recover treasure but to ensure that whatever is discovered becomes known.
Clergy
Priests of Aelthir are called Cantors.
Higher-ranking priests are known as Lorekeepers, while the leaders of major temples bear the title Grand Cantor.
Many Cantors multiclass as bards, wizards, archivists, or loremasters.
Every Cantor is expected to master at least one musical instrument and maintain a personal Book of Verses. Within it they record discoveries, stories, spells, songs, maps, riddles, and unusual pieces of information encountered during their travels.
When a Cantor dies, their Book of Verses is returned to the nearest temple and added to its archives.
Thus some temples possess thousands of journals written by adventuring priests over centuries.
Religious Practices
The First Verse
Aelthir's principal holy day occurs on the first day of spring.
At sunrise, temples open their doors and musicians begin playing. The performance continues without interruption until midnight.
Anyone may participate.
Between performances, scholars publicly announce discoveries made during the previous year.
The Last Song
When a follower of Aelthir dies, those who knew them gather and compose a short song describing something worth remembering about their life.
The song does not need to be beautiful.
It only needs to be remembered.
The Offering of Knowledge
Aelthir's temples rarely demand monetary offerings.
Instead, visitors are encouraged to contribute something the temple does not already know.
This might be a copied manuscript, an unexplored map, a new spell, a family recipe, a foreign song, the location of forgotten ruins, or even a particularly good joke from a distant land.
The Eternal Chorus
Followers believe that every meaningful song ever performed leaves a faint echo upon the planes.
Together these echoes form the Eternal Chorus, an incomprehensibly vast composition containing fragments of the memories of countless civilizations.
According to legend, Aelthir can hear the entire Chorus at once.
His most powerful prophets sometimes hear tiny portions of it in dreams.
Such visions have revealed lost cities, forgotten names, ancient spells, and warnings of events yet to occur.
There is, however, one disturbing teaching whispered among the highest Lorekeepers:
Someone has begun removing verses from the Eternal Chorus.
Songs once remembered by thousands have simply vanished.
And even Aelthir does not know who—or what—is responsible.
Music Domain
Granted Power: You gain Perform as a class skill. You receive a +2 sacred bonus on Perform checks involving one musical instrument of your choice.
| Spell Level | Domain Spell |
|---|---|
1st | ventriloquism |
2nd | sound burst |
3rd | sculpt sound |
4th | shout |
5th | song of discord |
6th | greater shout |
7th | legend lore |
8th | greater planar ally |
9th | foresight |
Aphorisms of Aelthir
Common sayings among his followers include:
- "Listen before you speak; someone may know the next verse."
- "A forgotten lesson must be learned twice."
- "Write what you discover. Sing what must never be forgotten."
- "Ignorance is forgivable. Willful ignorance is not."
- "Every ruin was once someone's home."
- "The wisest scholar still has something to learn from a tavern song."
Perhaps the most famous teaching of Aelthir is carved above the entrance to his oldest known temple:
Knowledge kept by one mind dies with one mind.
Knowledge shared becomes eternal.