Pronounced: (teh-HAH-nah)

The Ever-Healing Wound, The Unhealed Wound

Followers

Followers revere Herew, but focus their devotions specifically upon Tehana, an aspect of Herew: his unhealed wound. Devotees of Tehana are referred to as the Tehanine (TEH-hah-neen), and while they consider themselves to be Hewrite, there is no vertical relationship between the Tehanine church and the mainstream Hewrite faith.

Holy Symbol

In artwork, an open hand with the palm displayed, fingers and thumb pointing straight up. The palm has a jagged wound going from the upper-right of the palm to its lower left. Stylized depictions generally feature a white hand with a red wound.

Holy Places

Valleys, caves, crevasses, and grottoes, being natural wounds in the earth, together represent the unhealed wound of Herew, and are thus particularly sacred to the Tehanine, who have established their holiest shrines in such places. Hot springs are also viewed as representations of the life essence of Herew flowing from Tehana, and their waters are assumed to have healing properties.

The Tehanine liturgy is one which reveres natural creation, and particularly the earth and stone, believing it to be infused with the lifeblood of Herew.

Holy Days

Feast of the [Maker's] Mark - held on the first day of spring, which is associated with the day of creation, when Herew wounded himself to animate the world.

Known Relics

Besides water from the hot springs, there is one other type of item particularly valued. Blood-red rubies that seem to be lit from within have been prized from the earth. Although not otherwise endowed with any power, Maker's Bloodgems, as they are called, are treated as sacred relics by the Tehanine as manifestations of the Wound of Creation.

Origin

Devotees of Tehana believe, along with other Hewrites, that after creation, Herew had to give of his own essence in order to provide animus to what he had formed out of the raw stuff of the elements, thus weakening himself. Specifically, the Tehanine believe that Herew cut open his palm, and that a portion of his own life's blood flowed into what he had wrought, permeating it and granting it life.

Tehana is the wound of Herew, the essence that he separated from himself to animate the world. It is the Ever-Healing Wound, or the Unhealed Wound, the part of Herew that will always be separate from Herew until all creation ceases to be and yields its life essence back to him.

Doctrine

• Virtues: Dignified Suffering, Sacrifice, Compassion for the Sick and Poor.

• The chief end of all life is to be rejoined to Herew to close his wound; when this completes, Tehana will cease to exist; there will only be Herew.

• The healing of disease and injury is of symbolic importance as it presents an image of the Ever-Healing Wound as it continues to heal.

• Healing is of actual importance; the Tehanine believe that, in some sense, a person's soul is marked with the stigmata of their suffering flesh. The healing of their flesh will cause the wounds of the soul to be healed in like proportion.

• Certain people, however, are privileged to suffer from an incurable condition; they can bear their wounds in the comfort of knowing that Herew continues to suffer alongside them. People who suffer in this manner are exemplars of the faith, deserving of our honor, aid, and comfort as they seek to live and die with dignity.

• Life should not be needlessly prolonged or extended past its time. Death should be suffered at the right time with assurance that their spirits return to be rejoined with Herew.

• The undead are a perversion in that the spirits contained within cannot or will not return Herew's life essence, as is his due. They need to be scoured away like the necrotic tissue that needs to be removed from a wound so that it can fully heal.

Sects

• Order of the Lacerate: This warrior-monk sect of self-flagellant mendicants seek to attain a mystical union between themselves and Herew by ritually wounding themselves in various ways so that they can experience both the suffering brought by the Unhealed Wound as well as the healing brought to it; the typical member is marked with a continuous skein of scar tissue from head to toe, which forms a kind of natural armor and resistance to pain as nerve endings are deadened. They seek to understand the source of pain itself and to transcend it, as Herew must have done, living simple lives of faith and service. In battle, these monks are heedless of danger to themselves, practicing a form of martial art called "Turning into the Blade", which seemingly exposes the practitioner to mortal danger in order to gain advantage over an opponent. Most Tehanine view the Order as a bizarre sect that has taken an overly literalistic interpretation of the creation myth that serves as the foundation of orthodox Tehanine faith.

• Cleansing Flame: These ruthless Tehanine comprise, among others, paladins, clerics, avengers, and rangers who seek to eradicate all undead, which they consider to be filth contaminating the wound of Herew. This order also studies the epidemiology of disease, magical or mundane. This order has somewhat of a darker reputation due to their habit of enforcing quarantine during pandemic situations at any price should the situation require it.

Clergy

Tehanine clergy can be found throughout the known world. Small chapels to Tehana sprout wherever there is a community large enough to support a full-time healer. The Tehanine religious hierarchy is completely flat; those who wish to become members of the clergy have a relatively short novitiate period prior to taking their vows, and there is only one rank: Brother/Sister. The vows themselves are simple and unadorned: poverty, humility, and the promise to provide succor to all, regardless of income or status.

There are two distinct cultures within the mainstream Tehanine clergy; they are most effectively contrasted by the phrase "town and gown".

Unaffiliated "town" clerics will live out their vows to Tehana by establishing small basement chapels or shrines underneath a homeless shelter, hospice, or clinic. The vast majority of the Tehanine faithful are shepherded by this humble, unsung priesthood, who live out their daily lives in back-breaking and thankless labor on behalf of their flock. In rural environs, chapels to Tehana can sometimes be found in a natural cave or cliffside grotto.

The Tehanine are most visibly organized into a loose affiliation of monastic hospital-academies. The "gown" culture, found in these academies, is in most ways vastly different than its "town" counterpart, although ostensibly founded on the same ideals and virtues. Each academy is headed by a Chancery, presided over by an Archchancellor; this body is chiefly responsible for publishing a yearly digest of abstracts of all medical research performed over the past year. These digests are gathered up and distributed to all of the other academies. It is prestigious to have one's research noted in the digests; members of the academies vie fiercely for the privilege, and each department watches over its word budget with the precision of an underfed tax accountant. Each academy, while theoretically a non-profit organization, has a sizeable endowment and considerable real estate holdings.

Then there are the countless departments devoted to particular branches of medicine, covering all manner of divine or mundane healing arts. There are intense rivalries between and within the academies, as is true in any large, organized guild or government, and competition for prestigious teaching posts and bright students is cutthroat, albeit bloodlessly so. Although each cleric is referred to as Brother or Sister, the abbreviated postfixes to their names conferred by the accumulation of various titles, positions, degrees, and other honors can stretch their entry in the academy's directory to two or three lines.

Although each member of the academy takes the same vow of poverty as their unaffiliated brethren, the church charges for its medical care on a sliding scale, and those who can afford it pay dearly for the privilege of being attended to by the best treatment available. Tuition is also a big source of revenue; departments with more students thus have more budget, and thus more power and its accoutrements. Some of the more successful members of the establishment have "requisitioned" substantial possessions for themselves, justifying their wealth by pointing out that their extravagant possessions are actually property of the academy and their right to their usage is one of the many perquisites of their hard work on behalf of their department.

There is a movement of reformers who seek to take the "gown" culture back to its more humble "town" roots by reining in some of its more notorious excesses, but success in this area has been limited to newer academies that have sprung up in recent years that have established a true return to the vows of poverty and humility as part of their charters.

Famous Adherents

• Marach (Cleansing Flame, member; Hospital of Dragonfall Forest, co-founder)