Mioran
Pain burns away delusion; madness makes us pure
Introduction
The Maiden of plagues is one of the most fearsome deities of the pantheon. Her command over diseases and madness makes her equally feared and revered throughout Kena'an. Despite her chaotic nature, Mioran's official church is organized in complicated orders and authority figures. Yet the structure of the Withered Flame, as the church is called, usually makes sense only to those deeply involved.
Origins
The last time the Keeper walked the Bridge of Entropy herself was in the age before time had meaning. In the silence of Astralyn, she was a guardian of passage, her touch gentle, her gaze firm. She bore a crown of her own creation, adorned with gems; each a divine seal against ruin. One of these held every plague, every madness, every unraveling that might befall mortals. It was her gift to the living: a promise that death would be peaceful, and suffering brief.
But then, the Keeper was betrayed.
Her twin sister, Zinxa the Devourer, and Haestrom, the Frozen Tyrant, schemed together. They sought not merely death or dominion, but the slow, exquisite desecration of creation. To that end, they targeted the Keeper’s crown. Its wards were absolute, until the Devourer found a crack.
The Keeper was lured away from her sacred realm by the promise of truce in the endless war with her sister. The two were to meet to weave at last the fate of souls anew, to bind their realms as one, and restore the Underworld to its former glory. Yet when the Keeper arrived, the sister was nowhere to be found.
From the depths of Noxaria’s torment, horrors erupted - twisted nightmares and broken martyrs, souls warped by suffering and spite. They surged like storm-winds, tearing at her with claws of despair as the skies above the Underworld rent asunder. For a fleeting breath, the material world pierced the veil of death itself, and the radiant light of her father - the great Sun - scorched the darkness, burning away her foes.
Relief bloomed in the Keeper's heart. She lifted her gaze, and smiled toward the sky.
But then, the light was suddenly swallowed.
A shadow vast and endless, older than memory, eclipsed the sun and cast the worlds into an abyssal night.
An eclipse darkened the skies for three unholy months, and in its darkness the heist began. A gem - the brightest, cruelest and most essential jewel - was torn free from her crown.
And then It shattered.
From its fragments spilled every plague sealed since the first breath of the world. Disease twisted in the lungs of mortals. Madness gnawed at the edges of reason. Where order once stood, rot bloomed. And from the center of this unmaking, a new goddess rose, formed of betrayal, crowned in suffering, born screaming through the blood of stolen divinity.
Mioran: Mistress of Massacre, Maiden of Plagues, Mother of Madness.
Siona, the Keeper, would never be the same. And Mioran, once a possibility she had sealed away, was now a sovereign god, walking freely in the shadow of the broken veil.
Appearance
Mioran rarely manifests upon the material plane. She prefers the suffocating air and rotting splendor of her self-fashioned dominion: a festering realm nestled deep within the Pandemonium, where sanity frays and time has no meaning. On the rare occasions she descends into the mortal world, she takes the guise of a war-priestess, cloaked in the tanned skins and broken bones of her victims. Her voice echoes like a fever dream, and her presence spreads the scent of infection.
Mioran’s true form is an abomination of divine decay; a grotesque silhouette of rot and ruin. Her body is a canvas of corrosion, her flesh stitched with open sores and blooming blight. She wields a scythe carved from the spine of a titan, and carries an unholy relic of her own design: a censer from which spill the seeds of all plagues; known and unknown, ancient and yet to be named. Where Mioran walks, suffering follows. Where her name is spoken, mercy withers.
The Maiden of Plagues is usually accompanied by her three children and heralds:
- Thesra, the Harbringer of Plagues.
- Louthara, the Thorn of Agony
- Kaevros, the Weaver of Delirium
- Symbol
- Titles
- Alignment
- Portfolio
- Worshipers
- Cleric Alignments
- Domains
- Sub domains
- Favorite Weapon
- Sacred Animal
- Sacred Colors
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Dogma
"She was the scream sealed away. Now she is the silence devouring all."
Mioran exalts chaos, shadow, and suffering. Her doctrine is a hymn to rot and a sacred litany of affliction. She commands her faithful to sow disease and torment, for the art of unending agony alone. Quick ends are a heresy as only prolonged suffering feeds her divinity. The despair her plagues birth, the screams torn from shattered minds, the slow unraveling of flesh; these are her sacraments. Every tear, every fevered breath, every waking nightmare is an offering.
Mioran teaches that reason is a prison. Sanity is a veil drawn over the void to protect the weak. Her dogma declares that true revelation lies not in logic, but in madness. Only when the mind is unmade can it see clearly. Only in delirium does meaning emerge. To suffer is to awaken. To endure is to ascend. Pain - physical, mental, and spiritual - is the crucible through which transcendence is forged. Most of the time, her faithful seek enlightenment not in scriptures, but in scars.
Unnur's Creation
From the first breath of the dark divine, Mioran and Zinxa shared more than mere alliance. Theirs was a bond forged in silence and shadow; a mutual understanding that needed no words and a communion of cruelty and purpose. They did not love, but they reflected one another: two sides of the same cursed coin, each reveling in the unraveling of life. Together, they conceived a design so vile, so intricate, it threatened to unweave the threads of creation.
Bound by their desire for pain and rot, the two goddesses wove a forbidden ritual: an act of divine fusion, mingling pestilence and death into something far worse. Mioran became the womb of ruin, the living altar upon which the ceremony was etched. And from that unholy union, a god was born:
Unnur, the Endbringer.
Unnur, the God of Destruction.
He was forged in stillborn screams and baptized in plague. His breath is the ash of cities, his gaze the silence of mass graves. In him, Zinxa's merciless decay and Mioran’s deranged affliction were perfectly joined to create a god of obliteration. His coming was not a mistake. It was prophecy, fulfilled by his own makers.
When he rose, Mioran and Zinxa watched from the shadowed veil with satisfaction.
For in Unnur, they had made a legacy of desolation.
Clergy and Temples
Mioran’s faith is enshrined in the cult known as The Withered Flame; a name whispered in fear and reverence, symbolizing the dying light of hope and the slow burn of suffering. Her clergy is predominantly female, known as Daughters of Affliction. Male supplicants are rare, and those few who do serve are often relegated to lesser roles, deemed unworthy of bearing her deeper mysteries.though their appearance evokes war more than worship.
The Daughters are often mistaken by outsiders for warband leaders or barbarians, for they dress in tattered hides, plague masks, and garb stitched from the flayed skin of the condemned. Their bodies are marked with ritual scars, each wound a passage in a living scripture of pain.
The cult of the Withered Flame is not a unified hierarchy, but a labyrinth of orders, sects, and ranks, each devoted to a specific facet of Mioran’s dogma. Some specialize in diseasecraft, others in psychological torment, others in the cryptic rites of madness and revelation. Internal rivalries are common, as different orders interpret pain and ascension in unique and often violently opposed ways. Yet all kneel at the altar of decay.
Her temples are hidden sanctuaries, often buried beneath ruined cities, sunken into marshlands, or secreted within plague-ridden ruins. Inside, death reigns. The stench of decay is thick and sacred. Shrines are built from bone and carrion. Plague-wreathed censers hang from rusted chains, spreading cursed smoke. The altars are not mere adorned stones but a blood stained canvas where screams echo for hours. Ritual sacrifice is required. Not merely the ending of life, but the ritual unmaking of the body and mind. The more exquisite the torment, the more fervent the devotion.
Mioran does not desire death: she desires unraveling.
Relationships
Mioran’s ties to other deities are strained, volatile, and often born of ancient betrayals or fundamental opposition.
Her relationship with Levar, the god of trickery and revelry, is distant and disdainful. Though both embody aspects of chaos, their domains diverge utterly: Levar dances in mischief and fleeting delight, while Mioran thrives in agony and ruin. To her, the Tricksters antics are childish diversions from the raw truths of pain and entropy.
With Ephelion, the god of love and art, the tension is even sharper. His ideals of beauty, intimacy, and inspiration are anathema to Mioran’s gospel of decay. Their interactions are marked by contempt and clash; where Ephelion seeks to elevate the soul, Mioran seeks to unravel it. There is no common ground, only hostility.
Among all, Siona, Goddess of Death and Magic, remains Mioran’s greatest adversary. The gem that birthed the Plague Queen was torn from the Keeper's own crown and since that fateful theft, Siona has been haunted by her failure and obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the heist. Every move she makes is shadowed by her desire to undo Mioran’s existence and reclaim what was lost.
Mioran, however, barely acknowledges her. Rather than engage her directly, she works through subtler means by supporting her lover, Zinxa the Devourer of Souls, in their shared ambition to see Siona dethroned. To Mioran, this is not a simple feud but an inevitability: her plagues will spread, Zinxa will ascend in the Underworld, and Siona will fade with her brittle ideals.
Her relationship with Haestrom, the Frozen Tyrant, is laced with bitterness. During the Purification Era, Mioran stood as a loyal ally, unleashing her pestilence alongside his winter wrath in a war against the radiant Novirath. Together, they nearly drowned the world in shadow. But in victory, Haestrom betrayed her.
In secret, he redirected the devotion of the orc races - mortal children of Unnur, Mioran’s son - toward himself. This quiet usurpation struck at Mioran’s legacy. Her bond with Unnur might not be one of tenderness, but it is one of power: his strength is an extension of her own. Haestrom's treachery is more than an insult to her: t is a threat. The alliance is broken, and what remains is resentment, cold and festering.
All written content is original, drawn from myth, memory, and madness.
All images are generated via Midjourney using custom prompts by the author, unless otherwise stated.
As a Nurgle enjoyer myself, I really like seeing interesting deities of decay and/or plague. Was a very good read, thank you. :D "Her temples are hidden sanctuaries, often buried beneath ruined cities, sunken into marshlands, or secreted within plague-ridden ruins. Inside, death reigns." Are the temples built within plague-ridden ruines or are the temples rot the area around them as a goddess of decay is worshipped there? Can you smell such a temple from a mile away or is her influence heavily limited on the temple itself?
It's always great to see another fan of the darker aspects of worldbuilding :) You raise a very interesting point and thank you for the question. I would say it's a little bit of both. The most important of her temples were discovered only when it was too late, they stayed hidden and spread their influence silently rotting the area around them slowly. Such regions are easy to spot with all your senses from a mile away. But many other cult endeavors are subtler and limited within sanctums of decay. Since the worshipers of Mioran is involved as antagonist in our current game, expect some more articles on her church and orders soon!