Coal, Apostate of Rehorachti

Tengu / Crowfolk / Cleric

Submitted character story

Coal is a Tengu, feathers black as a starless night, who channels the blazing sunlight and restorative power of Rehorachti. His true name is a rising rasp like a crow trying to sing a sunrise. Unspellable, unpronounceable, and unique, it is a name unlike any other of his people. It was the first of his original sounds, his original thoughts, and for a moment it was also the last, for Coal has died, once.

He drowned. During yet another lonely pilgrimage in one of the tributary ravines of the river Erjh, a flash flood took him and plunged him to swirling depths as dark as night, then darker still. In breathless the black between living and dying he tried to pray, and could only parrot hollow temple-hymns, meaningless mimicry, the Tengu curse following him even to death. Then, for the first and last time, he made a sound that was his own; a grating, crying song none had ever heard, cracked out of him. 

That cry, Rehorachti answered. 

A great crow came to him, black on black in black, and kept his soul through the long night, and carried it back up to the dawn to the shore of Erjh. Coal woke with divine light behind his eyes and his own song in his blood. And three certainties more: His faith in Herorachti is true, that faith is reciprocated, and that the god is a crow, not (or not only) the falcon of lore and hieroglyph. A falcon hunts the living, but a crow keeps the dead, and it was a crow that kept and returned him. Coal's faith is of the returning sun: the light that dies each night and rises. Restoration, healing, and then radiant power, all the true aspects of Rehorachti himself.

The death itself, the drowning, the dark, the long night in the crow's keeping, is something Coal will not speak of. The end of a life shackled by mimicry and rote ritual was the beginning of a life as a creature that thinks its own thoughts, and, it turned out, the beginning of his apostasy. For any raised on the temple's script, much less a Tengu, original thought is often enough a kind of heresy. To question, even insist the temple is wrong, or even incomplete, would be intolerable, if not for the facts.

For all that he is considered apostate by most followers of his own deity, Coal remains devout - moreso than most. The temples of Rehorachti tolerate him at best, but can't deny that he channels  the magic of the divine. He heals and restores. He wields the power of the Sun. He can't be all wrong, and they must grudgingly admit it. Rehorachti himself is silent on the matter.

Having one's own name, and the capacity for original words and ideas is one thing, but having a name others can pronounce is another. After coming to the aid of, and then falling in with an unlikely grouping of adventurers, each walking different paths down the same road, he was told, insistently, that he needed a name people could actually say. The burly, blunt-spoken dwarf who called himself Balgrin Durstansson Blackkettle, the Anvilbreaker (and who preferred everyone use all four of his names), chose, and then insistently bestowed the name Coalwing Sunkettle Grimfeather, and the rest of the party settled on the first of those syllables. Balgrin built the name as straightforward and directly as befit him. Coalwing straight from the night-black feathers. Sunkettle a pure kettle-smith's read of a black vessel that somehow boils sunlight (half-adopting the crow into Blackkettle kin whether he likes it or not). Grimfeather from the first impressions of a powerful but lonely soul.

Rehorachti is a god analogous to Ra-Horakhty, a combination of ancient Egypt's Ra and Horus, God of Sun and Healing, God of the Horizons.  Rehorachti's holy symbol is a stylized eye, almost always three-dimensional — an amulet or small figure meant to be turned. Held as the right eye it is the Eye of Ra: the Sun, and power. Held as the left eye it is the Eye of Horus: healing and restoration. These are two faces of the Light domain in the same token — Coal turns his as he casts, sun-eye out when he shines - or burns, healing-eye out when he mends. The Eye is traditionally limned in black kohl, something Fenwick Larkspur, the party's Bard, noted with amusement.

Coal is a mimic who found his own voice at merely the cost of his life. He does not talk of his rebirth, nor does he evangelize any so-called heresy. However, Rehorachti's true epithet is "of the *Two* Horizons," sunrise and sunset. Falcon and Crow. As Coal and the party gain renown, others, not followers exactly, but those who accept that a spell-granted cleric must be a true cleric, have begun to reason that the god *must* have two faces: the falcon of the eastern dawn (the temples' god) and the crow of the western dusk (Coal's). The sun sets and dies and returns reborn. The apostasy grows around Coal, and for good or ill, easily or with strife, the Temple of Rehorachti will change.