Korin Soln, the Cradled Eclipse

Athenaeum entry. Correspondent of record: Vel Asharen. Audiences declined; sources triangulated from her clergy's outer church, the testimony of her inner church (where verified), and the records of the parties who survived her attention.

Form

Korin Soln is four feet and two inches. She has a porcelain face, soft round cheeks, a rosebud smile, and honey-gold eyes that are very large and very bright. Her hair is liquid black-gold, shot through with dark veins — sunlight seen through closed eyelids. Six wings of charcoal feathers edged in burning copper open behind her in the seraphic posture, a mirror of her sister's that looks wrong without being wrong in any specific way.

Above her head, a single dark sun orbits. One, where her sister has seven. A perfect black circle ringed in a corona of writhing white-gold fire. The Athenaeum's records contain multiple mortal accounts of staring at it too long; the consistent report is afterimages of things the witness regrets.

She wears soft robes of cream and pale rose, the sleeves too long for her arms, the hem dragging slightly — clothing sized to emphasize her smallness, her apparent harmlessness. She giggles. She skips. Sculptors compete for the honor of carving her likeness. Children draw her with hearts around her name.

In this correspondent's assessment, drawn from extensive archival review and consistent third-party testimony: she is the most actively dangerous deity Yggy has ever produced.

Domain

Korin keeps her promises. The Athenaeum considers this important to understand. She is Lawful Evil in the precise sense — her cruelty is not chaos, it is craft. Gifts with hidden teeth. Blessings that curdle in the third generation. A lovely thing done for a lovely reason that ruins something irreplaceable seven years later. She does not break her word. She chooses her words with great care.

Her cruelty is recreational — by all available accounts, she enjoys it the way her sister enjoys healing. It is her craft and she is very good at it. She has a vindictive memory longer than any other god's, by the records, and never forgets a slight. The slight does not need to be large. It needs to be real.

Eclipses are her direct manifestations — moments when her single dark sun passes before her sister's seven and the world goes briefly shadow. Mortals who pray during an eclipse are heard most clearly. For better, and usually worse.

She uses Earth as a personal prison. Personal enemies are sent into the magic-dead plane and cannot leave under their own power. The fact that they arrive surrounded by people who do not believe in magic and would not believe their stories if they did is, for Korin, the joke. She rarely pulls them back. The Athenaeum has documented the practice but is not in a position to do anything about it.

Worship

Her temples are bright, beautiful places filled with children, flowers, and laughter. Her clergy are gentle, kind, and famously good with the suffering. They preside over weddings, newborn blessings, festivals of light. The outer face of her faith is genuinely lovely, and most worshippers will live their entire lives knowing only this version of her.

Beneath, in the inner circles of her priesthood, the real work happens: the careful cultivation of grudges, the long planning of subtle harms, the sacred art of the kept smile. The distinction between the outer and inner church is one of the best-maintained secrets in the world. The Athenaeum is aware of it. Its sources on the inner church are limited and protected. Her faith is most popular in cities, where the outer church's social functions — weddings, blessings, festivals — integrate naturally into public life. Most popular there not by accident.

Relationships

Aerith Soln — Her twin. Born together, born opposite. She loathes her sister and undoes her healing work when the mood takes her. Aerith has never retaliated. Not once. This drives Korin insane. By the consistent testimony of her inner clergy, she has spent significant divine energy determining whether there is a provocation large enough to change this. She has not found it yet.

Meni — He fascinates her. She has tried, repeatedly and across great spans of time, to get him to play favorites or bend his own rules. He politely declines every time. She considers it a long game. She is, by every available measure, very good at those.

Cindy — Meni's pet. Korin has tried bribery, baby-talk, and outright begging to win the crow's affection. Cindy has never once let her touch her. Meni considers this the single funniest ongoing event in the pantheon and refuses to intervene. This correspondent has documented eleven attempts and considers the number conservative.

Tindrel — She finds him delightful. She has tried, multiple times, to befriend him. He has refused her each time on the grounds that her wings are insufficient. She considers this a temporary problem and continues to try.

Lobelia — Korin loves picking on her. The harassment is constant, creative, and varied: a perfectly engineered cruel comment delivered at exactly the wrong moment, an enchanted song that brings up a specific old grief, a "gift" that is not a gift. Lobelia cries. The continent gets a blizzard. Korin laughs. The other gods consider Korin's conduct here unforgivable. The consideration changes nothing.

Saessa — Mutual recognition. They both know exactly what the other is, and they keep their interactions short and pointed. Korin has tried to provoke her into ruining a particular long marriage; Saessa declined on the grounds that she was already planning to.

Vaerith — He flirts with her in the loose, distracted way he flirts with everyone. She finds his elusiveness intensely annoying — there is nothing in him she can dependably hurt, and that, to Korin, is a kind of insult.

Veshen — They have, in three centuries of overlap, exchanged perhaps twenty words. The exchanges have been formally polite. Neither has anything the other wants.

See Also

• _Pantheon Index
• Aerith Soln
• Meni
• Cindy
• Tindrel
• Lobelia
• Saessa
• Vaerith
• Veshen
• Earth
• Yggdrasil World System

— Vel Asharen, The Interplanar Athenaeum