The Raven Queen

Summary

The Raven Queen, goddess of death, is one of two deities that were once mortal. Death in Talonn was once a much more malleable natural law-- the Material Plane was closer to the Feywild, and the raw wild magic of the planes made death sometimes fleeting, and sometimes more vicious than we can ever imagine in the present. Entire villages would vanish from history, their passing erasing their souls from existence entirely and all living memory. Other people would climb out of their graves after several days, their souls unable to dissipate, leaving them with ravaged bodies that rarely healed. This, as one might imagine, presented a problem. This problem was not solved until 1421 Wings, when a proto-elven kingdom found itself under siege by undead. The names and details of this conflict are long lost to time, but the legend persists:
The kingdom, its citizens slaughtered en masse, was reduced to a single walled city where the queen and her honor guard stood as the last line of defense against the undead. It is unclear whether the undead were akin to a natural disaster, a military attack, or even the will of a god or devil, but they were an unstoppable force. The queen, often depicted as a maiden queen without heir or consort, committed an act considered so taboo no other mortal had ever attempted it: she formulated and performed a ritual that would give her the power of a celestial. The exact details of this ritual have also been lost, but the current nature of the Raven Queen suggests that her aim was to reform the path that souls in Talonn took after death. Before her ascension, dead souls did not dissipate in the fields of the Shadowfell as they do now; instead, they either burnt out without returning to the cycle or fruitlessly tried to return to life in their corpses.
The Raven Queen, as we know her, protects a very different path that souls take after death: the journey directed by her Handmaidens through the Shadowfell, to dissolve and merge with other souls to eventually reform and be reborn as wholly unique individuals. One can only assume that the ancient elven queen's desperate wish to save her people from a horrible fate spawned this system that has kept Talonn alive for the ages following Wings.

Historical Basis

Scholars of the Silent Priesthood have long searched for the identity and culture that the Raven Queen originated from, but artifacts from the age of Wings are precious few. In 526 Magic, Acolyte Mera Tian of the Silent Monastery consolidated theories from her peers and predecessors to put forward three credible candidates for the identity of the Raven Queen's mortal self: a Selvaderine princess named Rhian vas Selvadar, an ancestor of Queen Taladriel whose birth record lists as Winnidred vas Holeven, and the more obscure Kassinian queen Lysandra vas Ysendres. 
The list was extremely controversial, especially the inclusion of Winnidred, whose main qualifying trait seemed to be her relation to Taladriel. Selvadar and Kassinia were indeed two ancient proto-elven cultures; Kassinia existed on the northwesternmost tip of Ester Fal, and Selvaderine occupied a small space on the eastern coast of modern Beré. Of the two, Selvadar is better studied due to the fact that many of its ruins were submerged in the age of Flood. Kassinia, however, boasts an impressive burial site that was the location of the tablets that record the vas Ysendres dynasty. However, the burial mounds of Kassinia are all that is left of the kingdom, and many have been damaged over the ages past by the land's new inhabitants.
As for the Raven Queen's ritual of ascension, her mere existence is proof that it existed, as well as the more well known mortal-turned-celestial Idwan Mordus. Selvaderine ruins have yielded no traces of a ritual, and Kassinia's cities have never been found. Speculation by experts on celestials suggests that in order to perform the ritual, magical power far beyond the capacity of even a very skilled mortal would be needed. The only viable sources of such power are celestials, archfey, archdevils, and the condensation of souls in the same fashion as traditional lichdom. This speculation, however, has been actively suppressed for centuries by the Silent Priesthood, which considers conflating the Raven Queen to a lich or devil blasphemy of the highest order.

Spread

The Raven Queen's clergy, known as the Silent Priesthood, was officially established in the early age of Glory. Across the ages, they have protected the sanctity of death and the dissipation of souls in Talonn to the great benefit of all its inhabitants. As servants of the goddess of death, who was initially received in the age of Glory as a false god due to her mortal origins, the Silent Priesthood has recieved a mixed welcome from others. They have been celebrated, tolerated, and persecuted on a culture-to-culture basis; for example, the God-Kings of Chandris have been known to throw out any Silent clergy from their city, seeing them as a threat to their dynasty's "immortal souls". In Sarkhaan, the Silent Priesthood has long enjoyed a warm welcome, as their reverence for the flow of souls is paramount to their values.
The seat of the Silent Priesthood's power is the aptly named Silent Monastery in Beré. There, acolytes from all over Talonn take their vows to become official members of the church. However, there are also many grassroots cults of the Raven Queen that are recognized by the goddess herself, and thus deemed legitimate by most of the Silent leadership. Over the ages, the Silent Priesthood's leaders have ranged from ultra-conservatives (most notably in the age of Crystal, when the order launched an aggressive crusade against all undead that would last for a thousand years) to those more in favor of a horizontal organization. The current Lady-in-Waiting Lady Shira Vas Otten  is presumed to be of this ideology, given that her predecessor Lady At Fangrys Eyel  was a well-known incendiary in the Silent Priesthood council for her informal and democratic governance of the order's resources and branches.

Variations & Mutation

The Raven Queen has several aspects that can be invoked by her followers and worshippers across Talonn. The first, and most common, is the maiden queen; she is said to appear as a pale, young elven woman with dark eyes and dressed in black. The second, and also fairly common is the raven messenger. The raven, a carrion bird, mirrors the duties of the goddess with the flesh alongside the soul-- as the bird strips away and disperses the body, the Raven Queen guides and dissipates the soul so that it can return to the natural cycle of life. The bird is a frequently used image in totem and designs meant to invoke the Raven Queen, and is said to appear as a guide in dreams to the grieving.
Several other aspects have fallen into obscurity over time as worship waned. The most recent recorded is the Matron of Death, a veiled matron who was said to carry the souls of the departed into the Shadowfell and sow them in the fields there. Practice surrounding this aspect fell out of practical use in the age of Tempest, as recorded by the Silent Priesthood. Recently, whispers of an aspect obliviated by the Priesthood in the age of Crystal have begun to spread, a rumor whose material existence is supported by the seemingly deliberate destruction of religious artifacts and edifices around that time period.
As of late, Abiyr Arsolum has begun to suspect that his mysterious patron The Mourning Glory may be linked to the Raven Queen.

In Art

It is generally considered bad taste to depict the Raven Queen directly, as mandated by the Silent Priesthood in 1694 Tempest. This gesture was an attempt to quell rumor that invoking the face of the Raven Queen can call death upon the invoker, but the cultural taboo persisted beyond its time period. It has morphed into a gesture of respect, and so many artists only depict the raven messenger. Temples and shrines built before the mandate came into effect retain their statuary and icons, however, as iconoclasm was also considered disrespectful. Thus, we can still enjoy the sculptures in the Raven's Descent and the Silent Monastery in the Dawning age.