Pharika's Influence

Pharika represents the duality of life and death distilled into a single draught that can serve as tonic or toxin, depending on the dosage. She is most associated with affliction, whether that phenomenon takes the form of a disease, a venom, a drug, or the passage of years. Her cures are reliable but come at a cost. In some cases, that cost is pain as the medicine courses through the imbiber's body. In other cases, she demands years of life, either from the patient's lifetime or the researcher's labor.
In her oversight of life and death, Pharika acts as a patron of alchemists. Pharmacists offer prayers to her while crafting potions, as do the ill or infirm before imbibing a supposed remedy. Likewise, a body's slow transformation is sacred to her, whether it be the inevitable effects of aging or the petrification of her medusa children's victims.

Pharika's Goals

To Pharika, Theros is an ongoing experiment and mortals are her agents in carrying it out. Rather than limit her knowledge to what her own insights yield, she revels in watching mortals decipher the world's wisdom and unearth its hidden knowledge, and she delights in seeing each sage interpret their findings in novel ways. She is willing to do anything to perpetuate experimentation and discovery, even at the cost of turning her less devout followers into specimens.

Divine Relationships

Despite her venomous reputation, Pharika has provided nearly every god with a cure or an otherwise essential tonic at a crucial moment. As a result, she's rarely in outright conflict with her fellow gods, yet she's always willing to jeopardize peace with her peers if it means indulging some audacious new experiment.
The gods of the Underworld have cordial relations with Pharika. She and Athreos enjoy each other's silent company, and Erebos appreciates her agenda, which ultimately bolsters his realm. Pharika rankles somewhat at the attention Erebos gets from dying mortals, chafing at their tendency to appeal to him when they could beg her for healing or for a painless death.
Pharika and the gods of civilization cautiously maneuver around one another's territory, with Ephara and Karametra recognizing Pharika's medicinal virtues, and she is always seeking subtle ways to use city-states in her experiments without provoking her peers. She disdains Ephara's and Karametra's desire to tame the world rather than understand it.
Pharika has her most complex relationships with the gods of knowledge. Pharika loathes that Keranos gifts wisdom to the undeserving, while Kruphix represents mysteries even she has yet to fathom.
No god is more precious to Pharika than Nylea. She adores Nylea as the source of nature's abundant bounty and delights in Nylea's warmth. Anyone who threatens or offends Nylea is likely to also earn Pharika's enmity.