The Raven Queen
(a.k.a. Matron of Death, The Lady of the Dead, the Judge of the Damned)
The Raven Queen is the unaligned goddess of fate and enemy to all the undead. Death, fate, and winter all fall under her domain. Master of the skein of fate and the mistress of winter, the Raven Queen is the god of death. Her gaze follows and marks the end of each mortal life, watching over the border between life and death and ensuring the natural transition is undefiled. Many funerals ask her blessing to protect the deceased from the terrible curse of undeath. She is the sovereign ruler of Letherna, the extra-dimensional afterlife that resides within The Shadowfell. She marks the end of each mortal life, overseeing the passage of the soul to the City of Midnight.
The Raven Queen is seen as a just, fair, and comforting god of death. Death comes to all, and when it occurs Lady Death is there to take each soul by the hand and lead it to the proper afterlife. The Raven Queen’s priests teach that those who revere the gods according to the rites of their religion have done their proper service and will be offered the afterlife they seek.
The faithful of The Raven Queen provide people with peaceful transitions into the care of the Matron of the Dead. They help the dying put their affairs in order, and they officiate at funeral rites for those who can’t afford the lavish ceremonies of their faith. The tenets of The Raven Queen’s faithful compel them to forestall or prevent untimely deaths whenever possible. Different sects and worshipers define “untimely” in different ways. One group might concentrate on stopping the spread of disease, another on the prevention of murder, and yet another on eliminating the scourge of the undead. In fact, all the faithful of The Raven Queen despise the undead and work to some degree to eliminate them, for undead of any sort are seen as an abomination of the natural order. This belief obviously puts The Raven Queen's faithful at odds with necromancers, priests of Orcus and others who promote the creation of the undead, and it also causes conflict from unexpected sources. For instance, priests of The Raven Queen routinely destroy any writings about the creation of the undead that they find — an act that offends those who value knowledge for its own sake, such as the faithful of Oghma. And there also exist undead that aren’t evil, such as the baelnorn, which the elves consider holy. The Raven Queen's devotees seek the end of such beings regardless of that fact.
Staying isolated in her realm, The Raven Queen remains out of contact with much of the pantheon, save for when her motivations conflict with deities such as Bahamut, and Oghma who treat her with great suspicion. She has an openly adversarial relationship with Orcus, regarding undeath as an affront to the natural order of life and death.
Divine Domains
Death, Fate, Winter
Divine Classification
Greater Deity
Realm
Children
Ruled Locations
Comments