Mallach
Mallach is the patron god of bards, artists, and lovers, and is widely worshiped in the mostly catfolk land of Jassira. His avatar is a catboy, dark-haired and wielding a golden citole. He is mostly known as the god of love and/or lust, but there's much more to him than just pursuit of carnal pleasures. According to Cait "you'll never see a Mallachite shying away from a good lay, especially with a good friend.".
Worship
According to Cait:
"Mallach's a god of everything beautiful in the world. He delights in passion, and encourages all his followers to love deeply and to nurture artistry as much as they do romance. Many Mallachite priests are renowned poets or painters, you know! And the rest of us, well, we try to at least be familiar with the arts."
Mallach is very open to all sorts of tastes when it comes to love, as he broadly promotes manifestations of love, lust, and passion, which can express themselves in many ways. In other words, he doesn't really kink-shame.
Mallach has multiple temples erected to him in Jassira. The clergy there make the temples sanctuaries, practising and proselytising his ideals and principles within them. Most famously, this involves giving their bodies to their god, in the form has having sex with visiting supplicants who want it.
Known ranks/positions of Mallach's clergy are:
- Sacred Courtesan
- Ordained Cleric
- Lay Priest/Priestess
- Temple Acolytes
Clergy who's job involve sleeping with temple visitors are sometimes known as "temple harlots" or "temple whores", such as Cait's mother. It's unclear how derogatory these terms are actually considered.
Clergy's children are often raised together in the temples, and treat each other as siblings.
Nudity is implied to have a symbolic association with truth to Mallachites i.e. "there's a reason why it's called the naked truth.".
Getting cum on/in them has significance to Mallachite clergy, who consider it a type of spiritual anointment, and a sign that they have pleased their god by manifesting someone's passion.
To become part of the clergy, one must take sacred vows to Mallach. In the case of clergy's children, it seems it is traditional to take these vows on the first day after their 18th birthday. The vows to Mallach bind body and soul to his temple (whether magically or just metaphorically is unknown), and requires one to be undressed.
Magic practised within the temples mainly revolve around sex or childbirth. Clergy like Lay Priests/Priestesses are also trained in giving sermons, sensuality, ritual dances/stripteases, sex, and how to accommodate a potentially wide variety of tastes.
"That's the problem with these ritual dances: they're designed to get you all worked up. But they're also all one big tease, after all...These dances of ours were honed over generations, you know. Centuries of slutty cat-girls dancing away for men's pleasure, perfecting the ways to make you so desperately desire to rip us right out of our skimpy little silks. But you wouldn't do that, would you? I don't have that big an effect on my Adventurer, do I?"
Mallach has few followers in the north such as around Hawkethorne, and as such there are very few temples to him there. Cait thinks it may be partly due to his avatar being a catboy, because the north has more lupine than catfolk. His worship is not outlawed, however.
Female temple clergy often have very large breasts, but it is widely known that this achieved unnaturally (presumably through magic). Whether Cait's E-cup breasts are natural or not is unknown.
Known Followers
Trivia
- His name is sometimes invoked as an exclamation, i.e. "Mallach's balls. Either this stuff is really fresh, or it's really potent", as used by Leorah. Someone with a sensual touch may be compared to him, as with "Oh, you've got Mallach's touch!" from Cait.
- Followers of Mallach are called Mallachites, which is similar to the name of the real-world green crystal malachite.
- In ancient Egypt the colour green (wadj) was associated with death and the power of resurrection as well as new life and fertility. Ancient Egyptians believed that the afterlife contained an eternal paradise which resembled their lives but with no pain or suffering, and referred to this place as the "Field of Malachite".