Lobelia, the Quiet Frost

Athenaeum entry. Correspondent of record: Vel Asharen. The subject has granted one audience. The audience was, in this correspondent's experience, the gentlest interaction yet documented with any member of the pantheon — and ended with snowfall in a region that had not seen snow in two centuries.

Form

Lobelia appears as a woman of approximately twenty-seven years, with flawless skin the color of new snow, faintly blue at the temples and the tips of her fingers. Her hair is silver — the specific silver of moonlight on still water — and she wears it in an elaborate crown-like braid that has not changed in any of her recorded appearances.

She wears a pale silver-grey blindfold of soft cloth. The clergy never depict her without it. Whether her eyes exist beneath it, what color they are, and what she sees through it are questions she has, on the rare occasions she has been asked, declined to answer.

She is soft-spoken to the point of near-silence, and profoundly shy — uncomfortable in crowds, exhausted by unexpected attention, and inclined to withdraw rather than engage when the social demand exceeds her preference. The cold deepens around her when she does. Her clergy keep introductions short and crowds small. The correspondent's one audience with her was conducted at a whisper that did not feel quiet.

Domain

Lobelia is the goddess of the stillness in winter. Snow, ice, the held breath of a forest under cold weather, the precise pattern frost makes on a windowpane at dawn — these are her domain and, in her own quiet assessment, her pleasure.

She is gentle. She is not weak. Mortals who have mistaken the first for the second have, in well-documented cases, frozen — without malice on her part, without anger, without anything one could call retaliation. She simply does what she is, and what she is is the cold.

Her pacts are extended quietly to those who serve cold places — winter hunters, mountain peoples, ice-fishermen, those who maintain shelter and warmth in regions that do not naturally provide them. She grants resistance to cold, the ability to walk on snow without leaving a trail, and, to her most devoted, a small share of the silence that surrounds her wherever she goes.

The Aurora

The shimmering curtains of green, violet, and pale gold that drape the night sky at high latitudes are, by long Athenaeum confirmation and by Lobelia's own quiet assent, hers.

The phenomenon itself has a knowable physical cause. The world is wrapped in a magnetic field that deflects the continuous stream of charged particles arriving from the sun and from deeper sources beyond it. Where that field's lines funnel those particles down toward the rarefied upper air at high latitudes, the particles shed their energy as visible light. This much is mortal physics, well-established in the more advanced arcane and natural-philosophy traditions, and Lobelia herself has not contested it.

What Lobelia provides is the form. The particles arrive on their own schedule. The magnetism guides them. The cold air responds. But the curtains, the slow drift, the deliberate colors, the way the light moves — these are her, and no one else. The aurora is the visible mark of Lobelia ruling the radiance that radiation produces when it touches her domain. Without her, the same physical interaction would still occur. It would not look like this. It would not, by any account from any pantheon scholar, look like much at all.

Mortals across the high latitudes have, for as long as records survive, treated the aurora as a sign of Lobelia's good will — a thing she puts on the sky when she is content, or when she wishes to be visible without being present. Her clergy confirm this reading with the standard hedge that the goddess herself has never quite said so. this correspondent was never permitted an audience.

Folk practice in the regions where auroras are common holds that prayers offered during a particularly bright display are heard with unusual clarity. Lobelia's clergy do not confirm this. They do not discourage it either.

Worship

Her temples are quiet places, built of pale stone, kept cold by intention rather than necessity. They are common in regions where winter is the operative season — mountain ranges, northern coasts, the high steppes — and rare elsewhere. Where they exist, they tend to function as community shelters as much as places of worship; the clergy run warm-meal services, winter relief, and the long-term care of those who would otherwise be alone in cold months.

The faithful pray to Lobelia for safe passage through cold, for the patience to endure long winters, and for the quiet strength to hold one's own ground without raising one's voice. She is one of the kindest gods in the pantheon by her clergy's accounting and the pantheon's own.

Relationships

Aerith Soln — Aerith treats Lobelia with the careful warmth. They have tea together at irregular intervals. The tea is always cold by the time they finish.

Meni — They take occasional walks together when his work allows it.

Korin Soln — Korin loves to pick on her. The harassment is constant, creative, and exquisitely targeted at exactly the kind of attention Lobelia cannot tolerate — engineered social ambushes, public spectacles, the deliberate manufacture of crowds in places Lobelia thought she would be alone. Lobelia withdraws. The continent gets a blizzard. Korin laughs. The pantheon's general assessment is that Korin's behavior here is unforgivable; the assessment is widely held and changes nothing. Lobelia has never asked the other gods to intervene. They have, on three documented occasions, intervened anyway.

Vaerith — Her snow rides his winds. The collaboration is unhurried and almost wordless, and produces some of the most beautiful storms recorded in the northern regions.

Lurexios — Her brother. She loves him, in the way that a very long winter loves the end of itself — with relief, and with the knowledge that it will circle back. He is the loudest thing in any room he enters and he enters every room she is in. She has asked him to stop approximately eight hundred times. He hears her, and he hugs her, and he makes a pun about it, and he does not stop. The continent gets unusually heavy snow during his more creative phases. He does not notice the correlation.

Krorus — Distant yet caring. Krorus takes care of issues before they even arrive.

Noil — Cordial and distant. His children mostly survive her, which she finds appropriate; she does not interfere with the work either of them does.

See Also

• _Pantheon Index
• Aerith Soln
• Meni
• Korin Soln
• Vaerith
• Veshen
• Krorus
• Noil
• Thurim Ironwake
• Lurexios
• Yggdrasil World System

— Vel Asharen, The Interplanar Athenaeum