The Guides of the Fallen
The concept of death to the Free Peoples would sound very foreign to the Civilized folk of the Glass City. The City of Mirrors sees death as a reaper, personified in various guises by the Broken, from Falsenight to Starheart and on. To the Free Peoples, death splits along two lines, neither of them an end but a beginning. As these are broad abstract concepts, they have been personified as a married couple: the Masculine Little Green Man and the Hermaphroditic Rainbow Moth.
The Little Green Man
The great instructor and the regenerator. The death of the Little Green Man is the death of green of the forest in face of cold of the darkening solstice. As autumn draws to a close, death creeps in and the world goes quiet. As Winter passes and the Rains come, life returns, regenerating from apparent devastation. The leaves are not the same leaves, the fruits are not the same fruits, but the pattern is the same. The Little Green Man does not pretend that death cannot reach us, but points out that death cannot stop us. What we have taught the next generation lives on in the next generation, they are the rains and the coming spring and summer, as their teachers are the Autumn and the inevitable cold of the Dark Moons. Death is merely a pause: breath in, hold, breath out.
The out shell looks different, but the pattern remains, the story continues to unfold. Death is merely an interruption. Do not fear it, prepare for it and the next generation will carry your tale for eternity and you will never truly be dead.
Death is the source of all life in Arcadia. Don't fear the reaper.
The Rainbow Moth
As the Little Green Man personifies death as a regeneration, so the Rainbow Moth personifies death as a transformation. From Larva to Pupa to Adult, the Rainbow Moth is the blossoming of something new and greater- death as a shedding of lesser form. Before death, the inhabitant was small and frail and merely physical in form. Now, in death, the inhabitant's greater form bursts forth: a powerful set of accomplishments and ideals that they have lived well enough to have added to the archetypes of the Freepath and the stories of the Tribe itself. Freed from the constraints of the body, the life that the inhabitant lives becomes more an greater than said life every could have been while the inhabitant was alive.
The Rainbow Moth also venerates sacrifice and legacy and may be a little too comfortable with the idea of dying well for a great cause, but when a warrior seeks to die gloriously to buy the tribe time to retreat as the Harvester and the Men of Black and White bear down upon a village, it is to the Rainbow Moth that said Warrior says invocations.
