Jabru, God of Death

Jabru is the god of death and the dead, the personification of both the moment of death and the caretaker of the many souls that find themselves with nowhere else to go. As most gods are, Jabru was once a mortal, and has ascended beyond the normal bounds of life and death. None know when they were as a mortal, but even the earliest of histories speak of their worship as a long established part of society.

Tenets of Faith

Jabru is worshipped in three major aspects, known as Jabru in Repose, Jabru Awakened, and Jabru Weeping. There are, however, a number of shared beliefs. Chief among them is a great respect for life and death. Jabru's followers teach that death, however necessary, is always tragic. Therefore life should never be taken in vain, and death should never be accepted without acknowleding the full impact of that death. Followers must show compassion, dilligence and dedication to their work. Death never takes a holiday, so the effort to ease its burden cannot afford to do so either. This does not mean that all those who serve must serve unceasingly - the only being Jabru demands that of is Jabru themselves.

Jabru in Repose

Jabru in Repose is the god of peaceful death, and is worshipped by a number of organizations dedicated to taking care of the dead and the dying. These organizations take steps to reduce the pain and suffering caused by death, both easing the moments leading up to death and tending to those left behind, as well as making the necessary arrangements to dispose of their mortal remains. Many of these organizations operate a variety of related charitable services: orphanages to raise and care for children left behind by their parents' death, hospitals that tend to the wounded such that they need not die unnecessarily, and, in a very few cases, providing food and shelter to the disenfranchised. In the country of Kinilan, the main organization that worships Jabru in Repose is The Embrace.

Jabru Awakened

The worship of Jabru Awakened is a strange and seemingly contradictory one, chiefly exemplified by a guild of assassins known as the Sleepers Awakened. Worshipers of Jabru Awakened believe in the cause of intervention; that is to say, they believe in reducing the impact of death by killing those who cause too many deaths. They hunt down murderers, assassinate corrupt nobles, weed out foolish generals who spend the blood of their soldiers as if it was water. Most polite, upstanding members of society see these assassins as dangerous murderers at best, if not evil cultists bent on bringing down society, so these worshippers tend to be a secretive bunch. Conversely, many more mundane assassins pretend to be a Sleeper, or at least a worshipper of Jabru Awakened, to take advantage of this fearsome reputation.

Jabru Weeping

Jabru Weeping is rarely worshipped in a formal capacity. This aspect represents mass death, and is said to walk battlefields littered with the fallen, or in cities devestated by disaster, or with those survivors who show little capacity to respond to the world around them. This title is invoked in prayers said for the victims of such events, or as a curse of shock or dismay.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

Nobody knows who Jabru was in life - even they have forgotten - for it is in death that they proved remarkable. Before Jabru's ascension, there was no god of death, no caretaker of the souls of the departed, and, indeed, relatively few gods to take in the souls of their followers. This left the land of the dead a dark, morose plane populated by shades slowly succumbing to a terrifying decay, forgetting their past lives and slowly dissolving into the aether. Jabru was one of many who fought against this fate, fighting to retain every scrap of memory, of identity. Searching for a way out, a way to end this slow spiritual collapse.
He failed. The decay of the soul is every bit as natural and inevitable as the decay of the body. But they did find another way - a way to guide the fugue, to give it shape and meaning, not just for themselves, but for those around them. To turn it from a slow, torturous decay tearing the soul apart piece by piece into a gentle, peaceful, ebb, taking only those memories that the soul no longer clings to as it sinks into a peaceful slumber. The end result is the same, but the path to reach it is far more relaxed.
In shaping the fabric of this plane of the dead, Jabru found themselves bound to the plane. Even as their memories of life faded away, their power over the plane increased, allowing them to provide this gentle release to more and more souls until eventually they could reach them all. Indeed, some philosophers have suggested that the entity known as Jabru is not the mortal soul they claim to be, but the plane itself, having had the original being's will permanently imprinted into its very nature. Most dismiss this as an irrelevant distinction, and those clerics who have spoken with Jabru directly believe their god is definitely that once-mortal soul, but in reality, it is difficult to tell. The idea of a plane being imprinted with an individuals will, then acting of its own accord is somewhat unique, and there is no agreed upon way to definitvely prove one side or the other.

Religions

• The Embrace

Age

Unknown

Gender

Neutral