Dedicant

A dedicant (pronounced /ˈdɛdɪkənt/) is a person who gets landworking powers in exchange for his dedication to Vlastach or its agents (or, perhaps, other patrons). The state of being a dedicant is called dedicancy (/ˈdɛdɪkənsi/). Dedicants differ from landworkers in that they need not perform rituals to draw on Vlastach's power; they are simply granted certain innate abilities they can use at will, or transformed to enhance their bodies in some way.

Like landworkers, dedicants must remain in favor with the land. In fact, for dedicants, the consequences of eliciting Vlastach's disfavor may be even more severe; if a landworker falls out of Vlastach's favor, he will lose the use of his powers, but a dedicant who angers Vlastach may face far worse punishment, up to and including permanent transformation into a form such as a slug or a rock.

All dedicants are considered natural creatures for the purposes of landworking effects.

Becoming a Dedicant

Though there have been rare cases of Vlastach immediately accepting as a dedicant a person who has performed it some great service, a dedicant usually attains that status through the ritual of confirmation—or through its emulation by the ritual of petition. The dedicant may perform the ritual himself, if he knows it; more often, it is performed by a landworker who takes it upon himself to initiate the dedicant into Vlastach's ways. The prospective dedicant must undergo the ritual of his own free will; no one can be forced to become a dedicant.

Obviously, to become a dedicant a person must already be in favor with the land, or at least not to be in active disfavor. Seldom will Vlastach accept the offered dedication of a man who has not already shown himself to be at least somewhat friendly toward the land.

Renouncing Dedicancy

Once one has taken upon himself the mantle of a dedicant, it is not easily discarded. Simply ceasing to follow Vlastach's will is not enough; the individual will still be considered to be under the obligations he took upon himself as a dedicant, and will be treated as any disloyal dedicant would be. Escaping these obligations requires the sacrifice to Vlastach of a great deal of material wealth, as well as the employment of a spell called the ritual of dereliction. It is extremely improbable that the dedicant himself will be able to perform that ritual; even if the dedicant does have some skill in landworking, the ritual of dereliction is one that requires great favor with the land to enact, and a dedicant about to abandon his calling is unlikely to be favored by Vlastach. Finding a landworker willing to perform the ritual and release the dedicant from Vlastach's service may be quite difficult, however—and even if the ritual is performed, Vlastach may choose not to honor it. Given these stringent requirements, it shouldn't be surprising that no more than a handful of dedicants were ever known to have forsaken their dedicancy—the path to dedicancy is almost always one-way.

Service

Even more so than landworkers, a dedicant is expected to always be ready to serve the land in any way possible. A dedicant has a special tie with Vlastach that allows him to have an impression of Vlastach's will, the better to know how to serve it; the more experience the dedicant has in interpreting these feelings, and the more favor he has with Vlastach, the more specifically he can understand what Vlastach needs and how he can best be of service. Should he want more explicit guidance, a dedicant can commune with Vlastach to receive a vision of its will. Here, too, more favor and more experience yield more detailed instructions, but even a dedicant new to the calling will receive some communication this way, and in fact may do so more reliably, or at least in a way he can more easily comprehend, than by relying only on the usual promptings. Not all dedicants will be expected to serve the land in the same way; what Vlastach expects of a particular dedicant will depend upon that individual's talents and proclivities.

Some dedicants serve Vlastach indirectly, by attaching themselves to individuals highly favored by the land, and serving their wills. The person whom the dedicant chooses to serve is known as his liege. While anyone can be a suitable liege who has at least as much favor with the land as the dedicant serving him, most commonly a dedicant's liege will be another dedicant, more experienced and thus more in tune with Vlastach's desires—although landworker lieges are also not uncommon. As long as the dedicant follows his liege's commands, he is considered to be serving Vlastach, even if his duties don't aid the land directly.

It seems likely that dedicants continue to serve Vlastach in some form even after death—certainly Vlastach lays claim to their souls, as it does those of all natural creatures. Exactly what is the post obitum fate of dedicants, however, has never been revealed.

Focused Dedicants

Some dedicants choose to narrow the focus of their service to Vlastach, concentrating on preserving and maintaining one particular taxon, geographical feature, or other natural phenomenon. Such focused dedicants are considered to be serving Vlastach whenever they serve the needs of their chosen bailiwick, even if it doesn't necessarily serve the interests of the land as a whole. For example, a dedicant focused on mice would serve the land by preserving mice from predation and trapping, even if the ecosystem where he lives is already overrun by mice and could well do with a smaller mouse population; a dedicant focused on a particular sandstone formation would serve the land by protecting it from erosion, even if that means turning aside rain and running water that could be beneficial to plants in the area. If this happens, Vlastach may encourage another dedicant in the area to focus on something that would balance the work of the first dedicant, or enjoin such a dedicant elsewhere to migrate into the area. This could mean, in the first example, bringing to the area a dedicant focused on owls or foxes or some other predator, for instance, or even one focused on grain, in whose interests it would be to keep down the mouse population. In the second example, it might mean bringing in a dedicant focused on plants, or on some specific plant in need of water. The fact that such scenarios may put dedicants in direct conflict with each other doesn't seem to bother Vlastach; it doesn't care if its servants fight each other, as long as they are both serving the land, and in the end it works out to the land's benefit.

Focused dedicants frequently choose or are assigned boons, especially passive boons, that reflect or resemble their chosen area of concern. A dedicant focused on snakes may develop a poisonous bite, and perhaps a heightened sense of smell (though the sense may work in the same way as a snake's, which means he'd also need to develop a forked tongue to use it properly); a dedicant focused on a particular lake may develop the ability to take on a watery form, and perhaps to control aquatic creatures.

Boons

In return for his service to Vlastach, a dedicant is granted a number of boons—either effects they can produce using Vlastach's power, or alterations or abilities that are always in effect. The number and power of boons a given dedicant has depends on his favor with Vlastach; the boons of a more highly favored dedicant will be more numerous or more powerful, or both.

Boons which are always in effect are known as passive boons. This may include simple transformations that aid the dedicant's service in some way; a dedicant may be granted as a boon sharp claws he can use to fight enemies, or hard scales to ward off blows, or gills that let him breathe underwater, or wings that let him fly through the air—or the dedicant may be granted a durable body of solid stone. Obviously, dedicants with such immediately apparent transformations will tend to stand out, and such blatant boons are more common among dedicants who live in the wild apart from civilization, though it's far from unknown for a dedicant with such boons to reside in a city, especially in Grower nations. The transformations, however, may be more subtle, involving heightened senses (or entirely new senses), or new or enhanced internal organs. Some passive boons may be more in the nature of enchantment than transformation, making the dedicant immune to heat and fire, for example, and able to walk through molten lava without damage; or surrounding him with an invisible aura within which plants grow much faster and bear more fruit.

Other boons must be consciously sparked by the dedicant; such boons are sometimes called "spells", but more usually "active boons". Generally, a dedicant does not have unlimited use of his active boons; either some time must pass between uses, or he is limited to a certain number of uses per day, or per some other period. The more powerful the dedicant, however, the more frequently he can generally use his boons; a highly favored dedicant may be able to use an active boon every minute, or even every few seconds. An active boon works very much like an anticipated ritual by a landworker. This extends even to encompassing more or less the same range of powers; for all practical purposes, the possibilities for a dedicant's active boons are the same as the range of landworking rituals. It's true that on occasion a dedicant has seemed to possess an active boon that corresponded to no known ritual, but then it's also true that on occasion an individual landworker has made use of a ritual otherwise unknown.

Livelihood

The stereotypical image of the dedicant is that of a cloaked wanderer in green and brown clothing whose closest brush with civilization is the occasional visit to a market to purchase new boots or other goods not readily available in the wilderness, or to sell furs or herbs or other products of the land, and perhaps from time to time a stop by a tavern at the edge of a town to socialize. Most of their time, however, they spend camping in the wilds, perhaps in a tent, or perhaps in a cave, or in a new structure they build each day out of sticks, or some shelter they create with their boons. Such dedicants may be willing to hire out as guides or escorts through dangerous wildernesses, as long as their prospective employers mean no harm to the land. Encountered in the wild, the dedicant may prove a valuable friend and ally, or the most deadly of foes, depending on one's relations with the land.

There is much truth to the stereotype, but of course there's much more variation in dedicants than this. Certainly not all roving dedicants wear cloaks, or dress in green and brown. But while many dedicants do otherwise more or less fit this image, there are also many dedicants who depart from it considerably. There are those dedicants who are employed by lords and landowners as foresters or game wardens or in other positions that suit their pursuits. There are urban dedicants who manage to serve Vlastach while living in cities among other men, and feral dedicants who live in the wild as naked animals. There are subterranean dedicants who serve Vlastach underground as other dedicants do above.

Although dedicancy does require constant readiness to serve the land, it does not preclude pursuing other activities, so long as those activities do not oppose the goals of Vlastach. It would be quite impossible, for instance, to be both a dedicant and a landreaver—and any dedicant who started to dabble in landreaving after his confirmation would instantly bring upon himself Vlastach's wrath. Certainly, however, there is nothing wrong with a dedicant practicing elemental magic; and while it is somewhat rare for an elemental mage to become a dedicant, or for a dedicant to begin to practice elemental magic, both cases have been known to happen. The practice of landworking among dedicants is quite common; certainly not all dedicants are also landworkers, or even the majority, but the proportion who are is far higher than among the general population.

This extends to matters other than magic use; urban dedicants especially may make a living with jobs that have nothing directly to do with their dedicancy. Nothing prevents a dedicant from working as a bookbinder, or a barber, or a barmaid. In fact, with such dedicants especially, it may not be at all obvious that an individual is a dedicant at all. While most dedicants are open about their devotion to Vlastach, not all are, and almost anyone one encounters could be—probably isn't, but could be—a dedicant in secret.