The Stranger

As the Trueborn God of Cosmic Law, the Stranger oversees the Law of Life and Death. He is not a god of life, nor a god of death. He is the god of the line that divides the two realms, the first and most fundamental law of the universe: all things that live must die, and all things that are must one day end.   Furthermore, the Stranger is the creator of the one thing in all of reality that can cross the divide between life and death: the soul. As such he holds dominion over all souls, from the tiny, sputtering sparks contained in the most minuscule of specks of dust to the great roaring soul that dwells in the heart of the cosmos itself. They are all his to command—and his to collect.

Although various sects claim to possess relics bestowed upon them by the Stranger, there are only two such objects that are known to have truly come from the Stranger.  

Shroud of the Pale God

Main Article: Shroud of the Pale God   Known only to a select few, the Shroud of the Pale God is a relic given only to the most devoted of the Stranger's followers. Little is publicly known about the means to obtain the Shroud, what its capabilities are, or whether the Shroud even exists in the first place. The official stance of the Faith of the Nine is that whether the Shroud exists or not, only those the Stranger deems worthy of the knowledge would know about it, and not even the world's most comprehensive repository of texts and historical documents has any records of the Shroud. The only known writing that attests to the existence of the Shroud is stored in a secret section deep in the heart of the Imperial Vault, which in and of itself is already a high-security facility accessible only by the Imperial Trinity—or by the invitation thereof.  

Ghost Lily

Main Article: Ghost Lily   The Ghost Lily is a divine artifact granted to the cleric Thurkear, who briefly joined the Wardens of the Wayward for some time. The artifact is a mace that grants its wielder a degree of authority over the forces of life and death. It can heal wounds and eviscerate foes, but its true strength only manifests when brought to bear against the undead, which are obliterated if they fall to the weapon's strike. At present, it is housed at the Grand Rookery, where it was laid down by Thurkear after accomplishing the task for which he had been granted the weapon: the destruction of the Atropal being used as a vessel by the Unkent known as Brovak, Death-Defied.

While the various faiths that have come to worship the Stranger through time may adopt various tenets, doctrines, or dogmas, the only tenets that the Stranger truly cares about are the following:

1. The Stranger is the creator and originator of all souls, thus he holds dominion over them. Mortals are merely lent their souls for a time, as the Stranger, and the Stranger alone, has claim to any given soul.
2. Souls, once created, are born, experience mortal life, and then die; upon their death, they return to the Stranger's city. This is a sacred cycle, the oldest and most fundamental thereof.
3. Those who meddle with the souls of others transgress against the Stranger's domain and must be punished. Those who do so for their own selfish gain must be destroyed.

He is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. No corner of the cosmos is beyond his reach, not even the deepest depths of the Shardscape, where death can be a more abstract and nebulous concept. His power is such that he could give death to all life across the endless infinitudes of worlds and realities with a thought, and such a death could be conceptual, in the sense that all things that could be argued to live, or to possess life in some manner, from such abstract things as love, conversations, ideas, and fictional characters, to concrete things such as cities, vehicles, and even soulless, mechanical automata would be made to cease.   Fortunately, the Stranger is as bound by Cosmic Law as all other beings are, and like his kin, the laws that underpin reality itself prevent his direct interference with the cosmos.  

Principle of Exclusion

The Stranger is a singular being. This means that Cosmic Law will not abide any duplicates, lesser copies, fragments, or variants. His existence simply cannot be partitioned or multiplied. Reality itself will ensure that there shall only ever be one Stranger—and only ever the original.   While a begotten god might split into separate aspects when two or more groups of devotees begin to follow divergent doctrines, no such thing can happen with respect to the Stranger. This goes further. Where begotten gods can spring into existence spontaneously as new religions form, any faiths which give worship—whether primarily or otherwise—to an unknowable deity that guards the boundary between life and death and serves as a cosmic lawgiver, can give birth to no such begotten gods, as the Principle of Exclusion ensures that one cannot be born.  

True Immortality

As a Trueborn God, the Stranger has no interest in nor any need for the worship of mortals. Unlike begotten gods, who are born from the sincere and collective beliefs of mortals, the trueborn are eternal beings who arose at the beginning of time. The Stranger requires no worship to sustain him as he is an integral, fundamental part of reality itself. His existence is inevitable and inviolable. He is without beginning, and cannot die or be ended, except at the appointed hour, at the close of eternity, when even death must die, and the Unkent shall reign, consuming all things to return the cosmos to the formless nothing from whence it came.

The Stranger is an amoral and apathetic being. Cosmic Law gives no credence to justice or injustice, to good or evil, to morality and immorality. Emotion plays no role. There are only those who follow the Cosmic Law and those who break it—those who accept his rightful claim over mortal souls, and those who deny it. Whether it is a grieving mother who uses necromancy to reclaim the soul of her child who was taken from her too soon, or a mass-murder who traps the souls of their victims in order to inflict further torment, both are sinners in kind, even if not in severity, before the eyes of the Stranger.   Although his trueborn kin largely eschew interaction with mortals—Cosmic Law prohibits their direct intervention in the mortal world—and thus are largely unknown to them, the Stranger does not share their qualms. This is not to say that the Stranger has any particular fascination or fondness for mortals, he simply interacts with them in the furtherance of the foremost of his duties: ensuring the sanctity of the veil between life and death.   While the Stranger's devotees may ascribe morality and may impose certain codes of conduct upon themselves, the Stranger himself is apathetic to these mortal contrivances. His singular concern is the boundary between life and death, and the Stranger would countenance any method, however repulsive or abhorrent, to ensure that those who transgress against the Law of Life and Death are punished, so long as it is effective.

The Law of Life and Death dictates that souls are born, endure a mortal existence, and then die to be reclaimed by the Stranger. As such, there is only one taboo for the Stranger: interfering with the process. While the Stranger grants some degree of latitude to mortals over what they do with their own souls during their mortal lives—short of outright destroying them—any trespass against a soul belonging to another is a transgression upon the Stranger's domain.   An important nuance to understand is that it is the act of interfering with the journey of another's soul that is considered a transgression against the Stranger. Theoretically this means that the pursuit of immortality is not necessarily an act that goes against the Stranger as long as the aspiring immortal manipulates only their own soul. In practice, this does not mean that those who discover a means to attain immortality using only their own souls can escape death for eternity; they are permitted to endure so long as the world from whence they came remains alive.