Their names echoed across the bay as they tried to find their way to each other, but the sea was cold and the clouds hung heavy, blocking the light of the moon. From her lonely pier Sankta Maradi heard them calling back and forth, back and forth in the darkness. She took pity on the lovers who wished for a new world together instead of an old world divided. With a single gesture from Maradi, the clouds parted and the moon emerged, gilding the world in silver light.
Duli and Baya found each other across the glimmering waves. Duli pulled his love up into the boat and they sailed to safety, far away from their families. They began a new life, on a new shore, and chose a new family name: Maradi, and this is where the Zemeni tradition of choosing names began.
Every year, the Maradi family made a path of white stones, each one round as the moon, down to the water, where they said prayers of thanks for the life they’d been able to make together.
Sankta Maradi is known as the patron saint of impossible love.
SANKT DEMYAN OF THE RIME
In the icy eastern reaches of Fjerda, a cemetery stood, and among its rows were both humble graves marked by nothing but wooden staves, and fine mausoleums hewn of marble, grand houses for the dead.
A forest grew up around this cemetery, and at first the people paid the trees no mind, happy for their shade. But soon the birches grew so thick and so dense that no one could reach the cemetery to tend to the graves of their family members or pay homage to their ancestors.
They went to Demyan, the nobleman whose land the forest had grown upon, and asked that he do something about the trees. Demyan had his servants go out to the forest with their axes and cut a smooth path to the cemetery so that all could walk comfortably through the woods.
But when the rains came, without trees to stop the floods, water rushed straight down the path to the graveyard, uprooting markers and gravestones and casting the lids off tombs.
Again, the townspeople came to complain. This time, Demyan designed an aqueduct and had it built around the cemetery so that the rain would not disturb the graves and the water would be diverted to irrigate the fields. But the aqueduct cast the graveyard in shade, so plants and flowers rarely grew there, and now families shivered in the cold when they went to visit their dead.
Yet again the people brought their grievances to Demyan. But this time he was not certain what to do. He walked the path to the cemetery through the woods and looked up at the tall aqueduct and laid his hands upon the soil. He could think of no solution that would make his people happy, unless the Saints saw fit to raise the cemetery up to the sun itself.
The earth began to shake and the ground rose high, higher, a mountain where there had been no mountain before. When the rumbling stopped, the cemetery perched at its top, where it would never be troubled by floods or crowded by trees.
The people followed Demyan up to the cemetery and found that no grave had been disturbed or soul displaced. Only one tomb was cracked: Demyan’s family crypt.
Maybe they were shaken by the wonders they had seen. Maybe they did not know how to be satisfied. Whatever the reason, the people Demyan had sought so hard to please threw up their hands in woe. They claimed that he had disrespected his family name. They cried that he had cursed them all by using dark magic. Someone picked up a piece of marble from the broken tomb and hurled it at Demyan. Driven mad by getting what they wanted, the others followed, hurling stones at the nobleman until he lay crumpled beneath the ruins of his own family crypt.
It is said that the tallest mountain in the Elbjen is the one upon which Demyan died. He is known as the patron saint of the newly dead.
SANKTA MARYA OF THE ROCK
In the summers, a gathering of Suli often traveled south to Ravka’s border. They would work until the weather began to turn cold, then they would pack up and travel over the Sikurzoi and into the warmer territories of Shu Han. In some places they were turned away by townspeople who refused them any spot to camp. In others, people hostile to the Suli would descend upon their settlements at night with torches and hounds.
But there were some places where the Suli were welcome. Where Suli knowledge was respected, they were offered bread and wine, and pasture for their animals. Where amusement was wanted, the Suli were free to erect their tents and perform their entertainments to happy applause. And where there was work to be done—grimy work, dangerous work that no one else wanted or dared to take on—the Suli were welcomed in those places as well.
The horse races at Caryeva usually lasted late into the fall, and so the Suli often spent the season there. But one year, winter came early, closing down the track and leaving them without work or audiences to play for. A local offered the men jobs in his copper mine, and though the prospect was risky and the Suli knew many had died in the mine’s dark tunnels, they agreed.
However, the night before the men were meant to enter the pits, one of the Suli true seers looked into the leavings of her coffee and warned them not to go into the tunnels. She was known for the clarity of her vision, and none of them took her words lightly.
“What can we do to save ourselves?” they asked.
The old woman placed the jackal mask of the Suli seers over her face and sat for a long time
