Baal'Hadar

Baal’Hadar is vision without comprehension, truth without context, and the feverish pursuit of knowledge that should not be known. Among the five Old Gods, Baal’Hadar stands apart not for cruelty, but for the burden it places on those who recognize its presence. It is not an active god—it does not smite, or guide, or demand—but it sees. Always. Completely. And in being seen, things change.   Worshipped in hushed, fractured circles as The Sight Beyond Sight, Baal’Hadar represents the very concept of perception weaponized. It is the hidden watcher behind the stars, the dream that stares back, the lingering paranoia in the heart of prophets and madmen alike. To see truly is to go mad. To be seen truly is to be undone. Those who venerate Baal’Hadar do so not out of hope or salvation, but because they have seen too much to do otherwise.   According to the scattered fragments of esoteric scripture, Baal’Hadar did not begin as an entity—it began as an observation. A moment of awareness so pure and unfiltered that it transcended subjectivity. From that seed of awareness, the god was born—not to create or destroy, but to eternally observe.   In myth, it first appeared not in flesh but in dreams shared across species—visions of endless spirals of eyes, of impossible symmetry, of being observed by something vast and unknowable. These dreams would surface again and again in history: among extinct cave peoples, deep-reef civilizations, and stargazers driven to blind themselves in terror. Its mark appears scratched into ancient glass, painted on cave ceilings where no light ever reached, and carved into fossilized skulls older than language.   It is said Baal’Hadar still drifts within the Realm of Insanity, not dormant, but awake, fixated, watching every thread of time and thought like a web of trembling light. Those who believe in it know that to be observed by Baal’Hadar is to be changed at a fundamental level—rewritten by the act of being noticed.

Depiction

Baal’Hadar is never seen the same way twice. The most common image across ruins and carvings is a spiral of eyes, some slit-pupiled, others ringed with concentric irises, many crying streams of ink or blood. These eyes are sometimes engraved in gold, sometimes Obsidian, sometimes etched directly into the stone by heatless light. Some turn to follow the viewer. Others refuse to face forward.   Many cults render its symbol as a triangle of three inward-curving lines, forming no true corners—known as the Inward Eye. Mirrors are also considered sacred, as are lenses and smooth, black stones polished until they resemble still Water. To gaze too long at one is to risk falling into Baal’Hadar’s sight and not coming back.

Tenets of Faith

Baal’Hadar does not speak. It does not issue commandments or revelations. Instead, those who fall under its gaze—through dreams, exposure to forbidden glyphs, or sustained acts of perception—begin to understand. The tenets of Baal’Hadar are not learned. They are realized.   Perception Is Power. Seeing something gives it weight. Observing a thing changes its behavior. To perceive is to own—to reshape the world in the mind’s image. Baal’Hadar’s cults obsess over divination, surveillance, and control of information. Scrying pools, enchanted eyes, and spy networks form the core of their rituals. Some claim that by seeing enough of the world, one becomes immune to its lies.   Secrets Are Scars. To know is to suffer. Every truth carries a cost. Followers often inscribe forbidden knowledge onto their bodies as tattoos, carvings, or symbolic burns. This is both an offering and a reminder: the truth cannot be forgotten once it is known, and must be carried like a wound.   Blindness Brings Clarity. Physical sight is a distraction. The world we see is not the world that is. Advanced cultists ritually blind themselves, replacing their eyes with enchanted glass, alchemical lenses, or nothing at all. They claim this allows them to see through the veil, to look inward and outward at once. Some report seeing echoes of things that were never born, or truths from futures that never arrive.

Followers of Baal'Hadar

The faithful of Baal’Hadar are drawn to patterns—of speech, of light, of conspiracy. They are found among astronomers charting impossible stars, librarians who memorize every page of every book, detectives who solve crimes before they happen, and deranged prophets who stare at blank walls and see messages. Most are haunted. Some are vessels.   Cultists rarely gather in large numbers. They prefer isolation, correspondence, or triangulated meeting spaces where no one stands directly in front of another. Their writings are often encrypted, or composed in mirrored text only readable in water. Most cultists believe that to speak the god’s name aloud too often is to attract its gaze prematurely.   Among them are the Lens-Eaten—ritually blinded prophets who recite prophecies backwards, and Gaze-Mothers, who breed dreams among the sleeping minds of cult initiates, seeding them with symbolic visions that recur across continents.   Most cults of Baal’Hadar function more like occult think tanks than religions. Their members are seers, spies, warlocks, playwrights, and painters—those obsessed with meaning, pattern, and symbol. They do not hold sermons. They hold viewings—periods of silent contemplation before obsidian mirrors or polished lenses, often while under the influence of alchemical vapors or dream-inducing fungi.   Their central rite, known as The Lens-Turning, involves the construction of a nested series of viewing lenses, through which participants pass mirrored images of themselves, meditating on what truths can be revealed through endless self-reflection. Some versions of the ritual end with participants going blind. Others end with disappearances, or prophecy.   In certain elite cults, the highest sacrament is the Unmasking, in which the subject stares into a mirror said to be “looked through” by Baal’Hadar itself. Survivors claim to have seen their past and future selves in war with one another—or worse, cooperating.

Heralds and Harbingers of Baal’Hadar

Among the cults of Baal’Hadar, a Herald is not announced—they are noticed. These chosen (or cursed) mortals often begin as scholars, diviners, or artists who pierce too deeply into the god’s gaze. They awaken changed—unable to look away, unable to stop seeing. Their pupils fracture into spirals, their voices echo when alone, and mirrors reflect not their form, but their thoughts. Some are marked by visions so precise they can describe events yet to occur in rooms they've never entered. Others begin to speak only in mirrored script or ink their own bodies with living glyphs. These Heralds are not leaders. They are apertures, cracked open so the Sight Beyond Sight may peer through.   Within cult circles, Heralds are revered and feared. Each claims to be closest to Baal’Hadar’s truth, but only one may rise to Harbinger. Their competition is rarely open battle—it is warfare of perception: riddles within riddles, curses disguised as insight, and assassination via induced revelation. They duel in reflected rooms, trap each other in recursive dreams, or overwrite memories until no one can recall who began the ritual. To ascend, a Herald must not merely survive, but compel the Eye to see only them. When this happens, temples twist to reflect their form, and all lesser cultists speak their name in reverse.   A Harbinger of Baal’Hadar is not a preacher. It is a truth detonation. Its presence makes reality bleed. Eyes open in nearby walls. Dreams become transmissible. Its mere approach can cause books to write new endings, clocks to spin backward, or truths to become contagious ideas. Some Harbingers replace their own faces with obsidian masks etched with flowing script that no one admits to having written. Others appear faceless entirely, surrounded by floating lenses or rings of blood-polished glass. They do not deliver sermons—they deliver clarity, often lethal. When one appears, knowledge spreads like a plague, and madness follows in its wake.

Temples to Baal'Hadar

Temples to Baal’Hadar are paradoxes in stone—structures not meant to be understood, only experienced. Built to disrupt orientation, erode memory, and fracture perception, their very layout resists comprehension. Halls bend in on themselves, staircases ascend into mirrored voids, and symbols etched into walls shift subtly each time they’re viewed. Doors vanish when approached, and windows look into spaces that cannot exist. The act of trying to map such a temple is considered a heresy by most cults—an insult to the Infinite Eye’s ever-shifting gaze.   At the heart of these temples lie Dream Pools—deep, ink-dark wells of water, starlight, or voidstuff into which initiates descend in pursuit of revelation. Immersion in a Dream Pool is an act of surrender, a communion through which the initiate opens their mind to what Baal’Hadar might reveal. Some return with fragments of impossible truth. Others lose their names, memories, or eyes. A few emerge transformed—silent, silver-eyed vessels said to see the world as it truly is.   These temples are not marked on maps. Most cannot be found in a traditional sense—they are realized. Many are hidden beneath the ruins of ancient cities, sealed behind forgotten libraries or within flooded observatories far beneath the waves. Others appear only during rare celestial alignments: on the night of a mirrored moon, or when three stars converge in a dreamer’s eye. Some are simply there, in places no one ever thinks to look—a dead-end alley, a spiral staircase beneath a dry well, a door that doesn’t always exist.   Certain temples are built atop leyline junctions, where Magic bends inward and dreams run hot beneath the stone. Others are said to exist only in sleep—shared spaces glimpsed by multiple dreamers across generations, accessible through ritual, mirrored water, or specific lines of reversed prayer. To reach a temple of Baal’Hadar is to be seen. To enter one is to see back, if only for a moment.   No two temples are ever the same, but all share a single unifying principle: they are watching. Every surface, every pool, every silence is part of the lens. To walk through such a place is not to be alone, but to be observed—fully, deeply, and without protection. Those who leave rarely speak of what they saw. Some never stop watching the shadows. Others never wake again.

Beholders, Eyes of the Infinite Gaze

Beholders are not born. They are dreamed. Manifesting fully formed from the fevered visions of minds touched by Baal’Hadar, these Aberrations are not servants, but reflections—autonomous and dangerous shards of divine perception. Each beholder believes itself to be the only true being in existence, and its gaze is a weaponized assertion of that belief. Reality, to a beholder, is malleable, shaped by what it sees and fears. What it cannot understand, it attempts to destroy.   Cultists of Baal’Hadar revere beholders not as avatars, but as fractured emanations of the Infinite Eye’s dream logic. Some sects attempt to commune with them through mirrored rituals, ink-dream offerings, or the creation of echo-chambers—sealed spaces where thought and perception collapse into recursive madness. Others believe beholders are lenses, not minds, and that to stare into one’s central eye long enough is to glimpse the god itself. These rituals rarely end well.   Despite their violence and instability, beholders are often found lingering near temples of Baal’Hadar, drawn to places thick with secrets and layered with impossible geometry. In rare cases, a beholder may become the unknowing guardian of a Dream Pool or serve as a cryptic oracle, offering revelations through riddle, hallucination, or madness. But such gifts are never free, and those who survive a beholder’s truth often leave blind, scarred, or no longer convinced they are truly real.