Grauth

Grauth

Type	Elder power / ancestral presence
People	Orcish
Titles	The Necessary Thing; The One Who Was Not Asked; What Remains When Everything Is Taken
Domains	Survival · Necessity · The Unwanted · Endurance Without Comfort
Symbol	An empty hand, palm down — giving nothing, taking nothing, simply present

Grauth is not worshipped with joy. He is acknowledged — grimly, honestly, the way one acknowledges a scar. Orcish theology does not hold that Grauth loves his people; it holds that Grauth is what his people have when nothing else remains. He promises no reward, no peace, and no recognition — only that endurance is possible, and that is reckoned enough.

Most humans either do not know Grauth exists or take orcish religion for primitive superstition, and orcs tend not to correct the impression. The rites of Grauth are conducted in private, in the orcish tongue. Calleth's clergy are the one human faith orcs occasionally permit at Grauth rites.

Their wound is dispossession. Orcish oral tradition holds that they were in Pelervar before anyone, and that they have been pushed — treaty by treaty, generation by generation — into the margins of the land they once held. Many orcs privately find the theology exhausting. They practise it anyway.