Malek

Introduction

Malek is the God of Death, Souls and Disease. Given the very nature of his domains, he is one of the most powerful of all the Gods, and one of the most influential to Atharen's structure, function and order. It was Malek who engineered the mortal soul, connecting it to the Living Gods and Muid, and as he designed the properties of the soul itself, the God's influence often extends into magic, metaphysics, and other complex features of the mortal world. Malek has always been among the most revered of his kin, though mostly if only so that mortals might evade his Divine flail, fearful of the eternity that is death and the evisceration that comes with blight and plague.

History

Malek was not the first among his brethren to experience the ensuing terror of death; the void lurching over their divine frames, embodied in the form of a mantis dissecting its prey. Rather, Malek was the first of all of his kin - and the only - to live in the face of the Outsider's talons, emerging from the beast's rake alive, though not unscathed. It was this terrifying encounter with the Mana-Eater that instilled a great paranoia within the God, a foundational glance towards the abyss that has forever molded his mind.

Malek has always had a fascination with the finality of life's end. To begin with, he was born with the power to cull other Adac, a feat virtually impossible for others among his kind. With all species he encountered - save for the Outsider itself - he has learned their weaknesses, finding vulnerabilities an almost instinctual drive within him. Of course, this has led other Adac to fear him in the past, but not more than they've admired him. Despite his terrifying power over many of his brethren, the God has always sought one thing above all: that they thrive. His single-minded loyalty has been a key to the Living Gods' success since their divergence from the old Plane, and like a dutiful soldier he has fulfilled whatever imperatives were asked of him.

For most of history before the Bleeding, Malek remained largely reserved. He deferred mostly to the will of the other Adac, often forced to engage with them by his wife, Y'shendra, who he had a close relationship with; a relationship he has never been able to replace. Whenever Malek did act, his actions held great consequence. The culling of the Ald'Norai elite led effectively to the end of the Age of Elves, a strict reminder of the power of Gods and what can be derived from their defiance. Aside from this, however, he became almost akin to an Outsider himself: lurching over life, waiting, reaping the living in their moments of vulnerability. The executioner of the Gods, he was always a quiet one.

This became only moreso after the Bleeding. With the descent of Y'shendra into Bel, Malek's final tethers to his brethren waned. For a time he attempted to find solace to fill the empty space; he bonded greatly with Kyrikain, helping to forge a new home for the Arkanai and delving deep into the realm of dreams, exploring what his brother called the infinite depth of reality. Nothing truly managed to placate him.

The history of Malek is little. A man once quiet, reserved, relying only on the company of a singular companion... he has since become a more extreme version of the same man, lost in his duties, seemingly content to do nothing but harness and distribute per his domains until the end of time. There is a deeply unsettling nature to the God that is known, or rather unknown, today. Worried of the dismantling of his faith, his brethren continue to speak to him as they drink from his realm, though few times if ever do they receive an answer.

Depiction

Malek is depicted as a strange and ambivalent figure. He has had a long history of paranoia, and a relationship with death many find incomprehensible. The Adac finds it to be a companion lurking from beneath him; always ready to spring, blackening the skies and consuming the world. The Outsider weighs on his mind, an ancient enemy; a prophesized demise. For this reason, many statues of his depict him as fleeing the talons of a Mantis, a creature parallel to the Outsider in appearance. He escapes, narrowly, the doom he imagines to be encroaching upon the mortal world, hopelessly seeking answers in the face of converging abyss.

Despite being one of the most powerful entities in known existence, he fashions himself prey; a reaper-pretender who can do nothing in the face of the true end, a predator capable of bringing death to any. Malek is a loving father to the people of Atharen, perhaps one of the few Gods who knows any compassion. Despite this, the jading weight of history distances him from others, the Adac finding himself a lone wolf in its face. His only relationships are with the children born of him, after Y'shendra's fall. For this reason, his statues often carry a lone child, the next of his progeny, deserving of his ear.

Malek is massive in scale and shape; tall, muscular, robust. He has dark olive skin, wears a multi-faced mask of skulls attached to hair-like fur, and tends to wear naught but a ragged loincloth. Beneath his skeletal mask is, supposedly, the face of a rugged brute, with unkempt, slicked back hair that extends beyond his ears, and a short-length beard. Malek is typically viewed as a primal and ancient figure, unchanging with the progression of history and technology. Even as the world around him evolves, he remains the same; a barbarian wanderer, as lonesome as he is emotionally volatile; wild, passionate. Perhaps for this reason, many take comfort in him, a familiar friend to the base nature of mortal-kind.

Domains

Malek's domains are often considered far more integral to the function and balance of Atharen than the God himself, who tends to appear as a distant, unrefined wanderer. While he may not interact with the mortals of Atharen, and in fact rarely ever has, even before the Living Gods became more distant, his domains interact with people in day-to-day life constantly. Aside from this, the very finality of his domains leads to a greater sense of prominence within them. Malek is one of the more contested deities, philosophically. There is a large divide within those groups who do acknowledge or believe in the Living Gods, with many of them viewing him as a benign and essential component to mortal existence, while many question the callousness that enables him to rend the soul of an infant child.

Within contemporary times, after the Divine Abolition, these contested beliefs over Malek have led many to acknowledge his existence as a necessary metaphysical force within Atharen, one not necessarily worthy of reverence. In many ways, he is seen as a necessary evil. Even many who do follow the Path do not tend to 'worship' Malek so much as seek to placate him. Ultimately, due to the inevitability of death and the nature of mortal fallibility, prayers to Malek necessarily cannot yield exceptions or mercy. He is an objective, and therefore by some standards, brutal God.

Malek's domain of Death is an incredibly powerful one. He is the only Adac who, from the very beginning, was aware of how to kill other Adac. It is said within theological circles that before the migration of the Gods from the Outlands, Malek was in fact forced to kill one of his brethren who threatened to rupture the Planes that Venadak was building, resistant to the idea of surrendering their original home. Learning to harness this power has always been a blight upon the man within his relationship to other Gods, who have feared what may or could become of him in the face of adversity or desperation. His nature as quiet, brooding, unemotional and non-expressive has led him to become a target of fearful speculation.

Malek's relationship to Souls is a complex one. It is his ability to manipulate and find the vulnerabilities within Souls that allows him to hold such a mastery over Death. Many would, in fact, say that these are separate names for the same domain, perfectly linked to one another; he could not end life if not for the ability to harvest Souls, and he could not functionally rend souls without the ability to kill even the most complex entities.

These two prior domains both converge within the final facet of his divine power, Disease. Disease, typically called 'Entropy' by Malek himself, is something he has learned to unleash to compromise the structure of all organic life. Malek's ability to kill is so exceptional because he can tailor and create divine and organic pathogens and directly impart them into the soul of another entity, the disease itself capable of changing and adapting to suit its environment. Interestingly, the souls within Senia on the surface of Muid each have a sort of parasitic pathogen within them that allows for Malek to continue to harvest the gradual decay of their souls. He has developed a truly vast number of diseases for separate purposes, though most of the diseases that plague the mortal realms did not emerge from him directly; rather, they are the consequence of viral reactions enabled by the introduction of such concepts to life. Malek made the framework of Disease, and allowed natural processes to take over from there.

Influence

Malek's influence is clear, and intrinsically tied to his domains. His power over death, the framework he provides for the proliferation of pathogens, and his innate ability to refine, harvest and manipulate souls has made him one of the most integral Adac within Atharen, and the effects of his abilities have in many ways ensured the existence of the Mortal Plane itself.

Dogma

Malek has little specific dogma, as he has never sought to be a religious icon or figure for reverence. He does not have encoded texts speaking of particular virtues, he does not make demands of conformity to the far majority of mortal life. The one concern Malek has continually expressed throughout history is against the 'perversion of life', and he often communicates this distaste through warnings, and punishment. The fate of the Ald'Norai was largely due to their infringement against his domains, with any undying beings drawing his immediate ire. Sigilic Pyromancy and the Black Sigil it derives from were developed so that mortals could enforce his wroth against these creatures, culling Ghosts, undead, and Dranoch.

Notable Religious Factions

The Black Remedy

The Black Remedy are among the few organizations in Atharen's history to be sponsored by the aloof God. Formed only within the last three decades in order to resist the oppression of the Sil'Norai by the Dranoch, Malek took particular interest in this organization, as it was formed directly to fight the Dranoch, entities that he reviles. Malek gifted the founder of the Remedy, Aldrin Sil'Jalus, a Lost Magic that largely disappeared with the extinction of the Ald'Norai, allowing him to spread the Mark among his followers to be weaponized against their ravenous foes.

For more information on the Black Remedy, please refer to this article.

The Carrion Hole

Malek's realm has a unique metaphysical boundary that directly connects it between the two planes of Atharen and Muid, the only realm of its kind that does so. The surface level of his realm acts as the bridge for all life into the afterlife. Through a tether known as 'the Crossing', souls pass through from Atharen to Muid, though their first destination is a massive basin known as the Well of Souls. The Well of Souls stores the mortal soul upon its death. The soul is extracted of its excess energy, whatever was garnered through its maturation within the shell of its mortal body. What remains of the soul, enough to wander the surface of Senia, is then guided to Senia by one of Malek's Noradac, known as a Collector. As the souls on the surface of the well are being harnessed and extracted, they will funnel into a lower level of the realm, called the Carrion Hole.

It is within the Carrion Hole that the Living Gods drink from the Well of Souls, a massive, multi-level structure that acts as their basin of energy. The Well of Souls naturally refines ether into Divinity when moving between the first and second tier of the structure. Upon reaching the second tier, the Gods dip a divine artifact similar in form to a chalice within the well and drink from it. Each sip of the well contains an unfathomably vast amount of energy, the condensed and pure form of Divinity that emerges from within a soul. Gods use this substance to expand their power, maintain their domains (such as with crafting Spirits), and previously, to perform divine deeds in aide of their followers, though they no longer do so.

The third and lowest tier of the structure is the true breadth of the Carrion Hole. This is a smaller fountain that Malek himself drinks from, appearing to be within an enclosed grotto-like area surrounded by vultures perched on all sides. Outside of this pond-like enclosure exists the remainder of the realm itself, a vast marsh, its waters filled with corpses. The walls of the Carrion Hole are built of an amalgamation of blended corpses, piling up as tall as mountains. Malek himself resides within a large cave system, free of corpses, known to be silent, tranquil and cold.

Demigods

Surprisingly, since his separation from Y'shendra, Malek has engaged with a number of lovers within the mortal plane, even calling them to his bedside from within Senia. As a result of this, he has a considerable number of recently-created Draedan, one of the only of his kind within the Living Gods to continue to reproduce frequently with mortals after the Bleeding. Malek typically forges his Draedan within the Carrion Hole itself, and will actually deliver a Draedan to their intended mother or father upon their creation. This is, typically, the last time either the child or their parent will ever witness him.

Melphas

Draedan of Ash, Vermin and Virulence. More information to come.

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• Bane
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