Ened and Magic
Ened is the patron deity of Enedal, a north-western region of Endallen named for him.
Magic is everywhere there, from banshees to wyverns.
People are no exception. Everyone is born with a gift, and no one gets to choose it. Some are powerful; others are narrow, impractical, or dangerous to those nearby. Whatever form it takes, a gift remains with its bearer for life. It is not a measure of character, and it comes without instructions.
Three hundred years ago, the Velhari began a war of expansion against Esvar.
They wanted the knowledge and machinery of the Esvari, a people who had achieved without magical talents what their neighbours could not.
Some Velhari opposed the war and refused to take part.
The Esvari had no army and no magical talents. They resisted through engineering and calculation. When they could no longer defend their homeland, they destroyed what the invaders had come to claim. Soil, water, roads, and cities were ruined in the Last Working.
The Velhari gained nothing.
The Esvari lost their home.
Ened intervened once. He took magic from the Velhari who had used it for war and left their homeland uninhabitable beneath permanent storms. He has never repeated the act.
The faith began with refusal.
The Velhari who had opposed the war understood Ened’s intervention as a judgment upon the aggressors. From that belief came the faith of the Unspent.
The faith teaches that talent is entrusted to a person rather than wholly owned. Its use carries responsibility. Those who had refused to spend their talents on conquest became the Unspent. Those from whom Ened had taken magic became the Hollow.
The Unspent travelled north and built Velorin Coast as a new city, with their religion already at the centre of its identity.
The war ended. Expansion did not.
The Hollow moved west and became the Tarvai. The loss of magic did not end their expansion. They are now pressing into the nearest islands, while Velorin Coast remains, in their eyes, the land of traitors.
The surviving Esvari disappeared beyond the Borgulm. No outsider knows where they settled, and the Esvari have shown no desire to tell them.
Their former homeland is now called the Salted Lands. The land that was once Velhar remains uninhabitable beneath the storms Ened placed over it.