Domains: Corsair honor, the wave-pact, the oath the captain swears to the water before the captain swears anything to the crew.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~4,800 BSD). Cohort: current. Marolan rose out of the Drachman corsair-runs of the middle Expansion, when raiding the deep-sea routes between Drachma and the eastern trade-ports became a recognized profession rather than a furtive one.
Worshipped by: Drachman captains and their officer-rank, the bond-bos'ns who keep the oath-rolls, the dockside priests who refuse fares from any ship that has not paid its share to the wave. Qindo blue-skin sailor-pirates carry the same prayers; their inflection treats the wave-pact as a family inheritance rather than a captain's office. The Swordsmen of the Free Isles keep his rites in their Romance-tradition maritime form — the only patron they share with the mainland Drachmans. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
Marolan and Gavelos are siblings in the sense that the same dockside priest will keep both shrines, and the same captain will pray to each on different days. Gavelos is the shore-shrine god — the navigator who blesses the route home, who hears the prayer of the merchant before they raise the merchant's sail. Marolan is the shipboard god, prayed to at the bow at the moment the raid is decided, in the brief window between the lookout's call and the captain's order. His worship is feral by Gavelos's standards; the sea welcomes both. Drachman priests teach that a corsair who has not paid to Marolan before the strike will be answered for by Gavelos on the way home, and that the corsair who has paid both is not in danger from either.
The wave-pact has a specific form. A captain who takes Marolan's oath swears, in front of two witnesses from another ship, that the prizes of the run will be divided by the rule the captain names before the first sail rises, and that the rule will hold whether the run is fat or thin. The pact is in front of the sea and the daemon is its witness. Breaking the rule — short-handing a junior officer, holding back a take from the crew, lying about what was found in a hold — is the one sin Marolan punishes directly. The form the punishment takes is consistent enough to be a Drachman proverb: the oath-breaker drowns within sight of his own port. Whether this is daemonic action or the natural result of a crew who have learned what the captain is, the docks have not bothered to distinguish.
His shrines are at the pier-foot, at the height the tide reaches on a normal high. Offerings are cut salt-rope, a slice of the first cask opened on return, a coin pressed into the wet beam where the rope-cleat is set. The lore-handle Drachman bos'ns keep is: Gavelos blesses the route, but the route is not what you swore to the sea.