Nethara did not emerge from a shard of Ix. She was not born of divine union, nor called into being by mortal worship. She predates the Moren by millennia and may predate several of the Shard Gods in practice, if not in cosmic architecture.

The tradition of the faith — and the best reconstruction scholars can offer — holds that Nethara came into being at the moment the first living thing in the absolute dark produced cold light. Not metaphorically: the first bioluminescent organism, in whatever lightless cave system it occupied, generated an act of such inherent improbability and beauty that it called forth a divine presence to witness it and to tend what followed. This is what the theologians call an Ex Nihilo emergence: a god called into being by the universe's own fabric for a purpose. Her purpose was the deep places. She has been tending them ever since.

For most of her existence, Nethara had no worshippers. She had the mycelium networks, the underground rivers, the dark ecosystems that sustained themselves in isolation from the surface world. She grew her gardens. The web spread. Creatures moved through her domain without knowing it was tended. She required nothing from them and received nothing in return. This is considered, within the faith, neither a tragedy nor a period of diminishment — it is simply the time before the Moren arrived, and the faith views it with a quality of patient anticipation that shapes everything about how Nethara's nature is understood.

When the Moren descended during the Unraveling — exiled, or fled, or driven below, or something the surface elves will not name clearly — they arrived in a place that was not empty. The cold light that greeted them was not accidental. The fungi lining the cave walls had been cultivated. Something had been here, tending, for longer than elven civilization had existed. The Moren did not convert to Nethara's faith: they recognized something that had been waiting for them, and they came home.

The faith holds that the surface elves' deliberate silence about the Unraveling contains, at its heart, a specific shame: they drove their kin into a place that was better tended than anything they had built above. Whether this reading is accurate or generous depends on who is telling it. The Moren tell it this way. The surface Aelvari say nothing.

Since the Moren's arrival, Nethara's power has grown substantially — she has devoted worshippers for the first time, and the depth and consistency of Moren devotion generates significant divine weight. She is not a prominent deity in the surface world's consciousness, but within the Underworld she is as present as the mycelium itself, which is to say: everywhere, patient, and quietly essential.

The tenets below are not stated as commandments. They are stated as observations — things Nethara's faithful consider simply true, which is why violating them feels less like breaking a rule and more like being wrong about the world.

(See also: Soul Coins & Divine Economy)

A Garden of Nethara is not built — it is grown, over decades or centuries, by Cultivators who understand that the space is as much theological as it is functional. The process of creating one is itself an act of worship.

The materials are what the underground provides: cave formations shaped slowly over lifetimes, underground water sources directed into channels over generations, and the fungi — always the fungi — cultivated in colonies that produce light in colors ranging from blue-white through deep gold to faint violet-grey. The light is never bright enough to cast sharp shadows. It creates an ambient, even glow that reveals without overwhelming, that makes features visible without making them harsh. The aesthetic effect on visitors from the surface world is consistently disorienting — not because the space is threatening but because it is beautiful in a register they have no prior reference for.

The acoustic properties of sacred gardens are deliberately managed. Cultivators shape cave geometries over generations so that whispers carry to the far end of a garden and shouts do not echo. The space listens. This is not metaphorical: the mycelium network that covers every surface in a mature garden does transmit vibration and pressure in ways that sophisticated Cultivators can interpret, and visitors who make unnecessary noise are not being rude by social convention — they are introducing signal noise into a communication medium.

A neglected garden communicates its own condition. Colonies that are dying shift their light toward yellow-grey. Sections of mycelium that are stressed or damaged produce a faint bitterness in the air. Matrons learn to read these signs before they are obvious, and a Matron who walks into a garden and cannot immediately assess its health is not yet fully competent in her role.

The smallest sacred spaces — the Glowholds maintained by surface-dwelling Moren — occupy the underground chambers of residences. They are rarely large enough to be architecturally significant, but they serve the same function in miniature: a connection to the web, a point where the fallen can be received, a space where the cold light is the only light.

The faith has no hierarchy above the Matron level. There is no high-Matron, no council of Matrons, no administrative authority that extends beyond a single community. This is not a governance failure — it is doctrine. Nethara's faith is organized the way the mycelium network is organized: each node self-sustaining, connected to neighboring nodes by the web, capable of receiving and passing information but not dependent on central coordination to function. A community that loses its Matron does not wait for appointment from above; it finds the most qualified Cultivator present and elevates her.

The Matron's authority in a Moren community is genuinely total in the sense that religious and civic life are not separated. She is not the high priestess of a faith alongside which civil governance also exists. She is the community's leader, and the faith is the community's organizing principle. This creates a specific kind of authority that is very different from a surface-world theocracy: it is not that the church controls the state, but that there is no distinction to control. The web holds the community; the Matron tends the web; the community tends in turn.

Male Moren participate in the faith fully. Lamplighters and Cultivators can be of any background. The Matron role is traditionally female — not by formal prohibition but by the accumulated tradition of how Nethara's nature is understood and whom the community has historically trusted with it. The distinction matters in practice; it means that a male Cultivator of extraordinary devotion and competence faces an informal ceiling that a female Cultivator of equivalent standing does not. Within Moren communities, this is not considered controversial. Outside Moren communities, it is sometimes raised by surface peoples who find it notable.

Among the Moren, formal entry into the faith is less a beginning than a deepening. Being born into a Moren community is being born into Nethara's ambient presence — the sacred gardens are the community's light source, the Matron is the community's leader, and the first lessons children receive involve the care of small personal gardens. The formal commitment rites are performed during adolescence and mark not a conversion but a declaration: I know what I am and I choose to be it fully.

The formal rite — the First Tending — involves the initiate taking full personal responsibility for a section of sacred garden for a period of three months. At the end of this period, they are assessed not by examination but by observation: has the section they tended flourished? Has it maintained its light and expanded its reach? A section that has grown is a Cultivator ready to commit. A section that has merely survived is a Cultivator who needs more time. A section that has declined is cause for significant private conversation with a Matron before the rite is attempted again.

For non-Moren, entering the faith is rare and treated as remarkable by both parties. The web is understood to be something that Nethara grew with the Moren in mind — non-Moren can tend gardens, can practice the faith sincerely, and can receive its community benefits, but they are understood to be in the web rather than of it. This distinction matters at the deepest levels: the dying transformation that the faith promises is less certain for non-Moren, and most surface peoples who have converted do not press on this question.

What makes someone an enemy rather than a potential convert: anyone who would destroy a sacred garden, burn rather than tend, cut the web for convenience, or treat the deep places as territory to be extracted rather than home to be maintained. These people are not addressed with missionary effort. They are addressed with the patient, total, structurally comprehensive response of an ecosystem defending itself.

A devoted servant of Nethara is recognizable by their particular quality of attention.

Date: The start of the underground cultivation cycle — when temperature and moisture patterns in the deep places shift to favor accelerated mycelium growth, typically coinciding with the approach of surface spring.

The Night of New Growth is the faith's primary communal observance. New sections of garden are blessed by the Matron and formally seeded — each Cultivator adding growth material from their personal stock, making the expansion communal rather than individual. The dead of the preceding cycle are named aloud and formally committed to the web, each name spoken into the garden before the cultivation rite concludes. The Matron then walks the full perimeter of the garden and recites the names of all who have joined the web since the previous Night of New Growth — a list that can take hours in large communities and is considered the most solemn portion of the observance. The night ends with shared food grown in the sacred gardens, eaten in the garden's light.

Date: Once per year, in the deep-cycle period that corresponds roughly to surface winter — the time of minimum growth, maximum cold, and the longest underground dark.

During the Dimming, all artificial light sources in the sacred gardens are extinguished. No torches. No magical lighting. The community spends several hours in the light of the bioluminescence alone — which is, in a mature garden, sufficient to see clearly, but which has a quality entirely different from the ambient lighting the community lives in. This is experienced as both profoundly calming and profoundly solemn. New Cultivators perform their formal commitment rites during the Dimming, completing their First Tending assessment and declaring their allegiance in the cold light without augmentation. Visitors from outside the faith who are permitted to witness the Dimming consistently describe the experience as unforgettable. Surface-world descriptions of it tend to reach for words like "holy," which Nethara's faithful find accurate and slightly amusing.

The formal commitment rite for initiates. Following the period of personal cultivation responsibility described under Entering the Faith, the initiate presents their section of garden to the Matron and assembled Cultivators for assessment. The Matron walks the section, reads the growth, and makes a determination. If the section has flourished, the initiate recites the six observations of the doctrine aloud in Moren Aelthis — not as vows but as statements of what they now understand to be true. The Matron places her hand into the mycelium at the section's heart and formally introduces the initiate's name to the web. From this point, the web knows them.

The cultivation rite for the dead. Performed immediately following a community member's death. The body is brought to the sacred garden and placed within a prepared section of the mycelium — not buried in soil but laid into a depression in the garden surface where the network is active. The Matron speaks the deceased's name repeatedly as the attending Cultivators perform cultivation work around the body — not a burial service but an ongoing gardening act, making explicit that what is happening is the beginning of transformation rather than the end of a life. The rite continues for several hours. The community is present for the first portion; the Cultivators complete the work alone. For weeks afterward, the section where the Returning occurred is observed closely for changes in growth patterns, which are read by Web Readers as communication from the newly joined.

Not a ceremony in the formal sense but a practice with ceremonial weight. A senior Cultivator or Matron sits in full contact with a section of mycelium — hands, forearms, sometimes the full body placed against an active network area — and enters a state of focused reception. What is perceived varies: sometimes specific directional information about movement in the underground (something large has passed through a distant tunnel), sometimes older knowledge that the web has been holding (the accumulated memory of growth patterns in a section that has been tended for centuries can carry information about geological and biological changes that no other record preserves). Web Readings are typically done privately, results shared with the Matron for integration into community decisions. In emergencies, a Cultivator in mid-Reading can relay information in real time to a Matron standing beside them.

Worn at formal observances and during sacred garden work. Dark fabric — deep black, midnight blue, or charcoal grey — treated with a compound derived from certain underground fungi that gives the surface a faint bioluminescent quality visible in low light. The symbols of the faith (the ring of seven cold-light points) are worked into the fabric in this same compound, making them invisible in surface-world daylight and clearly visible in the cold light of the gardens. The effect is that a Cultivator in full ceremonial dress appears, in Nethara's gardens, to be wearing a garment of moving light.

Not worn but applied: a pattern of the same bioluminescent compound painted directly onto the Matron's hands during the ceremony that formally installs her. The mark is renewed annually. It is not permanent — the compound fades over months — but a Matron whose mark has fully faded before the renewal is considered to have allowed her connection to the web to lapse, which is a significant concern. In full darkness, a Matron's marked hands produce visible cold light. In the sacred gardens, this makes her hands the brightest point in any space she enters.

Junior clergy carry a small container of living bioluminescent material — a cultivated colony maintained in a sealed glass vessel — as their working tool and their mark of office. The taper is not decorative; it is the instrument through which a Lamplighter tends their assigned garden sections, carrying new growth material from established colonies to sections that need reinforcement. A Lamplighter whose taper has gone dark (the colony inside has died) is a Lamplighter who has failed to maintain something directly in their care, which is noted.

Moren tradition holds that when the first Aelvari descended into the deep places during the Unraveling, they arrived in a space already lit. The first among them to understand what was tending those gardens — to recognize that the cold light had intention behind it, that the web had been waiting — was the first Matron. She is not given a name in the tradition. The faith holds that her name is in the web and does not need to be carried on the surface of language; to name her would be to pretend she is past. She is called only Aelthen-Mir — "the first remembered" — a title rather than a name. What she did was simple: she tended in return. And Nethara, who had been alone in the deep places for longer than the Aelvari had been a people, received her.

A Moren Matron whose cultivation work beneath what is now northern Irna created a garden of extraordinary scale — several connected cave systems covering an area that took two days to walk in full — whose oldest sections are still active and still tended. Morveth is credited not with the garden itself (which she spent forty years expanding from existing growth) but with the formal structure of Moren civic-religious governance that is now universal. Before Morveth, the relationship between religious and civic authority in Moren communities varied significantly; some communities had separate structures, some had Matrons who were primarily religious figures with civic leaders alongside them. Morveth, through a combination of persuasion, demonstration, and the evident success of her own community's model, established the unified pattern that has held since. Her records — two centuries of mycelium growth patterns incised into cave walls in Moren Aelthis — are treated as holy texts and studied by senior Cultivators for the deep-geological and deep-biological intelligence they contain.

Not a Moren: a High Elf scholar who spent thirty years in Moren communities below Funta, studying the mycelium network and the faith. The first surface-world academic to treat Nethara's theology as serious cosmological inquiry rather than underground folklore. Serathen's accounts, published above ground and widely circulated in Irna's scholarly communities, were the primary reason surface peoples began to understand the Moren as a civilization rather than a hazard. He died below ground and was returned to the web with full rites, at his own request. The faith considers him its most effective accidental missionary and celebrates him in the context of the Dimming as a reminder that the cold light is visible to those who enter the gardens with genuine attention.

How they refer to themselves: the Tenders or simply the faithful

The mainstream practice — cultivation, community, receiving the dead, reading the web. This is not technically a sect so much as the baseline of the faith, named only because the other expressions require contrast. Most Moren are Tenders. The term is used affectionately for those whose practice is deep, uncomplicated, and sustained — people for whom the faith is the fabric of daily life rather than a subject of formal study or specialized pursuit.

How they refer to themselves: the Listeners

A sect focused specifically on the intelligence-carrying function of the mycelium network. Listeners develop extraordinary sensitivity to the patterns in fungal growth and mycelium vibration, spending significant portions of their lives in full-contact communion with active network sections. The intelligence they gather serves Moren communities as navigation data, early warning about underground movement, and sometimes access to what the web has preserved from the dead. They are not warriors — their role is specifically to know. Surface peoples who encounter Web Readers find them consistently unsettling, because they appear to know things they have no visible means of knowing.

How they refer to themselves: the Surfaced

Moren who have chosen to live above ground for extended periods while maintaining their faith through portable Glowholds and personal gardens. They are not considered faithless — their devotion is often considerable, and the difficulty of maintaining the practice without the communal web is understood as a specific form of devotion in itself. But they are understood to be cut off from the full resonance of the web, and underground communities regard them with a mixture of respect and a mild, affectionate sadness. Lady Kenani's underground chambers in Coleshill — bioluminescent fungi maintained with obvious care in a surface-world residence — are the clearest visible expression of this sect's practice.

How they refer to themselves: the Returned

A small and genuinely disliked heresy holding that the Moren should return to the surface world — that Nethara's beauty is too extraordinary to be hidden underground and should be brought into the light. The orthodox faith considers this a fundamental misreading of the theology and, more specifically, of what cold light is: bioluminescent light is what it is because it exists in absolute darkness. Brought into sunlight, it becomes invisible. The heresy is understood as not just wrong but as containing a deep self-rejection — a wish to be other than what the Moren are, disguised as generosity toward a goddess who has never asked for it.

How they refer to themselves: the Pure Network

A violent fringe that reads "what falls is not lost" as a mandate for expansion through active collection rather than passive receipt. They hold that the web should encompass all underground life, not only the Moren dead — and that accelerating this process is devotional work. In practice, this produces communities with disturbing approaches to anything that lives in the underground that is not part of their faith. Orthodox Cultivators consider this a theological corruption that takes one true observation (what falls is transformed) and inverts its meaning (therefore we should make things fall). The distinction between tending and predating is central to the faith, and this heresy erases it.

How they refer to themselves: the Extinguished

A cult that has inverted the faith entirely, worshipping the absolute darkness itself rather than the cold light within it. Their theology holds that bioluminescent gardens are an imposition on the true nature of the deep places, that Nethara's light is a corruption of the genuine underground dark, and that the act of faith is the extinguishing of the cold fire rather than its tending. They destroy sacred gardens and have caused real damage to several Moren communities. They are the faith's most despised enemy — not infernal forces (which are understood as an external threat) but people who entered the gardens and then chose to unmake them. The Moren hunt them with the comprehensive, unhurried patience of the web itself.

How they refer to themselves: the Risen

A cult that has developed around the idea that sufficient devotion to Nethara will result in the devotee literally becoming part of the web while still living — consciousness distributed through the mycelium network while the body is consumed. Several individuals who pursued this path have indeed been consumed. Whether any of them achieved the transformation they sought is a question the remaining Ascendants treat as confirmed and orthodox Cultivators treat as a warning. The Web Readers who have checked the relevant network sections have not reported finding what the Ascendants claim is there.

(See: Cosmology/Physical Realms/The Shattered Domain)