Vathris the Transfixed
Hero-God

Portfolio: Anguish, Lost Causes, Revenge
Symbol: A black spear
Alignment: Lawful neutral
Core Worshipers: Flan
Domains: Destruction, Law, War.
Favored Weapon(s): Longspear

Description: A thousand years before the Twin Cataclysms, the land now known as the Bright Desert was a fertile (if somewhat arid) basin contested by a half-dozen semi-nomadic Flan states. Necromantic Ur-Flan adepts bolstered the dominant kingdom of Sulm. Their primary rival ltar honored Vathris, a demigod of Progress and Ingenuity who had walked their lands for centuries. When the two nations clashed in an inevitable conflict that lasted more than three decades, Vathris stood at the heart of the final battle. There, the godling and his army were annihilated. For more than a thousand years, Flan dervishes ranged the dunes of the now-despoiled desert, venerating a god who would not answer their prayers. Responding to a terrible vision seen by the Qolat Sisterhood in 562 CY, thirty six ranking dervish priests gathered at the Plain of Spears and enacted a ritual to resurrect their fallen god. What emerged from the chaos of their casting was hardly the hero of their ancestors. Ancient carvings depict Vathris as a shirtless copper-skinned muscular man standing half again as tall as a human and wearing metal and clay beads in his long dark hair. Since his “death,” he appears with a grisly torso wound, which seeps black poisonous bile. Vathris wields the wickedly barbed onyx longspear that killed him, using the object of his own defeat to exact revenge upon his enemies. In this way the black spear has become his holy symbol and the favored weapon of his clergy. His once-bright eyes are now empty, hollow sockets. Vathris once stood for the future. Now, he is obsessed with redressing the past. He manifests perhaps once or twice a year, wandering the desert for days in a weakened, delirious state, violently dispatching monsters and ignoble men, and offering guidance and seeding ideas of revenge among the wronged. Within a matter of weeks, he collapses and dies once again. “Fear not your own suffering and death, for those who fall on the side of right will rise again on the Day of Vindication, and take their place among the righteous tribes who forever torment the malign. Break not the laws of our people, but bide your time, striking when fate allows it.” The Flan dervishes who worship Vathris are broken into two factions. The unpopular priests who follow the god’s original manifestation as interpreted from centuries of oral tradition act as clerics who attempt to elevate the desert folk from their nomadic lifestyles, frequently overseeing oases or caravansaries. The more militant dervishes, often warrior priests, venerate Vathris as the Great Talion who rights wrongs perpetrated upon the tribes by local monsters, northerners from Urnst, and (increasingly) the forces of Rary of Ket.

Gods of the Flanaess