Codex

Sallaróth

Daemon

Domain: salt, preservation, food that outlasts the season; dead cohort (Craggus era); the god of the lesson the Long Winter had taught the survivors.

Type
Daemon

Domains: Salt, preservation, food that outlasts the season.

Era of ascension: Age of Craggus (~41,000 years ago). Cohort: dead. Died: Lost Ages (~30,000 years ago), when the Laughing Plague killed the households that kept the stores and the salted barrels rotted alongside the dead they had been laid down to feed.

Worshipped by: The salt-cutters of the Craggus era, the coastal evaporation-flats and the inland rock-salt mines, the smoke-houses that processed fish and game for winter, and the household preservers whose annual autumn work was understood across the Craggus-era cultures as religious in the way that only people who had nearly starved understand. No living culture maintains his worship. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)

Sallaróth was a specifically post-Long-Winter cult. The lesson of the Winter was "store, salt, preserve"; the survivors and their immediate descendants did not need to be told it twice. His worship rose in the first generations of the Age of Craggus alongside the rebuilt agricultural cycle, and the doctrine was unembarrassed: he was the god of not starving again, and the rite was the work itself. The salting of a fish was a prayer. The packing of a winter cellar was a prayer. The trade in cured meats between the rebuilt towns was the cult's largest single ceremony, conducted at the autumn markets.

The Plague did not kill the salt or the smoke-houses; it killed the households that owned them. A salted barrel keeps for years, but it requires somebody to eat from it; a smoke-house requires somebody to tend the fire. Within a generation of the Plague's peak, the surviving Craggus-era towns were full of intact stores whose owners had laughed themselves dead before broaching them. The barrels were eventually broken open by scavengers or rotted in place. His cult ended without ever forgetting what it had been for. The last of his priests, the records suggest, died trying to eat from the cellars of dead neighbors and finding the seals broken by previous, also-dead scavengers.

Aedorath was the fresh harvest; Solek was the hearth that cooked it; Sallaróth was what was kept against the year the harvest failed. The Plague made the keeping pointless from the keeper's end.

The Codex of Alaria