Honored Ancestors

The collective name for the ancestral figures revered as Ascendants by the folk of Byssia, especially the Ihmisi and more rural/mixed-blood humans. The exact personalities and rites vary by village--each village maintains its own shrines. As a collective, their worship is generally benign. Token sacrifices of flowers, food, animal feathers or wool, plants. Each shrine is watched by a priest of sorts, who usually also serves as the area's kami servant, village social worker, and often herbalist and druidic/divine practitioner. They rarely have significant magical power--a few blessings, a cure for poisons and common diseases (mostly herbal) and similar.

Gossips in the Astral paint those that actually have ascended as rural country bumpkins, an assembly of people who talk and worry but don't actually do much. They are firmly lower-ranked ascendants.