Tharizdun

Tharizdun, also known as The Chained God and The Elder Elemental Eye, is a long-forgotten deity who sought to destroy all that is. During the Dawn War, he created the Abyss, an act for which he was imprisoned by the gods.

Description

Tharizdun appeared as an amorphous, roiling pitch-blackness.

Personality

Tharizdun is not simply neutral evil; his evil transcends law and chaos, reflecting a primal nature so ancient it goes back to the early days of the Great Wheel cosmology.

Worshippers

Tharizdun was one of the evil deities within the Oerthly, Dawn War, and Exandrian pantheons. He was worshiped only by mad people.

Dogma

Tharizdun's exact dogma is unknown, as the ages he was imprisoned in the Abyss along with his own growing insanity left him unable to communicate in a meaningful manner. Even when he appeared to his followers, he only spoke to them in the form of a shrieking babble that was impossible for mortals to comprehend. The following are his assumed teachings, followed by his cults. “ Channel power to the Chained God, so he can break his chains. Retrieve lost relics and shrines to the Chained God. Pursue the obliteration of the world, in anticipation of the Chained God's liberation ” —

History

Ancient History

In the time when the multiverse was young, Tharizdun was a power hungry deity who was not happy with the idea of sharing the multiverse with the other gods, and for a long time he searched for something that would give him an edge against them. In those times, he joined his fellow Oerthian deity Pelor and a Nerathian deity, Ioun, who were also interested to discover the secrets of the multiverse. They eventually found the Living Gate, that separated the Far Realm from the Astral Sea. The three gods peered through it, learning terrible secrets that changed them forever, among them the weapon he was searching for.

Some time later, when the gods were fighting the primordials during the initial stages of what would be known later as the Dawn War, Tharizdun returned, killed the guardian of the Living Gate and opened it, releasing corruptive energy from the Far Realm into the multiverse. From the Far Realm he retrieved a "seed of chaos" from a dead universe, the Shard of Pure Evil of the obyriths. Through the shard, the obyriths changed his mind and spirit, corrupting him in an instant, driving the deity to madness.

But the obyriths' plan to seize the celestial realms controlled by Tharizdun and his kind was met with resistance and a twist they had not anticipated. The obyriths demanded Thariuzdun to plant the seed of evil within the Astral Sea, promising him total dominion of that realm in exchange for his fealty. Even within his madness, Tharizdun recognized that his fellow gods would turn on him before he could fully seize the power the obyriths promised. Instead, the mad god traveled to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, planting the seed of evil in a primordial expanse of the churning Elemental Chaos, which he hoped to seize as his own.

This seed eventually grew into the Abyss, and though the act gained him great power, the other gods of the multiverse temporarily put aside their differences in order to imprison him. Modern History

In 1340 DR, a cult of Tharizdun formed in western Chessenta. It hired bandits, consorted with demons, and caused much havoc before an alliance of forces destroyed it. Some credit the fact that Tharizdun did not gain a permanent foothold on Toril to the personal intervention of the goddess Mystra.

A new cult of Tharizdun was formed by the plague demon Murmur in 1479 DR after a burnt portion of its corpse was discovered by the Firestorm Cabal in Akanûl. It possessed Leheren, one of the members of the Cabal, and created a secret order within the order devoted to freeing Tharizdun and releasing him on the continent of Faerûn.

At roughly the same time, the last of the Sabrak clan of dwarves discovered an intrusion of the Abyssal Plague in a temple of Ghaunadaur in the mountains south of Easting and devised a way to transform victims of the plague into plague demons with which they hoped to create an army that would fight for the Elder Elemental Eye.

In the late 15th century DR, several cults dedicated to the Elder Elemental Eye arose in the Dessarin Valley trying to summon the Princes of Elemental Evil.

Tharizdun

Intermediate Deity

Basic Information

Titles

The Chained God
The Elder Elemental Eye

Pantheons

Astoran

Attributes

Alignment

Neutral Evil

Symbol

Dark spiral or inverted ziggurat

Realm

-

Portfolio

Darkness, Elemental Power, Entropy, Insanity, Ruin, Vengeance

Favored Weapon

Curved dagger

Following

Worshippers

Fanatic nihilists
Evil elemental beings

Alignments

LE, NE, CE

Domains

Air (-)
Earth (-)
Fire (-)
Madness (Insanity, Nightmare, Truth)
Void (Dark Tapestry)
Water (-)