Iou-Bonn, Goddess of Sorrows

Called The Unmended Heart, The Ceaseless Mourning, and The Raging Widow

Deep in the hinterlands of Garrel, amidst the plains and rolling hills of that pastoral country is a set of ruined buildings which used to be a farmstead of modest size. Rising like a bastion from the center courtyard of that destroyed steading is a great tree whose bark is white as sun-bleached bone and its leaves are the color of fresh blood. Surrounding the roots and spreading outwards from the great tree are dozens upon dozens of miniature shrines and headstones, each graven with the name of a person whose body lies unmourned and unavenged. The votives who tend this Courtyard of Graves say that with each new dawn, the shrines shift and move like a slow mist. Names which were clear one day are replaced the next.

It is whispered amongst the farmers and tradesmen of Garrel that this was the birthplace of the first of the Troubled Gods, new deities whose presence was made manifest as The Silent Hatred grasped all of Asteria in a vice. They say that Iou-Bonn once lived in the farm that became the Courtyard of Graves, before a band of brigands that was driven mad by the Hatred slaughtered her family and livestock. They say also that she tracked the band for months before stumbling across their corpses in a faraway town, all consumed by the Gasping Death. Denied her revenge, she returned to her home to find herself unknown to her neighbors and the buildings all but consumed by the land. It is said that the great tree grew where she threw herself onto her sword and that her spirit remains in that place to be the receptacle for those whose sorrows can never truly be healed.