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title: Our Lady of the Black Rose
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An ancient, gentle [[Gods|goddess]]. Her purview is mercy, healing, forgiveness, love, and community. Like most gods of [[the Hallowed Lands]], her true name is unknown, and so she is often referred to simply as “the Black Rose,” or as “Our Lady” by her faithful.

Her symbology is floral; naturally the rose is her holiest symbol, but she is also often represented with imagery of small but tenacious weeds growing through the cracks in dry earth and cobblestones. Black is a holy color to her faith, and silver is a holy substance.

Because her doctrine preaches forgiveness and second chances, her faith is seen as heretical by the rigid [[The Church of the Guiding Way|Church of the Guiding Way]]. Followers of the Black Rose are commonly derided as cheaters, sinners, people who must be guilty of awful things to need the goddess’s forgiveness. There is at least some truth to this narrative; convicts and the repentant are among her most devout followers.

Open worship of Our Lady of the Black Rose is illegal in [[Holy Kingdom of Alinor|Alinor]], but not in Vesper Ridge. Even so, her following is highly taboo and public sites of worship are exceedingly rare within the city.

After [[Poor Jimmy Ashcroft|Poor Jimmy’s]] death, our party learned of traditional funerary rites of the Black Rose’s faith from [[Sister Linia]]. When a member of the community passes away, their loved ones come together to knit a “mourning blanket” of black yarn embellished with intricate silver or white patterns, each one with a symbolic meaning known to the Black Rose’s devout and representative of the person being commemorated. These blankets are placed on display for an amount of time no shorter than the time the deceased spent among the community in life, and are then given to the family (or descendants of the family) of the deceased.

According to the [[Hymns for the Blossoming]], many of the Church of the Black Rose’s traditional prayers, hymns, textiles and holy emblems reveal deeper symbolic meaning through a complex system of arithmancy: sacred music notation and geometries through which Our Lady’s divinity can be represented in the physical world.