Ossurnvuln
Ten to eleven feet, with the heaviest coat of the three hanging almost to the ground, a horn boss across the brow, and a low broad body built to stand into wind and not move. They are the priesthood, the weavers and the government, and the three are one office.
A holding without a vuln is a holding that is dying, and neighbouring holdings will send one within the season without being asked.
Body
Ten to eleven feet, the heaviest coat of the three, hanging almost to the ground, with a horn boss across the brow and a low broad body built to stand into wind and not move. The boss is worked into tools and traded openly by the Ossurn themselves, from their own dead.
The line is nearly herbivorous, which nobody in a holding regards as interesting. They travel least of the three and are the most sought after.
Society
A vuln cards, spins, felts and weaves every thread the holding uses, holds the doctrine of the Storm, calls the holding in from the rite, names the children at the first molt, and speaks last in the hall. The office is religious, textile and civil at once, which is not a contradiction in a place where cloth is survival.
Decisions are taken in the hall by everyone present, slowly, with long silences that outsiders find unbearable, and the shaman speaks last and speaks briefly. Under the shaman are the walkers, who hold the roads and the hunting, and the ice-walkers, who do the heavy work and the fighting.
Faith
The doctrine is theirs and it is tangible: the coat is the god's answer. A people put out to die in lethal country were given a body that could live in it, and the wool is that answer made into a thing you can wrap a stranger in, and to sell it would be to sell the answer.
This is why the wool rule is scripture and not economics, and why an Ossurn cannot be argued out of it by any reasoning about markets that anyone has yet tried. Enni of the Last Stake, molt-shaman of the furthest holding on the northern survey, receives the first-molt wool of the other three hundred and ninety-nine holdings for the naming.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How a vuln is chosen, and what happens if a holding produces none
- Where the doctrine of the Storm is kept, if it is kept anywhere but in the shamans
- Why the first-molt wool goes to the furthest stake for the naming
- What a vuln does with a holding that decides against the shaman