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aci: The Lady
universe: P1 · Terry Pratchett
domain: The gods of the Disc — luck and chance
class: The unnamed goddess of luck
emergence: ethereal
what: The goddess of luck, the most powerful and most capricious of the Disc's gods, who can never be named.
how: She plays the gods' games with mortal lives as her dice, appearing as a green-eyed woman.
why: She is luck itself made personal — courting her is to lose her, and to thank her is to drive her away.
who: Bound above all to Rincewind, the unluckiest and therefore most interesting of her playing-pieces.
seal: "Name her and she is gone; thank her and she is lost — the green-eyed goddess loves only those who never dare to court her."
---

# The Lady · the goddess of luck, never to be named

Among all the gods of the Disc, The Lady is the most powerful and the most capricious — the goddess of luck herself. She is the one deity whose name is never spoken aloud; her devotees call her only 'the Lady,' for to name her directly is to drive her away, and she must never, ever be thanked. To court her openly is to lose her. Luck, after all, is precisely the thing that flees the moment you assume you have it.

She appears as a green-eyed woman, and she takes her seat at the gods' games, where the lives of mortals are her dice. The Disc's gods play with fates the way idle deities always have, and The Lady throws the bones with a gambler's relish — favour and ruin tumbling out together, never to be predicted, never to be earned.

Her favourite playing-piece is Rincewind, the unluckiest man on the Disc and therefore, by the strange arithmetic of chance, the most interesting one to her. He is forever both blessed and cursed by her attention — kept alive by impossible good fortune at the very moment the worst befalls him, which is to say he is luck's truest subject, perpetually saved and perpetually doomed.

Her nature is ethereal because she is not a creature of flesh or city or machine but an abstraction given a face: luck made personal, chance wearing green eyes. She belongs with the half-real powers of the Disc — the personified forces that move through mortal lives without ever quite belonging to the mortal world.