Myrkul, The Lord of Bones
Myrkul is a deity of death, exhaustion, dusk, and autumn. He’s the god of the ending of things and hopelessness. Folk don’t pray to Myrkul so much as dread him and blame him for aching bones and fading vision. Myrkul was the last to be added to the pantheon of traitor gods. He began as a balance to Kelemvor, The Judge, a fellow judge on where souls were to end up when they made their final journey. However Myrkul grew impatient and greedy, his power grew, isolated in the Shadowfell, and he twisted the magics of undeath. He taught his secrets to Khur, the Living and others, spreading his secrets. The gods overlooked it, until her directly intervened and caused the fall of Khermi, when the sand had settled and the empire had fallen, Khermi and his tower of Barad-Mor were banished from the shadowfell, into the Abyss.
Myrkul is thought to be passionless and uncaring even of his most devout worshipers. Those who take Myrkul as a patron tend to be morose, taciturn, and obsessed with the dead and the undead. Like many followers of Kelemvor priests of Myrkul serve as undertakers and typically keep their patron’s identity secret. Some are necromancers, or druids who have turned away from the light and instead find refuge in the darkness of death. Others can be vampires or liches, who pray to Myrkul to preserve their own undeath on the material plane.
Shrines to Myrkul or engravings of his holy symbol appear in many places where humans bury their dead, but full-fledged temples are rare. The few that exist are hallowed places where the dead from hundreds of miles around are brought for internment, even if they were not of Myrkul’s faith. There is little space set aside for the living in such a location, usually a single modest shrine, but its catacombs and ossuaries are vast. In the deepest chamber of each temple rests a throne, and upon that throne sits the doomwarden — the preserved corpse of the most revered saint in the history of the temple (often its founder). Initiates to the faith are brought to kneel before a temple’s doomwarden, where they must spend a night and a day fasting and meditating in complete darkness.
Myrkul's domain is that or the tower of Barad-Mor, nestled deep within the Abyssal realm of Thanatos. Under its black sky, Thanatos is a land of bleak mountains, barren moors, ruined cities, and forests of twisted black trees. Tombs, mausoleums, gravestones, and sarcophagi litter the landscape. Undead swarm across the plane, bursting from their tombs and graves to tear apart any creatures foolish enough to journey here. Barad-Mor is a spiraling tower of black obsidian and bone, set within a howling wasteland called Oblivion’s End, the palace is surrounded by tombs and burial sites dug into the sheer slopes of narrow valleys, creating a tiered necropolis.
Divine Domains
The Undead, Exhaustion, Nightmares
