Domains: Coin-and-contract, the noble-merchant tradition, the ledger that doubles as a charter, the deal that raises the house of the dealer.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~2,100 BSD). Cohort: current. The Ladder-Blesser was named, not coined — the outsider trade-partners of the early Belenstrope houses used the descriptor for the patron they noticed the Belenstrope dealers praying to before signing, and the Belenstrope houses adopted the outsider name within two generations. The acceptance is the worship's first doctrinal act.
Worshipped by: Belenstrope noble-merchant houses, the contract-readers (the household clerks trained to find what the other side has left out of a draft), the house-stewards who keep the rising-rolls that document each generation's elevation in standing. Belenstrope is the only halfling people to worship the Ladder-Blesser, and Belenstrope houses keep him paired with Bylzar and Nellwen: Bylzar at the writing of the contract, the Ladder-Blesser at the signing, Nellwen at the table the parties share afterward. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
The Ladder-Blesser is the daemon of the contract that does two things at once. Bylzar is the merchant guild's god, pan-cultural and trade-neutral; he blesses the deal because the deal is the trade and the trade is what continues. The Ladder-Blesser is narrower. He blesses the deal that also raises the house, the contract that confers standing as a side-effect of completion, the ledger entry that another Belenstrope family will read in fifty years and recognize as the moment the dealer's grandchildren became the kind of family one took seriously. Belenstrope doctrine teaches that Bylzar blesses the trade and the Ladder-Blesser blesses the house, and that an Belenstrope dealer who has neglected the second prayer will find the deal closes and the house does not rise, and the dealer's children will be the same standing the dealer was, which is the failure Belenstrope houses fear most.
The rising-roll is the worship in document form. Every Belenstrope noble-merchant house keeps a rising-roll, a long parchment record kept in the house-steward's keeping, on which each contract the house has signed is entered with the date, the counterparty, the principal terms, and a single line at the foot of the entry recording what the contract did for the standing of the house. The line is a description, not a number. "Brought us to the Gren-Belen table." "Took us out of arrears with the Phirexes accounts." "Made our second daughter's husband's house take our name for the marriage." The rising-roll is the prayer. The house-steward reads the most recent ten entries aloud at each year-turning, in the presence of the house-elders, as the offering.
The lore-handle Belenstrope contract-readers carry is: "the contract is a ladder; climb it with both hands clean". The doctrinal corollary is that a deal closed by a deceit is a rung that breaks under the next generation's weight. The Ladder-Blesser does not bless contracts where the counterparty has been lied to, and Belenstrope houses that have been caught lying find their rising-rolls fall silent for two or three generations afterward, until the house has earned its way back into the patron's attention by a sequence of clean deals long enough for the silence to break. The reckoning is slow and the Belenstrope take it personally.