Zok'thuliss the Undying Wound

Titles: The Eternal Constriction, The Wound That Devours, The Coil Beneath All, Sire of Venomed Eternity
Symbol: A bleeding ouroboros, fangs piercing its own flesh, leaking black ichor.
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Domains: Death, Knowledge, Trickery, Corruption (custom or homebrew)
Depiction: An endless serpent with flesh torn open in a spiral wound that never heals, its insides writhing with shadowy tendrils. Its eyes are twin voids, and its breath smells of rot and time.

Mythos

Zok’thuliss is said to have been wounded by the Primordials themselves in the earliest shaping of the world—a punishment for trying to coil around the heart of reality and claim it for itself. But the wound did not kill it.

Instead, it became eternal. Bleeding time, pain, and poison into the world, Zok’thuliss learned the secrets of undeath, rebirth, and soul transmutation. To its followers, death is not an end but a membrane to be shed—like a serpent's skin.

The Undying Wound is not worshipped for mercy or protection. It is worshipped for what it knows: how to rot without ending, to shed mortality, to become a wound upon the world that can never be closed.

The Immortal Coil

The Immortal Coil believes that Zok’thuliss’s divine essence dwells in all serpents, but only the faithful are capable of awakening it fully within themselves. Through ritual shedding (literal and metaphysical), poison-forged alchemy, and soul-binding rites, they attempt to emulate the god’s endless cycle of painful persistence and unholy evolution.

They consider The Rending not as a disaster, but as a prophetic wound—a mirror of their god’s suffering—and they believe that it marked the first true sign of Zok’thuliss's awakening beneath the world. Rumors say a high priest of the Coil has discovered one of the Bleeding Veins—a living fissure of ichor that speaks in whispers and grants terrible gifts.

Cult Practices

• Shedborn Initiation: New cultists are made to fast for seven days, then anoint themselves in venom and let a serpent bite them. Surviving initiates are "shedborn"—those who have symbolically molted their weakness.
• Blood Binding: Cultists sometimes stitch the skin of dead enemies into serpentine patterns across their own bodies, believing it will keep those souls from escaping into the afterlife.
• Woundchant Liturgies: Chanted rituals where the same phrase is repeated in an ever-narrowing spiral, inducing a trance state said to bring the chanter closer to Zok’thuliss’s thoughts.
• The Black Ichor: A mythic substance said to be Zok’thuliss's blood. It burns, heals, and corrupts in equal measure. The Coil believes it lies hidden beneath the earth near Windrift.