Kivay

God of Civilization, Magic, Kings, and Truth

Kivay is the Kivish God of Wisdom, Knowledge, Planning, Civilization, Magic, and Leadership. She is the manifestation of the world's foresight, self-awareness, and good intent. She is the shining golden winged Kobold who watches the skies and seas and whose spirits deliver golden crowns of knowledge to the wisest of mortals.
Kivay is one of Kivishta's two entirely-good Gods, called the Aspirant Gods - the other Aspirant God being Ketisk, God of Plenty. Of the two Aspirant Gods, Kivay is the most important for formal religion and religious thought. Ketisk may provide the health and sustenance needed to begin one's intellectual journey to enlightenment, but it is Kivay who will actually guide and protect that path to spiritual awakening. Kivish religion is not really about the Gods on an intellectual level: the Gods are useful symbols and many believe in their tangible reality but any God worth worshipping should want to liberate their followers by empowering them to walk their own paths to enlightenment.
Kivay is the God of all good things that are intentional and cerebral: philosophy, justice, charity, magic, medicine, wisdom, and good leadership. The pursuit of enlightenment, moral decision making, and navigating difficult choices are all things that Kivay aids people with.
As a note, Kivay the god is not a real entity in this world. He is a character in Kivish imagination, refined by centuries of meditation, politics, and cultural exchange. This does not make him unimportant. Emesh, spirit of knowledge, often empowers paladins in her name and falsifies evidence of her existence, as part of his campaign of cultural plurality. As discussed below, some Kivish people are aware that Kivay is not real - but Kivay has always been semi-symbolic anyways.

Kivay's Spiritual Role

Kivay represents the pure and moral teacher. Kivish clerics and followers know that their own historical prophets and sages were flawed mortals, and Kivay works as a way to represent the moral and true teachings of the past without the baggage. Kivay is the ideal priest, teacher, king, general, and matriarch. She is righteous and just authority. She is the conscience of the world, the angel on the shoulder of reality itself. In this capacity, she resonates with the innate capacity for wisdom and correct decision making present in all people from birth.
The Kivish Pantheon divides Gods into neat categories based on old theological categorizations of the mind. All Gods are understood as aspects of the Dreamer - Rumek - whose mind hosts the shared delusion that we perceive as reality. Different schools of thought understand this differently, but all agree that the pantheon generally correlates to impulses and elements of Rumek's mind and dream.
Gods are divided between Good (Aspirant), Neutral (Mundane), and Evil (Profane) - two for each. These moral categories unsurprisingly represent the moral capacity inherent in each person and all things. Only the Good, Aspirant Gods are actually capable of spiritually protecting people, though, as even the Neutral Gods will lead worshippers to eternal suffering by accident. Each of these pairs is divided between an Orderly God and a Disorderly God. Orderly Gods represent the parts of the mind that are intentional - the Lightened Mind. Disorderly Gods represent the parts of the mind that are unintentional or hidden - the Darkened Mind. Least importantly, every pair has a Cthonic (earthly) member and a Celestial (heavenly and oceanic) member, representing the divide between emotional and immediate minds. Cthonic gods relate to our immediate minds, the things in front of us. Celestial Gods relate to our emotional, less visible stimuli. Kivay is Aspirant: she seeks to improve the world and refuses to accept suffering as the only fate for mortal souls. Kivay is Orderly: she embodies intention, logical thought, and planning. Kivay is Celestial: she represents the elusive, social, personal realities of learning and enlightenment, rather than the physical realities of what is in front of us.
Kivay is often understood as perfect and righteous, but distant and long-term. She represents long term spiritual gain from short-term sacrifice and work. For many, Kivay doesn't just represent that payoff but actively ensures it: she makes sure that, in this life or in a future reincarnation, all good hard work pays off and every good deed is rewarded. Perhaps those rewards will be abstract, getting closer to enlightenment, but Kivay respects and blesses those who put in the effort and do the right thing. Kivay is justice, at least in the sense of rewarding the good. Kivay only punishes through rejection and "banishment" from her good graces: the Profane Gods pay the wages of sin.
To people of the Reverent Path, Kivay is the most important God. Reverent Path symbolism and theology often portrays Kivay as distinctly superior to Ketisk: Kivay is often shown as Ketisk's dominant marital partner, who sows the seeds of plenty that Ketisk then tends to. The Reverent Path frames planning, order, and law as the ultimate form of goodness in a very tangible and cosmic sense, so Kivay as the Ultimate Good makes sense. The other Paths are more balanced in their approach to the Aspirant Gods, though no Path really has any negative characterization of Kivay. All Kivishta agrees that enlightenment is a process of intent, traditional learning, and hard work, so Kivay is important even to the "chaotic" Liberated Path.

Kivay the Character

Kivay's perfection makes her a less-dynamic character than the other Gods in storytelling. She is the archetypal teacher and authority figure, usually not the protagonist of any given story. Sometimes her advice can be cryptic but for the most part she is always a character that has to be right, which limits her narrative role. Sometimes Kivay does act as a judge in myths or literature, and in that role she is a bit more involved. When acting as Justice, it is common for other characters to have to plead their case to her. Many old plays and stories have interludes where, after a character dies, they stand trial for their actions before Kivay and have to explain themselves while she asks probing questions. Some stories have Kivay then deliver the "moral" of that character's stories; others end in greater mystery, as Kivay takes their arguments into account and ushers them wordlessly into the next life.
Kivay can also be a questioner who appears to test a person's moral thinking. Stories often have her either take the form of a "feathered hermit" or a "hermit with a white chicken" to poke and prod at characters who are facing moral conundrums. Sometimes, this helps them make the right decision. Sometimes, Kivay's intervention highlights how the character is doing something they know is wrong. At other times, she shows how morally difficult the question is altogether and helps the audience consider the basic moral question at the heart of the thing.
It is worth noting that Kivay, like the rest of the Kivish Pantheon, isn't really a mythological actor like the Uvaran Pantheon are: Kivish stories tend to follow mortals.

Divine Domains

Kivay is invoked by those seeking to teach, learn, plan, or decide. She is often invoked alongside her counterpart, Ketisk, for crafts and skill-based material tasks. If you want to be smart, wise, and capable, you pray to Kivay. If you want long-term gains, you pray to Kivay. If the path forward is unclear, you pray to Kivay. It isn't about the theme of the material components like it is with the Uvaran Pantheon.
The main exceptions come from the Cthonic/Celestial divide: in matters of weather and sea, Kivay is key. Those wanting protection when travelling by ship pray for Kivay's guidance and blessing; same for those needing a change in weather.
Reverent Path followers often pray to Kivay as a shepherd of the dead, as she rules over death and reincarnation as the Mistress of Rumakel. Liberated Path followers pray to her instead as a Goddess of interpretation - Ketisk speaks words of deep truth, but Kivay is the one who listens and learns. Promised Path followers associate Kivay with the holy bloodlines and the proper traditions of purification.
Kivay is often recontextualized based on local needs: in palaces she is a King but in households she is a wise grandmother.
Some Uvarans, especially Uvaran Kobolds, worship Kivay as a part of the Uvaran Pantheon.

Holidays

Kivay appears in many Kivish holidays - as the symbolic manifestation of enlightenment, she is present at every festival. There are a few holidays particularly focused on Kivay, however:

• Trodiren, February 28th, is the day of Kivay's Rest. It is a day of relaxation, contemplation, and charity, when work ends and people turn from the material to the divine. All exchanges of money are forbidden this day (though many people work around this by agreeing to exchange money the next day), as this is a day when people are to act by what is right and not by what is profitable. 
• Awakening Day, May 14th - 16th, has one of the three festival days devoted to Kivay. The second day is Kivay's Day, the day of restraint. Scholars, leaders, craftsmen, priests, gurus, and warriors are all honored this day, and people are to abstain from material pleasure. 
• Wondersday, June 20th, is a day devoted to Kivay as the knowledge and learning god. This is the day of crafts, when guilds and artisans parade and feast. 
• Glory Day, November 13th, is a specifically Reverent Path holiday devoted to civilization and order. Kivay is the patron god of this festival, in a very regal and legal context.
• Sovernten, winter solstice in December, sees Liberated Path and @Promisfollowers invoke and pray to Kivay as a God of Prophetic Interpretation.

Church/Cult

Kivishta

Aligned Organization

Kivish Pantheon