Krezzan

In the religious tradition of the Eleven Cities, Krezzan is the god of time, and therefore of death. He was generally depicted swathed in dark hooded robes that - for most of the history of sincere cultic are - concealed his face. Not generally portrayed as a malevolent deity, Krezzan was nevertheless often regarded as an obnoxious character given to exercising the power he had over mortals in an insouciant and casual way.
The priesthood of Krezzan adapted fairly well to the The Wesmodian Reformation  , which they seem to have anticipated; priests in some cities even took a role in dismantling other cults, notably that of Maryas. After the reformation they re-invented themselves as the Brotherhood of Rooks which, although more a philosophical order than a religious one, survives and enjoys a degree of social esteem to this day, despite a sinister reputation in some quarters.

Etymology

The meaning of the name Krezzan is obscure. Old Zolian, the language from which the other seven gods all derive their names, obviously includes the letter z, but uses it almost exclusively as an initial or terminal letter, seldom as an infix, and never as a digraph. The letter k is also uncommon, with q being the preferred method of recording velar stops. For a deity with such a fundamentally important portfolio to end up with such an unusual name - one with no clear meaning - is a remarkable linguistic occurrence for which there is no clear explanation.

Origins

One potential explanation for Krezzan's odd name has been mooted by thaumatologists; that the name is not drawn from Old Zolian at all, but from Ugiholcza. The region of the Eleven Cities overlaps with some of the historical domains of the Shroud Kings and those who know what to look for can find remnants of their tomb-cities fairly close by; Hulumay and Loros are believed to be built partially on top of such ruins. Scholars have noted that Ugiholcza features precisely the phonemes described above and that the Shroud King Achen'Krezz'acl - known to have completed the Rubric of the Eternal Spider - even has them in his name. The possibility therefore arises, they argue, that Krezzan is in fact Achen'Krezz'akl, who may still exist in an as-yet-undiscovered catacomb somewhere in the region. They point to the peculiar mythological origin of Krezzan - "rising from below" as further evidence for this dire possibility.
Other scholars dismiss this as paranoid alarmism, observing that Achen'Krezz'akl's base of operations was - insofar as these things can be established - on the other side of the Great Ocean. Were he still in existence it would be odd indeed for him to be anywhere near the Sea of Jars. Moreover the people of the Eleven Cities worshipped (or at least cautiously revered) Krezzan for over a millennium without any apparent recrudescence of Achen'Krezz'akl or any of his ilk which, even given the evident patience of some of these beings, would seem to speak against the idea. Scholars on both sides of the debate have appealed to the Brotherhood of Rooks - long believed to possess accurate histories of the Shroud Kings in their libraries at either Pholyos or Elpaloz - to clear the matter up, but the Rooks have not responded to such requests in any way. Certainly, however, the onomastic coincidence is eerie and the idea is taken more seriously than the accompanying idea that Ajqyod has some connection with the Shroud Kings.
The obvious place to look for evidence for any alternative theory is in the funerary practices of the early history of the region, which yield contradictory evidence. The archaeological record is fairly barren, with no clear physical evidence that any particular god was invoked at funerals until around 1,500 years ago - roughly halfway between the foundations of most of the cities and the Wesmodian Reformation. At that stage, a minority of gravestones in both Pholyos and Elpaloz begin to become inscribed with bas-reliefs depicting the deceased being cloaked by a tall, cowled figure. A very small number of these depictions show the figure in question as having male facial features, though in most cases their face is concealed by the hood. The figure is clearly Krezzan - some of these gravestones have been painted violet, his ritual colour - though exactly what the cloaking of the deceased actually represents, beyond death itself, is not clear. Why such imagery should have emerged, without any intermediary predecessors, is also unknown. It may represent the notion of the god taking some sort of pastoral responsibility for the dead, though there is scant literary evidence for any such shift in cult doctrine. Furthermore literary evidence makes it obvious that the priests of Krezzan habitually officiated at funerals much earlier than this. The appearance of the god of the archaeological record takes place long after he began to be venerated.
A final possibility - rather far-fetched - is that the heavily cowled Krezzan "rising from below" might represent some folk memory of the survivors of the Navigators of the Dex esh-Thaorr, some of whose underground bunkers have been found in the vicinity of the cities. The argument goes that the Navigators, tremendously deformed in their final generations, might have ventured from these bunkers heavily cowled, possibly to abduct people for food, and that the surface-dwelling survivors of such visitations might have come to fear and warily respect such figures. The theory fails to convince most thaumatologists, who observe that the entire history of the Shroud Kings played out between the last known Navigator activity and the rise of any recognisable subsequent human occupation of the region. In the highly unlikely event that any human being saw them and later went on to found a cult based on the experience, that cult would not be dedicated to a remotely anthropomorphic god.

Divine portfolio

Krezzan was the god of time and its effects. In practical terms this makes him the god of death, an inevitability that will befall all living things on a long enough scale of years. This gave him a sinister place in the imaginations of the cities, a generally lively and vivacious society not given to welcoming such solemnities.
Conversely, he was also responsible for growth and maturation, processes that by definition take place over time. As such his urban cult developed an association with children broadly analogous to that enjoyed by the predominantly rural cult of Dahan and had links with the cult of Hayan which were considered esoteric - but also oddly appropriate - for much of the time he was worshipped. The relationship between growth and decay was something that was of interest to philosophers of the cities, and even before the Wesmodian Reformation his cult was a sponsor of secular discussion about such matters.

Worship

Krezzan was not so much actively worshipped as he was warily respected and borne in mind. Mythology depicts him as a capricious entity who did not always wield his power over time and ability to hasten or cause death with as much responsibility or concern for the effects on his subjects as might have been hoped. As such he needed to be appeased, a matter that gave his priesthood considerable social currency in the cities during the pre-Wesmodian period.
In contrast to the open-plan, colonnaded temples of gods such as Ajqyod and Hayan, Krezzan's temples are akin to those of Maryas, being stolid, enclosed structures built with privacy and security in mind. Such buildings still exist in Oluz, Pholyos, Tyros, Loros, and Epaloz; two more, in Chogyos and Dypholyos were demolished in the aftermath of the Wesmodian Reformation. These last two are interesting in that both sites clearly show evidence of underground catacombs - particularly extensive in Chogyos - which lends some credence to the rumour that the existing temples contain such catacombs. Outsiders who are allowed access to these temples are closely escorted by priests or functionaries and opportunities to confirm these rumours, or determine what such catacombs are used for, are exceedingly rare. Ghoulish rumours circulate about ghosts and the walking dead haunting both the active and demolished the temples of Krezzan; few thaumatologists take such rumours particularly seriously, though more research into these catacombs would be necessary before they can be dismissed out of hand. The best records of these structures are of course kept by the Brotherhood of Rooks themselves, who guard the information closely.
In all cases these temples either adjoined the acknowledged grave fields of the city in question or were actually located within them. One of the central liturgical duty of the priests was to officiate at funerals, at which it was considered the done thing to have such a cleric lead the procession from the deceased's house to the place of burial and to speak catechistic prose prayers during the internment. Spoken in Old Zolian - not the lingua franca of the cities - these prayers would have been only very loosely understood by the laity hearing them, a point that Wesmod observed when he criticised the order in the third of his Wesmodian Invectives. The choice of liturgical language is odd given the fact that Krezzan appears not to be a Zolian word; the point is often used as evidence to suggest the god is a native entity to the Eleven Cities region. The actual content of these prayers, furthermore, is unclear. It does not appear to have occurred to any of the lay audience to record any of their impression, even if they understood it. Again, the Brotherhood of Rooks is widely reputed to have excellent archives, which presumably contain some records of such liturgy, but gaining access to those records is an uphill battle.
What is known is that the priesthood of Krezzan accepted donations for its services, and that the wealthy often engaged the priests for other purposes. They had a reputation as skilled physicians and apothecaries, viewed as superior in these fields to secular doctors, and having one of the order attend an ailing relative was seen as prestigious. They are said to have cured with healing hands, which may refer to some sort of therapeutic massage or pharmaceutical balm, or possibly both; thaumaturgy ought not be prematurely ruled out either. If their medical skill failed them, they were also known to be excellent morticians, having developed the science of embalming to such a degree that some members of the laity viewed as supernatural. Their preferred technique is unclear but appears to have involved a combination of scented and unscented ointments and prayers in (probably) Old Zolian. Once again the details of these techniques are presumably kept somewhere in the libraries of the Brotherhood of Rooks, if access thereto can be gained.
Such services obviously play to Krezzan's capacity as the god of time, as they preserve the body from the progression of illness and, should that fail, from the ravages of decomposition. They were costly and therefore mostly limited to the well-to-do in society. This had the effect of giving the cult of Krezzan a veneer of patrician respectability. Gravestones depicting the god are generally of the larger, costlier variety, with some such depictions actually carved into mausoleums, indicating that revering Krezzan in this sort of way appears to have been a practice of the wealthy. Perhaps desirable in the pre-Wesmodian era, this was used by Wesmod himself to fuel accusations of elitism during the reformation.
Such criticisms may not have been especially warranted. The priesthood engaged in well-attested - but, like so much else, vaguely-described - itinerant embassies to the hinterland beyond the cities, conducting funerary rites, tending to the sick and discussing philosophies of time and mortality with peasants, for no documented material return. It has been suggested that such embassies were motivated by little more than piety and a desire to share their discourse with members of society who would otherwise not have it. What the peasantry made of these odd, purple-robed clerics and their often somewhat esoteric discussion of the flow of time is not clear. There are a number of references in recorded mummery to violets being a traditional or desirable flower for funerals, however, and Krezzan has been observed as a character in a small number of such performances, demonstrating that the priesthood did succeed in extending recognition of their god beyond the cities.
One last interesting aspect of the worship of Krezzan is the priesthood's organisational links with those of other deities, specifically Ynglyas and MaryasThe presence of priests of Krezzan at conclaves of those of Ynglyas is well-attested and rumours of liaisons between them and the priesthood of Maryas appears to have been universally believed despite a shortage of genuine evidence. Liaisons between the cults of Krezzan and Ynglyas make a certain amount of sense given common concern the two deities had for settling the variable nature of the future though the implied variation in their methodologies - Ynglyas by predicting it, Krezzan by controlling it - makes the connection peculiar. Supposed connections with Maryas are perhaps more viscerally-motivated than intellectually defensible, and may stem from little more than the outward similarity between the temples of the two gods.

Wesmodian Reformation

Wesmod begins the third of his invectives with an uncharacteristic concession to the personal, emotional function of religion. Death is an inevitability, he allows, and it is unclear how much time any human being has before theirs comes for them. For time to be personified, and attributed with the caprice of death, is hardly surprising, he admits. He tells a personal anecdote about the death of his sister when he was ten years old - the age of the sister is not given - and how a priest of Krezzan had visited his house and spoken to his family, and to him directly, about this sad event. The conversation, he said, had the opposite effect to that the priest presumably intended, leaving him angry with Krezzan for taking his sister and with the god's earthly representatives, reputed physicians and healers, for failing to prevent this. From this point of departure, he launches a reserved and respectful but also quite vehement dismissal of the actual value of personifying death in the way that the worship of Krezzan represents. To do so is to attribute a human agency - in the form of a mind constructed by worshippers on human lines - to a natural process, and thus to turn the unpredictability of death into a trait of a human personality that can somehow be prevailed upon to change its course of action. This grants false how to the ailing and their loved ones, Wesmod argues, a cruel and counterproductive thing to do.
The response to this within the cult of Krezzan is difficult to assess with any certainty. The position of the Brotherhood of Rooks is that this critique dovetailed neatly with discussions within the institution at the time. They state that the cult had become aware that their work as morticians and physicians had given rise to a perception among the general public that the priesthood themselves had some sort of power over life and death, a situation they had not intended and were concerned about. Priests of Krezzan in Tyros met with Wesmod to discuss the common cause they had with him, and took advice about how to refocus their work to dispel talk of cryptic magic and make their true capacity - as a learned philosophical order focussed on the position of the individual in relation to the stream of time - both more effective and more evident. Wesmod is said to have been receptive to this sort of engagement and to have worked with the priests in long, private discussions over several days before the delegation returned to their temple to implement many of his recommendations. Via correspondence with the branches of the cult that existed in other communities, such reforms spread throughout the cities.
One of the problems with this story of ecumenical open-mindedness is that there is no evidence for it in any of the biographical traditions surrounding Wesmod. Those biographies are problematic in themselves, typically being written many years after the reformer's death by those keen to lionise the completeness of his victory, and it is quite within the bounds of possibility that a story of accommodation with theocratic institutions might be left out of such chronicles. Whether Wesmod's personal engagement in his objections to this cult (the story about the death of his sister, a person similarly unattested in any other contemporary sources) would predispose him to either meet with the priests or actively spurn them is another interesting question. Perhaps the most awkward issue to deal with is that the only source for this story is the Brotherhood of Rooks themselves, a closed and notoriously secretive institution quite unlike the sort of open, communicative order that presumably would have emerged from the sort of conference they describe. It is not hard to conjure up conspiracy theories about the priesthood of Krezzan promulgating stories about their receptivity to Wesmod's ideas in order to further public engagement with and reception of their cult in a post-Wesmodian environment.
Among the points in favour of this sort of theory are the long-standing links between the cults of Krezzan and Ynglyas. As a cult of prognosticators, it has been suggested, the priesthood of Ynglyas may have been able to furnish that of Krezzan with some sort of magical forewarning of Wesmod's ideas. The speed with which the Krezzanite priests claim to have spoken with Wesmod might be taken as evidence for this point. Standing against this idea is the fact that it attributes some genuine soothsaying ability on the part of the Ynglyan cult, an idea that modern thaumaturges are divided upon. It also begs the question of why the priests of Ynglyas themselves folded their tents during the reformation rather than using this putative forewarning to their advantage.
What is clear is that, somewhat like the priesthood of Zargyod, the cult of Krezzan managed to weather the Wesmodian Reformation by means of far-reaching institutional reform. There does appear to have been some atrophy of public subscription - it will be noted that the temples in Dypholyos and Chogyos were demolished, though exactly when is not clear - and much of their status as psychopomps and ritual leaders is gone. The Brotherhood of Rooks endures, however.

Current status of cult

Main aticle: Brotherhood of Rooks
The modern Brotherhood of Rooks is an academic and philosophical institution operating libraries and academies in Oluz, Tyros, Pholyos, Epaloz and Loros. These institutions are descended directly from the priesthoods of Krezzan that existed in those cities and continue to maintain the temples of the gods as operating centres. The name stems from their origins in Tyros, where the order was originally male-only, though it has since come to welcome female members in all its branches. The reference to rooks refers to a widespread rural superstition that such birds are psychopomps, though how such a superstition became attached to such a firmly urban institution is not clear. 
The stated aim of the Brotherhood of Rooks is to research and debate the nature of time and its effects on both individual humans and society as a whole. The moral tone of the institution is famously rigid, with members rumoured to follow strict codes of personal behaviour. Rumours are all the general public has to go on, however, as the Brothers (the honorific used to refer to members regardless of gender) very seldom discuss any of their internal traditions or activities with outsiders, preferring instead to offer learned advice, either to institutions or individuals, as they see fit. Such advice is sought-after and often seen as an indication that the topic under discussion is a matter of some gravity. The silence about their internal affairs, however, has given rise over the centuries since the Reformation to a body of rumour and superstition as to what these savants are actually up to, with tales of thaumaturgy and necromancy known to circulate in some cities. The Brothers politely refuse to respond to these accusations.
Becoming a Brother is a demanding process, though one that aristocratic families often push their young members into. Rather than being expensive, as it is to join the Commercial Guilds descended from the cult of Zargyod, the Brotherhood of Rooks merely subjects prospective members to gruelling interviews to test their intellectual and moral fibre. Members gain access - though exactly how this access is managed is unclear - to some of the most extensive libraries in the world, with especially strong holdings on issues of logic, history, eschatology, time and death. Thaumatologists covet access to this material, which may reveal a great deal about the powerful, cosmos-bending powers attributed to Krezzan and his followers in the mythology surrounding the god. The Brothers do occasionally grant access to independent researchers, but under tight supervision that raises questions about exactly how much of their knowledge they are actually sharing.