Domains: Chivalric courage, the bond with the mount, the bonding-rite the fox and the knight perform once and never repeat.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~1,500 BSD). Cohort: current. The Bell-Witness rose late in the Expansion with the Foxborne gnome enclaves' formalization of the fox-knight tradition — when the practice of pairing gnome riders with the chosen foxes of the litter became a codified order rather than a household custom.
Worshipped by: Foxborne fox-knights, the litter-keepers (the gnome elders trained to recognize which fox-kits of a litter are showing the temperament that will allow them to choose a knight), the bell-smiths who forge the small collar-bells the foxes wear before the bonding and the rider-bells the riders carry after. Foxborne does not share the Bell-Witness with other gnome enclaves; the fox-knight tradition is geographically tight to Foxborne. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
The Bell-Witness presides over the bonding-rite, and the bonding-rite is the one rite no fox-knight performs more than once. A candidate knight, having been brought up through the Foxborne training and shown to be ready, stands in the village courtyard at the appointed hour with the year's bondable foxes in a loose half-circle around them. The foxes choose. The knight is forbidden by Foxborne doctrine to approach, to speak, to gesture; the choice must be the fox's. A fox who has chosen will come forward and present themselves at the knight's hand, and if the knight is the right knight the fox will dip their head and let the knight take the collar-bell from their neck. The knight then ties the bell to a leather cord and wears it around their own wrist for the rest of the knight's life. The exchange is the bond's formation. The Bell-Witness is the witness who makes the exchange binding.
A fox may also refuse. A fox who is brought to the courtyard and who chooses to lie down and turn their head away has refused all the year's candidate knights; the candidates who were not chosen have not been failed, but the fox is held to be expressing the daemon's judgment on the cohort, and the village does not press the choice. A candidate who has been refused by three years' foxes is sometimes counseled to consider another vocation; sometimes the candidate is correct and the fourth year's foxes choose them. The Foxborne keep the count and read the cohort-rolls at the year-turning. The Bell-Witness's role is the witnessing. The village's elders, the bell-smiths, and the candidate's family are also present, but the daemon's witness is the one that makes the choice doctrinally binding rather than merely customary.
Where Drashweir presides over the rider's grief at the death of the mount, the seven-cut rite Inavolin griffin-riders perform over their fallen griffins, the Bell-Witness presides over the bond's formation, the moment before any grief is possible. The two daemons are companions in domain and opposites in posture. A Foxborne knight does not pray to Drashweir; the fox-bond is held by the Foxborne to be different in kind from the griffin-bond, scaled to the courtesy between equals rather than the courtesy between warbands. The lore-handle Foxborne fox-knights carry is: "the fox bows first; the knight bows lower". The doctrinal corollary is that a knight who has not learned to bow lower than the fox has not earned the bond and will not be chosen the following year.