Tower of Ascension

Lady Corinette is gentle, expressive, patient, and deeply empathetic. She is not weak, naïve, or passive. Her mercy is often mistaken for softness by those who do not understand how much courage it takes to forgive, mourn honestly, and refuse hatred.

She is said to speak through music, birdsong, the silence after weeping, the scent of flowers in an unexpected place, the warmth of a hand held in grief, or a melody remembered from childhood.

Lady Corinette is especially present in moments where violence could continue but does not:

• A soldier lowering their weapon.
• A feud ending at a funeral.
• A child being comforted after terror.
• A widow choosing not to curse the living.
• A bard singing in a ruined town.
• A healer sitting beside a patient who cannot be saved.
• Enemies eating from the same table.
• A community rebuilding beauty after destruction.

She is angered by:

• Cruelty disguised as justice.
• Art used to glorify slaughter or domination.
• Forced love, coerced marriage, or possessive obsession.
• The silencing of grief.
• The deliberate destruction of beauty to break a people's spirit.
• Abusers who demand forgiveness without repentance.
• Tyrants who ban music, art, mourning, or public affection.
• Priests who preach peace only to protect the powerful from consequence.

Lady Corinette teaches that peace is not the absence of conflict. True peace is the condition in which wounds can be named, grief can be carried, wrongs can be repaired, and life can become beautiful again.

A Young Bard called to The Tower of Ascension; ascending as part of the The First Ascension

Lady Corinette is worshipped by those who heal emotional, spiritual, social, and bodily wounds. Her temples attract people from many walks of life, including:

• Bards, singers, dancers, painters, sculptors, and poets.
• Healers, midwives, nurses, and grief counselors.
• Diplomats, mediators, and peace envoys.
• Lovers seeking blessing or reconciliation.
• Widows, orphans, refugees, and survivors of violence.
• Pacifists, reformers, and charitable workers.
• Nobles seeking peaceful legitimacy.
• Commoners seeking comfort after war, famine, abuse, or plague.
• Adventurers burdened by guilt, trauma, or vengeance.
• Communities rebuilding after disaster.

Her faith is especially beloved by those who have survived cruelty but refuse to become cruel in return.

Lady Corinette's strongest mortal following is found in The Free Lands, especially in Freeport. Among bards, artists, teachers, free spirits, lovers, and those who seek healing after violence, she is not merely a distant goddess but a living cultural force. In Freeport, her worship is often expressed through bardic schools, public music, open-door healing halls, art houses, wedding chapels, grief songs, and festivals rather than through temples alone.

By contrast, Lady Corinette is largely disliked in The Barony of Varbis. While the Barony tolerates some religions that serve clear civic functions, such as Magnore, Corinette's faith is often viewed with suspicion.

Black Alice is one of Lady Corinette's most famous and most troubling living followers. To the faithful of Freeport, she is a war hero, former professor, bard, and champion whose life proves that beauty and love can survive tragedy. To more cautious clergy, she is a warning: even sincere devotion can be warped by grief, vengeance, necromancy, and the refusal to let go.

Her connection to Lady Corinette is usually interpreted in three ways:

Lady Corinette's strongest followers are found in The Free Lands, especially Freeport. In Freeport, her worship is woven into bardic education, public music, art, teaching, courtship, grief rites, and the city's broader culture of self-expression.

Other Strongholds of faith can be found in:

• Temples of music, art, and healing.
• Peace gardens and memorial groves.
• Orphanages and houses of refuge.
• Theaters, bardic colleges, and public performance halls.
• Hospitals and recovery homes.
• Wedding chapels and reconciliation courts.
• Cities rebuilding after war.
• Refugee settlements that preserve songs of their lost homes.
• Neutral grounds where enemies may speak safely.
• Secret shrines in tyrannical lands where art, love, or free worship is forbidden.

Unlike some gods, Lady Corinette's influence often spreads through culture before formal religion. A village may sing her songs for generations before building a shrine. A battlefield may become holy to her because enemies once buried their dead together there.

Corinettan temples are usually open, bright, and welcoming. Even small shrines often include flowers, water, music, and a place to sit without being questioned.

A typical temple may include:

• A public healing room.
• A hall for music and storytelling.
• A garden of roses or local flowers.
• A quiet chamber for grief.
• A room for mediation between families or factions.
• A shelter for abused spouses, children, refugees, or the displaced.
• A kitchen for shared meals.
• A small gallery where local art is displayed.
• An open courtyard for dancing, weddings, and seasonal festivals.
• A memorial wall where names, ribbons, painted stones, or carved tokens are placed.

Many temples keep no locked doors except where safety requires it. The open door is itself a doctrine: suffering should not need permission to enter.

Corinettan clergy are expected to learn both healing and expression. A priest who can mend wounds but cannot comfort sorrow is considered incomplete. Likewise, an artist who creates beauty but ignores suffering has not yet understood the Lady.

Not all Corinettan clergy are pacifists, but all are expected to treat violence as a last resort and a cause for mourning rather than celebration.

• Heal the heart as well as the body.
• Let beauty return where suffering has passed.
• Do not mistake peace for silence.
• Love freely given is sacred; love forced is a desecration.
• Comfort the grieving before correcting them.
• Sing the names of the dead.
• Make room at the table for the stranger.
• Art is a shield against despair.
• Forgiveness cannot be demanded by the unrepentant.
• When violence is necessary, grieve that it was necessary.
• No person should be left alone with unbearable sorrow.

The most common Corinettan rite is a healing song performed during or after medical care. The song does not always carry magical power. Often its purpose is to calm breathing, steady the hands of healers, and remind the injured that they are not alone.

A simple healing refrain:

Lady of the Gentle Hand,
stay beside this beating heart.
Where pain has made a lonely room,
enter softly; do not depart.

At dawn or dusk, temples open their doors and ring a soft bell, chime, or stringed instrument. Anyone may enter during this time for food, comfort, prayer, or silence.

In dangerous lands, the rite may be symbolic: a candle in a window, a rose painted on a doorframe, or a ribbon tied to a gate.

The Open Door Rite teaches that mercy must be visible. Hidden compassion helps only those who know where to search.

Lady Corinette blesses love that is freely chosen, mutual, and life-giving. Her clergy perform weddings, courtship blessings, reconciliation rites, adoption ceremonies, and vows of chosen family.

A traditional blessing:

May love be a house with open windows,
not a chain around the throat.
May each heart enter freely,
and leave without fear if love becomes harm.

Corinettan clergy refuse to bless forced marriages, coercive bargains, or unions made only to settle debts or secure political control without consent.

The Shared Table is a reconciliation rite in which estranged people eat from the same meal. The rite does not require immediate forgiveness. Its goal is to create a space where speech can begin without weapons, threats, or public humiliation.

Peace-Binders often use this rite between:

• Feuding families.
• Rival villages.
• Former soldiers.
• Estranged spouses.
• Guilds in conflict.
• Refugees and host communities.
• Adventuring parties divided by guilt or grief.

Before burial, cremation, or memorial, Corinettan clergy sing or recite the names of the dead. Where names are unknown, they sing descriptions: “the child with the blue ribbon,” “the old mason of the eastern road,” “the sailor found at dawn.”

The rite teaches that grief becomes easier to carry when the dead are not reduced to numbers.

Broken instruments, cracked masks, torn costumes, damaged paintings, and ruined books may be brought to a Corinettan temple for repair. This is both practical and symbolic. To mend an instrument is to declare that the song will continue.

In cities recovering from war, this rite can become a major civic act. The first public performance after a siege is often considered sacred to Lady Corinette.

Lady Corinette's holy days are often emotional, artistic, and communal. They frequently involve flowers, music, shared food, public reconciliation, memorial art, and care for the grieving.

When: The first mild day of spring, or the first day a temple can safely keep its doors open after winter, siege, plague, or danger.

On this day, Corinettan temples open every public door and window. Food is prepared for strangers, flowers are placed at thresholds, and the clergy renew their vow not to turn away those in honest need.

In wealthy cities, nobles may sponsor public meals or performances. In poor villages, the rite may be as simple as sharing bread and soup in the temple yard.

When: Spring bloom, or whenever the first local white flowers appear.

The Festival of White Roses celebrates love, beauty, courtship, adoption, friendship, and forgiveness. Weddings are common during this festival, but the day is not only for romance. Families reconcile, friends exchange ribbons, artists unveil new works, and temples bless children born in the previous season.

Young lovers sometimes exchange white roses. Older couples may exchange repaired objects: a mended cup, restrung instrument, patched cloak, or repainted household icon.

When: Early summer, or during a region's safest travel season.

For one week, Corinettan temples offer public healing, grief counseling, music, meals, and artistic instruction. Traveling bards, painters, dancers, and healers gather to serve the community.

Unlike Magnore's more organized public clinics, the Week of Gentle Hands focuses on loneliness, sorrow, and emotional recovery. It is common for veterans, widows, orphans, and refugees to receive special care.

When: Late summer, harvest season, or after a major local dispute.

During this feast, enemies, rivals, estranged kin, and divided communities are invited to eat together. No one is forced to forgive. Instead, the rite creates a protected space where people may speak honestly without fear of immediate retaliation.

Peace-Binders preside over the feast. Weapons are left outside or wrapped in white cloth.

When: Autumn, often after harvest and before winter.

The Night of Laments is Lady Corinette's major memorial festival. Names of the dead are sung, poems are read, candles are lit, and families bring tokens of those they have lost.

This is not considered a sorrowful failure of faith. Corinettans teach that grief ignored becomes poison, while grief shared becomes memory.

When: Not fixed. Observed after a battle, siege, rebellion, invasion, or local feud ends.

This rite must take place before victory feasts. The wounded are tended, the dead are named, and at least one song is sung for all who suffered, including enemies. In some regions, commanders who refuse this rite are considered spiritually dangerous, because they may lead their people from victory into vengeance.

When: Any date chosen by a community after disaster.

After a fire, flood, war, plague, raid, or magical catastrophe, Corinettan clergy may declare a Day of Returned Beauty. The community repairs murals, replants gardens, rebuilds stages, reopens schools, paints doors, restores shrines, and sings in public for the first time since the disaster.

The rite does not deny suffering. It declares that suffering will not have the final word.

Lady Corinette's funerals focus on grief, memory, love, and the healing of those left behind. Her clergy often perform funerals for artists, lovers, children, victims of violence, refugees, and those whose families need comfort more than doctrine.

The standard Corinettan funeral is called The Rose-Lament Rite.

Its purpose is to make grief speakable.

Lady Corinette, Gentle Hand,
receive this sorrow without turning away.
Let this name be sung where silence would erase it.
Let this love remain where death would sever it.
Let beauty grow from what grief has broken.
Comfort the living.
Remember the dead.
Teach our hearts to carry what they cannot keep.

Lady Corinette is largely disliked in The Barony of Varbis. While the Barony has a secular focus and may tolerate practical faiths such as Magnore, Corinette's worship is often treated as socially disruptive, politically suspect, or dangerously foreign.

Her association with love, art, music, free expression, peace, and emotional healing clashes with many Barony attitudes toward order, duty, reputation, and control. In particular, her clergy are mistrusted for sheltering lovers, artists, abused spouses, dissidents, and those whose grief might become politically inconvenient.

Corinettan worship in the Barony is therefore usually quiet and informal. It survives in private music rooms, hidden gardens, traveling theater troupes, funeral songs, and small Rose Circles that gather behind closed doors.

In the Free Lands, Lady Corinette's worship blends naturally with rural festivals, Talicite seasonal rites, and bardic traditions. Her shrines may be found beside village greens, wedding trees, roadside inns, and memorial gardens.

Common Free Lands practices include:

• Spring rose festivals.
• Songs for planting and harvest.
• Wedding dances around old trees.
• Shared memorials after monster attacks or raids.
• Traveling bards carrying news, laments, and blessings.
• Peace-Binders mediating land disputes between villages.
• Garden burials where flowers are planted over the dead.

In the Winterlands, Lady Corinette's worship is rarer but deeply meaningful. Her rites focus less on spring flowers and more on warmth, memory, hospitality, and love kept alive through darkness.

Winterlands shrines may appear as:

• Hearthside rose icons.
• Song circles during long nights.
• Memorial ribbons tied to bare trees.
• Small shelters where no traveler is turned away without cause.
• Hidden chapels for widows, orphans, and those rejected by harsher traditions.
• Candlelit rooms where the lonely gather during blizzards.

Corinettan clergy often oppose the crueler interpretations of Icengrim, especially those that treat weakness, grief, or tenderness as shameful. However, some northern communities respect Corinette as a goddess who helps people endure winter without losing their humanity.

Within the Church of the Flame, Lady Corinette is a welcome and respected part of the good-aligned pantheon. Although her strongest independent following is found in The Free Lands, especially Freeport, her worship in the Winterlands is generally accepted through the Church's broader doctrine of the Flame.

To the Church, Lady Corinette represents the gentler virtues of the Flame: mercy after victory, comfort after loss, love freely given, beauty preserved in hardship, and the refusal to let grief become despair. Her worship is especially valued in Thronstadt because the city was founded as a refuge and because Church doctrine teaches that the strong must protect the weak, law must be tempered by compassion, and hope must never be abandoned.

Corinettan rites in the Winterlands are usually less flamboyant than those practiced in Freeport. Rather than grand bardic festivals or public romances, her worship appears in quieter and more civic forms:

• Songs sung in hospitals, orphanages, and refugee halls.
• Laments for soldiers, pilgrims, and citizens lost to war, winter, or monsters.
• Gentle music during the March of Cinders.
• White rose or ribbon offerings during Candlewake and funeral vigils.
• Comfort ministries for widows, orphans, veterans, and the traumatized.
• Peace songs before mediation between families, guilds, or noble houses.
• Open-door hospitality rites tied to the Day of Open Doors.
• Art, poetry, and music used to preserve the memory of the dead.

Many Winterlands followers of Lady Corinette do not consider themselves separate from the Church of the Flame. They may pray first to the Flame, then ask Lady Corinette to soften sorrow, guide a song, bless a marriage, comfort a widow, or help a wounded heart survive the long dark.

In the Empire, where unauthorized worship is forbidden, Lady Corinette's faith survives through songs, art, love letters, lullabies, theater, secret weddings, and coded murals. Because her worship can hide inside culture, it is difficult to stamp out completely.

Hidden Followers may:

• Hide prayers inside folk songs.
• Use love poems as coded messages.
• Paint roses into public murals as signs of safe houses.
• Perform banned laments for executed rebels.
• Shelter forbidden lovers, escaped slaves, and persecuted artists.
• Conduct secret marriages not recognized by Imperial law.
• Preserve the names of people erased from official histories.

In dwarven lands, Lady Corinette may be respected by artisans, jewelers, brewers, singers, family elders, and those who preserve memory through craft. Her worship may be less emotional in public but deeply embedded in memorial objects.

In the Corsair Seas, Lady Corinette's worship may travel through sailors' songs, tattooed memorial roses, shipboard weddings, sea-laments, and floating theaters.

Possible Corsair Seas traditions:

• Harbors with Open-Door shelters for abandoned sailors.
• Bards who carry last messages between ports.
• White roses thrown into the sea for the drowned.
• Peace songs sung before parley between rival crews.
• Ship surgeons invoking both Corinette, Marrow and Magnore.
• Pirate captains who ban her clergy because they weaken vengeance.
• Secret chapels for lovers separated by the sea.

A famous legend tells of two armies trapped on opposite sides of a broken bridge. Each believed the other would attack at dawn. Lady Corinette appeared as a woman carrying a basket of flowers and began laying blossoms across the shattered stones. Wherever a flower touched, a plank appeared.

By sunrise, the bridge was whole enough for one person to cross at a time. The first to cross was not a king or general, but a child searching for her father among the enemy camp. Both armies watched her pass safely and lowered their weapons.

This story is used to teach that peace often begins with the vulnerable doing what the powerful fear to do. Most Priests understand this is almost certainly an apocryphal tale, as Lady Corinette's moral time on the planet was limited, but still teach it as it highlights her teachings.

In another tale, a Corinettan priestess sheltered refugees inside a temple while raiders tried to break the doors. She had no army, no walls, and no weapon. She sang through the night, and every frightened person inside joined her.

The raiders battered the doors until dawn, but the wood did not break. When the sun rose, the attackers heard the names of their own dead in the song and fled weeping.

Some temples teach that the doors held because of divine power. Others say the miracle was that the people inside did not surrender to terror.

After a plague, a painter devoted to Lady Corinette found that many of the dead had no family left to remember them. She painted one thousand faces from memory, rumor, and dream. When the portraits were hung in the temple, families from distant towns recognized lost kin.

A theological tale says that Corinette once grew a rose without thorns and gave it to a cruel king. The king laughed, crushed it, and asked what use beauty had without the power to wound.

The crushed rose released a perfume that filled the palace with memories of everyone the king had harmed. He went mad with remorse, abdicated, and spent his remaining years tending gardens for orphans.

Priests interpret the story differently. Some say mercy is stronger than fear. Others say beauty can be judgment.

• “No wound is healed until the heart can sing again.”
• “Peace is not silence.”
• “A named sorrow can be carried.”
• “Love freely given is holy.”
• “Do not ask the grieving to be useful.”
• “Beauty is what survives cruelty.”
• “Break bread before you break blood.”
• “No triumph before mourning.”
• “A closed door is not a temple.”
• “Forgiveness cannot be stolen.”
• “Let mercy be easy to find.”
• “Ruin is not the last artist.”
• “A song remembers what fear forgets.”
• “The dead deserve names, not numbers alone.”

Lady Corinette, Gentle Hand,
sit beside this pain.
Let fear loosen.
Let breath return.
Let the body mend,
and let the heart remember it is not alone.

Lady of the White Rose,
stand between wrath and wound.
Let truth be spoken without cruelty.
Let grief be heard without shame.
Let hands open before swords rise.
Teach us the courage to end what hatred began.

Corinette, Keeper of Laments,
do not let this sorrow vanish unnamed.
Hold what I cannot hold.
Sing what I cannot say.
Let love remain
when presence is gone.

Lady of Open Hearts,
bless this love if it is freely given.
Keep it gentle.
Keep it honest.
Keep it brave enough to change,
and kind enough to release what should not be held.

Lady Corinette,
I have seen what should not have been.
Let my heart not harden into the shape of the wound.
Teach my hands to build again.
Teach my voice to sing again.
Teach my grief not to become another blade.

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