Alanna

The goddess Alanna is the third born of the gods. She is the first female and the first in the second set of twins. She controls nature, and has come to symbolize life and nature through her conflicts with her sister Abhirati. She calls Silice her home.

Description

Alanna typically chooses the form of a druidic woman, appearing wise enough to be a mother of several years. Most frequently, she is described as being a wild-touched and regal being with deep, red-brown curls. Her hair is generally bound back simply. Consistent in all the reported sightings are her eyes, which are a verdant green a touch deeper and brighter than those found in mortals. These eyes are a trademark of the goddess, it seems, and she keeps them regardless of what form she appears in when she wishes to make herself known.

In her humanoid form, she cuts a figure out of the forest in leather and hides. The angles in her face mark her distinctly as immortal. Her hair is often decorated with tree branches that appear to be growing amongst her hair, and her armor is covered in burned runes. There is a distinctive otherness about her, but one gets the impression of a kind, inevitable, verdant, and terrible entity.

Worship

The symbol that adorns Alanna's temples is a willow tree with exposed roots. Her worshipers have a high regard for life, and the religious leaders typically restrict meat in their diets. Some sects evolve complex rules on what can and cannot be eaten; given different weight to different varieties of life. However, many argue that this is not in principle with Alanna's general teachings.

Towns and cities in Silice typically have an open air temple dedicated to the goddess on the edge of civilization. The worship pares, kept separate from the Temple proper where the clergy live, is kept a mix between wild and gardened. A pipe weed imported originally from Balora by the halflings is a common staple in these gardens.

More rural areas keep smaller temples, some little more than an altar under a tree. Kept on the outside of town, these smaller temples are almost universally kept out of direct line-of-sight from the settlement. This is done to help keep a sense of reverence for the area. This is a remanent from an early Post-Fall branch of philosophy and theology that postulated that seeing day-to-day dealings of the world made prayer and worship more difficult to undertake earnestly.