Mallaurë
As days grow short and winter near, Allorï clans leave for their homes along familiar lake shores. Before they do, however, their salabën prepares and performs a ritual to ensure the growing of a chosen crop, so that it would be both healthy and plentiful once their people return.
Mallaurë is a fertility ritual performed by the wiseman or -woman of a clan every year within the bounds of a sacred pala before their departure for their winter villages. Most of the ritual is a private affair performed by the sage alone without so much as help from their apprentice, but other clan members frequently aid in the preparations and spreading of crop seeds during the ritual proper.
Execution
Everything begins with the hunting of a suitable sacrifice—most often a few hares or forest rabbits—and the gathering of seeds of the crop whose health and fertility the salabën wishes to aid. For the Allorï, the crop tended to be a grain called merönie, more commonly known to the world as honeygrass.
The animals would be filled with some of the seeds, and kept alive until the ritual. They were fed with seeds of the crop and nothing else before taken by the sage to the sacred place of power. Rest of the seeds would not be spread into the surroundings until the sacrifices were completed, though the salabën needn't have left the place of ritual before the rest of the clan could begin their part.
While every individual sage had their own variations of Malleurë, the ritual always required the memorization of a long spell, and an ability to concentrate on nothing but the ritual from the beginning until its completion. One wrong word or a singular moment of distraction was enough to disrupt the spell and make the ritual meaningless.
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