Gray Bishop (Wanderer of Wisdom)
The Gray Bishop, or the Wanderer of Wisdom, is the Imperial deity of community, runic magic, and travel. His dogma urges loyalty to friends and family, spreading of knowledge, and preservation of forgotten languages under the belief that those who do not learn from history will repeat it. His symbol is a gray bishop chess piece.
Alignment - Path of Equity
Domains - Community, Luck, Rune, and Travel.
Worshipers - Adventurers, Merchants, Sailors (Sea and spacefaring), Soldiers
Rituals
Clerics of the Wanderer of Wisdom travel to exotic lands, bless caravans, scout for armies, and record their experiences for others to learn from. They act as translators and diplomats, and help in the construction of roads, bridges, and hard-wearing shoes. They usually wear simple clothing of brown, gray, or faded green. They wander frequently, and seldom it is that one would encounter the same group of priests ministering at the same shrine.
Because the road is the best teacher, initiates are trained in the ways of the Gray Bishop by being taken on long trips. They are dismissed if they ask when the journey will be over, because to the faithful of the Wanderer of Wisdom, the journey never really ends.
Clerics of Gray Bishop are found throughout the world on various journeys, but are most active in central Valencia and the southwestern Fanemarshes. There are three kinds of priests: urban, pastoral, and archaeological. Urban priests wear brown robes and maintain small chapels in cities and towns. Pastoral priests wear gray and spend all their time wandering. Archaeological priests wear faded green robes and study ancient shrines and magical texts. The worshipers of the Gray Bishop observe the holy days of the Red Knight as well as an important date of their own.
Highharvestide
Highharvestide is an annual festival in the Tamrielic Calendar, taking place on the 21st of Heartfire. It is traditionally a feast to celebrate the harvest and the abundance of food, but also the time when those wishing to travel leave on their journeys before winter sets in.
Preparations for the feast start as early as a tenday before, while preparing, cooking, and preserving the harvest for the cold winter months. Traditions vary from planet to planet, but examples of festive activity included food-related contests; races and challenges of skill and strength; receiving homemade sweets from the local clergy; and priests blessing larders, wine cellars, grain bins, and food preserves.
This day is often an important anniversary to various governments. Often, taxes and tithes come due, rulers hold "open courts" to hear the concerns of their citizens, oaths are publicly renewed, troops receive marching orders to new duty stations, and guilds meet to confer on prices and rate changes for goods and services.
It is said that children born on this day are favored by the Gray Bishop to have lifelong good luck, but be smitten with wanderlust. Another legend is that females born on this day have control over their reproductive system (i.e., got pregnant only when they wanted to) by force of will alone, and that they could instantly sense when they had been poisoned, either by ingestion or being bitten by a venomous creature for example.
Relationships
The Gray Bishop looks to the Red Knight as a close companion. The duo are well-known to be very close, but whether they are friends or lovers is something they've kept to themselves.
Realm
Unlike most other gods the Gray Bishop often appears on the Material Plane and can be found roaming the roadways of the empire. He is almost always willing to stop and chat to travelers, but seldom dwells for long.
Journey's End is a legendary location that few even among the faithful have heard of. It exists, according to myth, in the center of the galaxy on a tiny, hidden planetary Oasis. A copse of magical orpheus trees enhance the powers of recuperation among those who rest beneath them there. Their round, fist-sized fruits each function as a full day's rations. The beautiful waterfall there heals wounds and cures diseases. Those who swim in the crystalline pond will find that the Gray Bishop himself will answer up to five simple questions they might ask.