Legends of Belariath

Religion

Nature is the church of Gaea, life her congregation, Nymphs her gift to life. To call them caretakers would imply duty and responsibility, such words the sort that many Nymphs would never care to learn. Though they were there to tend and encourage the very first seedlings to breach the soils of a once long-dead world, no sense of obligation nor calling drove them; they did it out of love, nothing more and nothing less. Nymphs are the Spirits of Nature, Gaea's love for life made flesh and given life all its own. 

Though each and every one of them is a unique individual, each and every one possesses a trace memory of what it was to -be- Gaea, and this fraction of divinity is at the very heart of who they are. Though the world that surrounds them may shape and mold them in dark and corrupting ways over time, the spirits of nature are timeless creatures, and no hurt nor perversion can stain them so deep as to blot out the light of love at their core.

Each is an avatar of the beauty of the natural world, breathtaking forests rich with the smell of wildflower and misty sunrises on glass-calm rivers captured not in canvas nor verse, but in feminine curves and sweetly delicate features.

The love of life is not a complicated religion, and demands little ritual nor ceremony. Still most every Nymph feels a strong craving to occasionally seek out and frequent a place where life struggles to take hold, their mere presence if not their active care encouraging purity of water, enrichment of soil, vitality of growth. When they come upon those who forsake nature and its beauty in their lives, their response is rarely ire but more often instead a will to change their hearts... to purify, enrich, and vitalize their lives with their presence.

Even the Duessa are creatures of staggering beauty; and though those living Spirits who personify the darker truths of Nature such as cruelty and decay may be more inclined to speed your way into the ground than work to see you thrive, the earth in which you're buried will be all the richer for it, and life, that which is most precious to Gaea, will go on.