The Devourer

Eons ago, the Material Plane sprang into existence in an instant, and someday it will end just as abruptly, as all creation ceases to exist. Believed by some to have been born in that same instant of creation, or perhaps even to be the ghost of some entity from a previous cycle of existence, the Devourer seeks to hasten this inevitable end and unmake the entire plane, eradicating all matter and energy until nothing remains, not even the Devourer itself. Every machine that breaks, every living thing that dies, every star that goes supernova, every photon sucked into a black hole, every galaxy that goes dark—all these and more are said to be the handiwork of the Devourer.
The Devourer has no name, no form, no being. It is less a god than a primal force of the universe—an embodiment of malicious entropy, concerned only with the obliteration of all reality. Heedless of the meaningless existence of life in all its myriad forms, it cannot be reasoned with, delayed, or halted, and it largely ignores the pleas and prayers of even its most devout worshipers. Some cosmologists and theologians postulate that when the Devourer has consumed everything and the mortal world expires, the Devourer will give birth to a new universe in place of the old, but the crazed cultists who venerate the Star-Eater as a god know this for the foolishly hopeful lie that it is. There will be no rebirth, no second creation—only an immeasurable void of nothingness.
The church of the Devourer has little organization or leadership, only scattered, chaotic cults made up of berserkers, cannibals, nihilistic plotters, depraved reavers, and ruthless solarians. While many of the faithful prey upon nearly every sentient being they encounter, reveling in destruction and mayhem, some members possess a cunning knack for planning, carefully engineering catastrophes and triggering disasters to maximize the loss of life and ruination of property and resources. Devourer cults are outlawed on nearly every civilized world, but hidden shrines can be found on remote asteroids and abandoned moons, and many cults form motley flotillas of ships that attack and slaughter all they come across in the depths of space.
While the Devourer can be represented by a simple black dot or swirl—representations of the final collapse of spacetime—the most common symbol is the Blood Accretion: a black hole with swirling red in its accretion disk. When the end finally comes, Devourer cultists believe, space-time itself will weep the blood of the gods before finally passing into nothing.

Sects

Scions of the Unmaking

Deep space provides cover for many criminals and outcasts, from mercenary pirates to demon binders and mutants driven insane by unshielded reactors. Yet the worst of these is likely the single-minded horror of the Cult of the Devourer.
Civilized worlds often wonder why Devourer cultists bother worshiping a god of destruction when it offers them nothing in return. Yet what they fail to grasp is that nothing is exactly what such cultists desire. The Devourer’s destruction promises not just an end but a complete unmaking of all that is. It could consume not just the future but the past; not just the Material Plane but all existence. By advancing its cause, the grief stricken can literally undo past tragedies, making it so their losses never happened. By removing the afterlife, the guilty can avoid judgment. While priests of different sects debate whether this existence would be replaced by a new one more to the Devourer’s liking, their underlying premise is that the current existence has rotted, and it must be erased completely.
While the public thinks of Devourer cultists as sadistic cannibals, berserkers in gore-studded armor that raid ships for the joy of slaughter, this is only one facet of the faith. Such shock troops are called “wall breakers”—barbarians driven by sacred drugs to slaughter and defile, not for their own pleasure, but to break the spirits of civilizations. Complementing these are the “hidden ones,” pious sociopaths who move undetected among other societies, gathering information, recruiting, and planting the seeds of entropy. Priests and leaders can be from either choir (as the two traditions are known), and different congregations place different emphasis on these two tactics. Above all of these, however, are the rare “atrocites”—individuals who’ve broken free from the Cycle of Souls in order to mastermind destruction on a scale grand enough to attract the attention of the Devourer. While individual cults may be fractious, battling each other as well as victims in their scarred and twisted warships, all immediately bow to the will of an atrocite, in whose empty eye sockets and stormcloud halo they might find their final victory.

CE god of black holes, destruction, supernovas; Centers of Worship: Akiton, Apostae, The Diaspora, Eox, Verces; Symbol: A black hole, often tinged with red

Type

Religious, Cult

Alternative Names

The Star-Eater