Domains: Beast-soul binding, animistic communion, the rental of a body across the species line.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~3,800 BSD). Cohort: current. The Hide-Lender was named, not coined, by the outsider polities of the southern coast who first encountered Kuru shamans walking inside the bodies of pelt-beasts and reported the practice in the only language they had. The Kuru took the outsider name and made it their own, on the doctrinal grounds that a daemon known by what they do is more honestly known than a daemon known by what they are called.
Worshipped by: Kuru beast-shamans, the inheritor-children chosen to carry the pelts of dead practitioners, the village-mothers who keep the pelt-houses and clean the rented bodies between borrowings. Kuru is the only people who worship the Hide-Lender; the outsider polities who named him keep no rites. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
The Hide-Lender's domain is the body of the beast as a rented vessel for the human soul, and the soul of the beast as the rightful owner who is being given guest-rights for the duration of the rental. The shaman does not become the bear; the shaman enters the bear, with permission, and the bear's own soul withdraws into a layer the Kuru do not name. The rental has a price. A shaman who borrows a body must return it with no worse a body than they took: a pelt-beast hunted while being worn is a debt to the Hide-Lender that the shaman repays by tending a beast of the same kind through a season of injury or birthing. A shaman who refuses the debt is found out within three winters, the village-mothers say, by the simple sign of a pelt that no longer accepts the borrowing — the rental refused, the soul of the beast keeping its house against the shaman's entry.
Where Lorus is the daemon of the voice in the dark you fear, the Hide-Lender is the daemon of the voice in the bear you become, and the bear's voice is not absent during the borrowing, only quieted. Kuru shamans speak of the beast-soul as a host who has stepped out of their own front room and is waiting in the kitchen for the guest to finish their visit. The shaman who forgets the host is present, who acts in the borrowed body as if the body were their own, is the shaman who comes back wrong. Kuru villages keep close watch on returned shamans for the first three days; a shaman who returns wrong is sometimes salvageable, sometimes not, and the village-mothers are the ones who decide.
His shrines are the pelt-houses themselves. Every Kuru village of any size keeps a pelt-house — a low timber building, dark inside, hung with the cured pelts of all the beasts the village's shamans have ever borrowed and returned in good faith. The pelts are the rental registry. A pelt's presence in the house means the Hide-Lender accepted the return and the debt is closed. A pelt missing from the house, taken by a shaman who left the village or by a borrowing that ended badly, is an open account, and the Kuru consider an open account to be a debt the village inherits. The lore-handle the Kuru carry is: "the body is rented; the soul is the lender; the rent is paid in the kind of work the lender would have done in their own house."