Ezynon Moronyad

Ezynon Moronyad is a scholar and thaumatologist based in the city of Dyqamay, noted for his work on the cultures of the Sailors on the Sea of Jars, which he regards as containing numerous resonances with the pre-Wesmodian worship of the god Zargyod. In addition to publishing widely Moronyad is in possession of a large archive of research material he has gathered over his long career.

Biographical details

Ezynon Moronyad is 65 years old and is the uncle of the current Siege of Steel and Silver in the Dyqamayan Circle of Eight. His father held the seat by virtue of his involvement in the Dyqamayan steel trade, but Ezynon was the youngest of four children and was never groomed for public office. Two of his elder siblings have served in the role - first a sister, then a brother when she died in childbirth - and the seat is now occupied by his nephew. Moronyad has made all appropriate statements of support for his relatives but a persistent rumour has it that he resents their influence and public profile.
Moronyad has travelled widely, frequently visiting the other two insular cities and also - less commonly - visiting the southern cities, as well as Ramoros. The stated purpose of this travel was initially to further the family's business contacts, though Moronyad eventually dropped this facade and began travelling much more simply, sometimes going so far as to offer to work his passage on ships embarked on enterprises with which he had no connection. He was swept overboard in a storm at the age of thirty and only rescued with some difficulty; at the age of 33 he was involved in a dockside brawl in Loros and left with a disfiguring scar. He undertook such plebian journeys until an inquiry to his left hand at the age of 45 cost him the use of two fingers thereupon.
For the last two decades Moronyad has lived quietly in a small, conspicuously well-fortified house adjoining the family estate in the richer quarter of Dyqamay. He still frequents the docks of the city occasionally but apart from some short visits to Dypholyos he confines himself to his home port. He has a reputation for bitterness and irascibility and is said to be unpopular with his neighbours, mostly because of his hectoring demands for privacy, which are made regardless of whether that privacy is actually being impinged upon.

Thaumatological significance

It has been in his apparent retirement in Dyqamay that Moronyad has gradually revealed the purpose of his long-term fraternisation with the sailing profession. It was, in fact, field work for a long-running program to catalogue and analyse the oral and musical culture of the Sailors on the Sea of Jars. Over the course of his twenties, thirties and forties Moronyad built up a large catalogue of sea shanties, recording scores of such songs, many of them in multiple forms. By tracing the development of these songs and their influence on each other over timeMoronyad hopes to be able to build up a convincing history of music and song at sea.
This, he argues, is crucial to the study of the cult of Zargyod, and of pre-Wesodian magic. Observing the well-established history of shipboard shrines to the god, Moronyad argues that the lay piety of the sailors who spread the cult represented a truer body of knowledge of the god than the commercially-minded urban clericy. Alchemists may find something useful in studying what he calls 'the cult ashore,' but to understand the god of fortune and the sea, he suggests, requires research into the cultures of shipboard life in the pre- and immediately post-Wesmodian era. The songs, tunes, dances, sayings and stories of the sailors, he argues, contain actionable echoes of the liturgies of Zargyod, and these echoes, if carefully researched, could be reconstructed into magical techniques that manipulate the laws of probability - a point he rather abstractly identifies as the key issue of thaumatology.
Moronyad has a reputation for caustic and irascible letter-writing campaigns in which he excoriates those who dispute his methodologies. Though this has understandably led to some bitter intellectual rivalries, those who forebear his choleric demeanour often observe incisive commentary on his chosen specialisation in his letters. This has led to a fairly regular stream of visitors to his house to consult his collection, something Moronyad encourages so long as visits are arranged with sufficient notice and due respect is paid to him and his work. Very occasionally invitations to visit will be extended, particularly to those who have something to contribute.
Moronyad claims to be writing up a large, authoritative collection of sea shanties, though he has been claiming this for over a decade and those who have visited him have not been shown any particularly convincing forward movement on the project. The one major piece of scholarship he has published to date is his Book of Morogyad, a treatise on the shipboard worship of Zargyod which positions Morogyad as less of a thaumaturge in his own right and more of an intercessory figure via whose good offices sailors courted the favour of his father.