Xaethra
"Hunger is not the absence of fullness, but the endless promise that more lies just beyond reach." -Xaethrist parable.
Xaethra is envy made flesh, hunger given endless voice, the desolation that follows greed. She is not merely a goddess of vice, but the embodiment of want itself, a force so intrinsic to mortal life that to deny her is to deny the very ache that drives civilization forward. Merchants whisper her name over scales, lovers feel her shadow in jealousy’s grip, starving villages curse her in the echo of their hollow bellies. And yet, for all the fear and condemnation, the hate most feel for her heavy hand in bringing about The Great Schism, she is worshipped, though in extreme brevity, wary of what she has done yet understanding why; It is simply her nature, not truly evil or good in-nature, she is desire, yet what one wants and what they are willing to do to get it often ends in misery of some kind, evident by the broken world her desires left behind. To her faithful, Xaethra is not sin but sight, the vision to see what could be taken, what should be theirs. Hunger is not weakness but drive, the raw flame of ambition that pushes mortals beyond what patience or mercy would ever allow. Xaethra’s presence in society is paradoxical, reviled by priests and kings who fear her cults, yet quietly revered by warlords, rebels, and the desperate. Those who invoke her do not beg for peace or protection; they demand power, license to seize what others hoard. Her shrines are rarely temples of grandeur, but doorways smeared in ash, feasts left to rot, coins abandoned in gutters, all prayers to the Maw that devours and never fills. For her followers, this is liberation. In her shadow, the laws of restraint, charity, and sacrifice are revealed as cages, while hunger becomes freedom itself. But Xaethra does not exist in isolation.
Among the pantheon she is the constant irritant, the discord that tests the boundaries of every other god’s domain. Against Chiniae’s mercy, her influence is corrosive, whispering that mercy is weakness, forgiveness an invitation for betrayal. Where Ny'yala's cycles weave endings into beginnings, Xaethra is the tearing hand that breaks those patterns with insatiable want, forcing new paths where none were meant to exist. With Caelbrith, the Veil Between, she is at war eternally, for absence and death still hunger but never consume, Xaethra seeks to devour endlessly, to leave nothing even in memory. Druvain, the Everforged, stands in uneasy opposition; creation and labor should bring endurance and fruit, but under Xaethra’s touch, tools are turned to weapons. Even more neutral gods feel her weight. Thalyss, a being of knowledge and study finds her whispers unavoidable, for envy coils itself in thought, reshaping reason into obsession. Xaethra is the wild card of the divine. She cannot be contained, for hunger is always present, always waiting, always gnawing at the edges of mercy, fate, and endurance. This is why her cults endure despite centuries of proscriptions, inquisitions, and purges. To the desperate, Xaethra is honesty incarnate, she does not dress her gifts in riddles or distant promises. She grants drive, clarity, ambition, and the right to take. That the price is ruin only proves her point: nothing worth taking is ever free.
Divine Domains
Xaethra’s dominion is not a gentle one. She does not soothe hunger, she sharpens it. She does not remove envy, she sanctifies it. To invoke her is to give form to the gnawing void in the heart, and she responds with strength, but never fulfillment.
- Primary Domains: Envy, hunger, greed, desolation. These are her truest faces. Her influence is present in the pangs of famine, in the grasping hands of a thief, in the merchant who raises his price during drought, and in the noble who burns his rivals’ estates just to watch the embers. Worshippers describe these moments as “Xaethra’s breath,” reminders that survival is bought through taking.
- Secondary Connections: Dominion, ambition, obsession, corruption of oaths. Followers believe that power itself is a manifestation of Xaethra. Every throne usurped, every contract twisted, every heart consumed with fixation is her will moving silently through the world.
- Tertiary Reflections: War, pestilence, famine. While she does not rule over battle, disease, or drought, each is often seen as a consequence of unchecked want, or curses she sets upon those who try to deny her.
Artifacts
Xaethra’s relics are not revered for beauty, but for power, power that bends the natural order to hunger’s will. They are not gifts freely given; they are temptations, meant to see who dares take them.
- The Maw-Crown: A jagged circlet, often rusted and stained from those driven mad by its whispers. It does not merely allow manipulation, it forces awareness of others’ deepest longings, making silence impossible. Many wearers end up hollow, unable to distinguish their own desires from those around them.
- The Thirsting Chalice: Carved of dark crystal, lined in silver. It makes water taste like wine, poison taste like honey, but leaves the drinker parched. To cults of Xaethra, it is used in feasts where no one leaves satisfied, a holy rite of perpetual consumption.
- Chains of Plenty: Thick links said to have been worn by Xaethra’s first mortal champion. They punish defiance but reward submission, offering strength only to those willing to be enslaved by their hunger. In temples, replicas are used to bind initiates during rites of devotion, a symbolic surrender to the Maw.
Holy Books & Codes
Xaethra has no scripture etched in radiant light. Her “holy texts” are fragments, often outlawed, whispered, or half-burned. They are more dangerous for what they promise than what they say outright.
- The Red Ledger: A collection of debts written in blood, usually compiled by cult scribes who see all of life as transaction. “You owe yourself first,” one surviving line reads, “and no debt is greater.” Some believe to inscribe one’s own longing within the Ledger is to guarantee Xaethra’s attention, and her price.
- The Feast Without End: Less a structured book and more a patchwork of feasting songs, indulgence hymns, and oaths spoken over meals. To outsiders it looks harmless, but when sung in sequence it becomes a ritual of devotion. The act of feasting, and wasting, is itself prayer.
Divine Symbols & Sigils
Her symbology is designed to linger, to unsettle, to remind:
- A gaping mouth ringed with teeth, crudely carved into wood or scratched into walls with ash or blood. A warning, or an invitation.
- A serpent devouring itself, never completing the circle, a hunger without closure.
- An overturned chalice, sketched onto coins, door lintels, or the underside of shields, a reminder that plenty will always spill away.
Tenets of Faith
Xaethra’s followers do not couch her creed in lofty prose. Her tenets are plain, visceral, and immediately actionable.
- Want is strength; to hunger is to live. Followers interpret deprivation not as punishment but as opportunity: to sharpen the self, to strive harder, to seize without apology. Fasting before rituals is common, not as penance but as a way to feel her presence in the body.
- Take what you can grasp; what you cannot, break until it yields. This is no metaphor. Raiding bands and outlaw cults alike see conquest itself as prayer. To fail to take is to insult Xaethra.
- No bond outweighs the self. Family, faith, and oath are expendable when weighed against desire. Cults enforce this brutally: initiates must betray something, a friend, a vow, a truth, to prove their devotion.
- Desire is the truest prayer; its fulfillment the only sacrament. To want is holy. To sate is fleeting. Thus worship is endless, for the Maw never closes.
Holidays
Xaethra’s holy days are not celebrated in joy but in bitter remembrance, twisted triumph, and mockery of what mortals fear most.
- Harrow Day (Topaz 30th): Known as Vile’s Day of Birth, now a carnival of shadows. Children and adults alike dress as fiends, devils, and aberrations, mocking the hordes that once scoured the land during The Fall. Among Xaethra’s faithful, Harrow Day is a holy night when hunger is embraced openly, feasts are held where food is wasted, stolen, or sacrificed, all to honor want’s supremacy. Outsiders treat it as mischief, but her cults use it as initiation, feeding the Maw through ritual rot.
- While outsiders see these holidays as perverse or dangerous, Xaethrists claim them as proof of their god’s truth, joy is fleeting, satiety is false, but hunger always returns.
Divine Goals & Aspirations
Xaethra’s aims are never spoken outright, but they are etched in every hunger pang and every hollow victory. To her followers, these goals are both warning and invitation:
- Spread Desire Without End: Xaethra seeks not the satisfaction of want but its proliferation. Every ambition fed births another, every envy sparks another fire. Her purpose is not to fill but to keep empty, ensuring that mortals never cease striving, taking, and hungering.
- Break the Illusion of Selflessness: She despises the masks of charity and mercy, seeing them as lies. When a priest feeds the poor, it is to exalt himself; when a king spares an enemy, it is to bind them in debt. Xaethra’s truth is that all actions, no matter how dressed, are selfish at their core. She wants her faithful to embrace this openly.
- Corrupt Oaths, Test Bonds: Vows of loyalty, covenants of faith, marriages of the heart, to Xaethra, these are threads meant to be pulled until they snap. Her silent command is to expose how frail mortal promises truly are.
- Endure Where Others Wither: Unlike gods tied to cycles or mercy, Xaethra’s goal is to be ever-present. Greed, hunger, envy, these do not fade with seasons, nor do they die when kings fall. Her ambition is immortality through inevitability, to be the one god mortals can never forget because she is the empty space in their chest.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
Xaethra’s truest form is beyond mortal comprehension, the unfortunate broken few who witnessed it firsthand, describe it as churning absence shaped into hunger itself; Appearing only in dreams or violent visions, a spiraling row of mouths consuming each other in endless descent, each whispering inner desires so personal the dreamer dares not speak them aloud. Similarly how she chooses to commune with her subjects instead of bothering to waste her infinite time conjuring a guise to compensate mortal weakness. These manifestations rarely come without cost, headaches, nosebleeds, fevers, and seizures are common after even brief exposure to her presence. Xaethra, in limited capacity, has unlike the other gods been seen to take a physical avatar, a constructs of monstrous scale; The infamous 'Tiamat' hydra-golem she possessed during the closing days of the Fall, a body of stone and magick. Believing it her vessel of triumph, she led her armies through this form at what was set to be her final campaign, our world was on its last bastions, she had all-but-won, and soared across the sky to take in her moment of glory. Then, Vile betrayed her, twisting her own runes of power she burned into the flesh of each of her soldiers, killing them all in an instant, absorbing their souls to power a ritual he thought would allow him to take Xaethra's place as god. He only violently killed himself instead, blown apart under strength his mortal body could now withstand, his final moments spent writhing in the golem's talons as she took him high into the air to mock his failure before leaving this vessel behind; Sending it golem hurtling back down into Gaiatia like a meteor that burned The Lost Ages to the ground. Even in failure, her efforts scarred the world deeply, leaving bloodied fields and deep craters that still whisper with echoes of her hunger. In her subtler guises, Xaethra may wear the illusion of a woman cloaked in shadows, her features shifting subtly to reflect what her victim most envies. Her voice in this form is deep and resonant, echoing with the sound of teeth grinding. Yet the mask never holds for long, a smile reveals too many teeth, a hand stretches too far, or her eyes sink into pits that glow faintly red, betraying her as the Maw that cannot be filled.
Divine Classification
God
Children
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