Asphodel
The Night Lady, The Killer Queen, Regent of Pride, Perfection and Schemes
Goddess of night, pride, beauty, rulership, couriers, prostitutes and assassins, Asphodel holds the distinction of being the first Material-born humanoid to ascend to local demigodhood. Her cults would grow to be one of the first—and most long-lasting—major planar forces outside the armies of the Insurgent and Colonial Gods. She is considered to have ascended in the middle 6th Century I.M., after ruling the breakaway Alanthian nation of Iyō for four centuries as a sort of Lich-Queen.
At the height of the Night Lady's power, Materia was considered the domain of the warring, outsider gods by day, and the domain of Asphodel by night. As the realm matured and more Materians ascended, her power would wane over the following millennia. Nonetheless, her cults have ancient and near-unbreakable roots in numerous holy sites around the plane. There are few who can stop her cults being where they want to be.
The Night Lady's alignment is Lawful Evil.Appearance & Heraldry
See also: Asphodel & Culminants Image Gallery (External)As a goddess of beauty and pride, Asphodel is inevitably portrayed in highly idealized ways, so much so that it is standard in her deific art to portray any other subject in the piece as noticeably ugly. While she is usually portrayed as feminine and given feminine descriptors, some portrayals are more androgynous, considering ideal beauty to be one that transcends notions of masculinity, femininity, et cetera.
More scholarly portrayals give her features akin to groups descended from the ancient Iyō peoples of what is now western Marai and eastern Khayyam: more light-skinned but dark-haired than the middling tones of most Meranthic Materians.
Her cults near-universally find Auroras to be holy things, symbolic of her fluttering silks as she soars across the night sky. Other heraldic symbols include stars, scrolls, bedchambers, orchids and depictions of her Relic wakizashi, the Aizenkunitoshi.History
Asphodel was Materia's first native-born Ascendant God: all gods before her were primordial, colonial outsiders or anticolonial outsiders.The Queen Regent of Iyō
After Godlord Io'a's assassination and a string of weak leaders, the vibrant but feral nation of Iyō would stagnate for a few centuries. However around 400 I.M. rulership fell to a previously obscure but brilliant Queen Regent named Ap'shetra of Saulot. She appears to have achieved Lichdom by some unknown means (methods used by the Kelpeater Lichlords were known by vanishingly few people), whereupon she would rule for nearly four centuries until her ascension to local demigodhood and resulting abandonment of her rule, around 766 I.M.. After this, the nation fell in the same way as its first iteration.
Nonetheless, under Ap'shetra's rule Iyō experienced an explosion of prosperity, modernization and territorial expansion, both into proto-Marai on one front and Alanthan'aravaut on the other. Much of the surviving art, literature and architecture of Iyō comes from the Ap'shetran (or simply Shetran) Dynastic Era.
By nearly all accounts, Ap'shetra was the embodiment of success in life: stunningly beautiful, fiercely intelligent and a martial arts genius, she grew from a street skulk to a courtesan to politician to assassin to cult leader to Lichlord before she was 60 years of age. It is thought she achieved demigodhood not long after this, perhaps only a few decades.The First Ascendant Materian
More powerful than any mortal but ignored by the senior gods, Asphodel was alone in her position. It was a isolating and warping existence, turning the ruthless but not entirely heartless Assassin Queen into a being of tyranny and paranoia. Her cults grew exponentially, and she sent them in all directions to invade and conquer. She became goddess of couriers, placing agents as actively as possible in any information network of import, using this knowledge to create and destroy kings. She was prayed to as the Night Lady, sometimes out of reverence to her beauty and intellect, but mostly to entreat her mercy during the hours between dusk and dawn. Materia had come to know a new, more involved breed of god, and it was an age that would not be remembered fondly.
Asphodel later added envy to her deific portfolio as others ascended to her celestial tier, a position she had grown to believe was only hers. The first of these was the warmth god Solonn, who would become Asphodel's most despised nemesis. Few of these stories have survived to the Third Age. Bizarrely, one First Age text claims Solonn was the adopted son of Asphodel, who was by then Queen Regent of of a nation-state in what is now Eastern Khayyam. If this is true, no surviving writing describes their descent from family members to hated enemies.Vierix Xandalphon
Asphodel had another persona: the Rozsan Lichlord Vierix Xandalphon. A high-ranking member of New Rozsa's ruling Temporal Vanguard, Xandalphon was an avatar of Asphodel inserted to monitor the powerful necrocracy, part of a complex set of plans to bring them to ruin as revenge for their ruthless oppression of her followers.The Third Age
While not the supreme Tyrant of Night she once was, Asphodel and her cults continue to maintain a powerful grip on dozens of religious and political organizations around the plane. Several collectives of assassins and couriers, ancient in their roots, continue to set the stage for her triumphant reascent to supremacy over the lesser demigods. Though her home city of Saulot was likely destroyed by the Deluge, ancient neighbours can still be found along the eastern reaches of Khayyam like Furia and Emeralda, where many powerful people still pay ecstatic homage in her temples. After the Great Fractionation, when several regions turned to independence from the First Empires, Asphodel's cults consolidated power among the new trade frontiers, some of which survive today, most prominently Kintyria-Mors in what is now Broken Empire. Hidden-away churches can also be found among ancient brothels and speakeasies of Valamon City and Marai.Worship
Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski
While self-centredness, vanity and sensuousness are often considered to be shallow, worship of Asphodel is deeper than one might think. Their worshippers, who usually call themselves Culminants, treat their bodies with the utmost respect, as one would a temple in other religions. There is a strong element of self-perfection in Asphodel’s “church” that can bear striking resemblances to the self-perfection techniques of the hermit sages of Ahm or the bodhisattvas of the Eight Pillars (the difference being a dogmatic disdain for prudishness and temperance). Culminants will smilingly call themselves “enemies of suffering”, and that’s true, but only suffering as applied to themselves, the Supreme Self which is elevated above all others. They are often courtiers, spies, assassins, ninja, bards or some combination thereof.
Asphodel is also thought to be a goddess not just of night but of the night sky in particular. They say that night used to be even darker than it was now, so dark that humans could do little but hide from the the things that emerged as dusk retreats. Now that it is Asphodel's domain, the night is a more hospitable, even beautiful thing to Waking humanoids, decorated with bright stars and richer colours. Her cults near-universally find Auroras to be holy things, symbolic of her fluttering silks as she soars across the night sky.
Though small, there remain some messianic cults rooted in ancient Iyō, which believe in Queen Ap'shetra's eventual return to the Emerald Expanse and the reëstablishment of a new, even more golden era of the ancient nation.Domains
Asphodel's primary domain is Perfection. Her secondary domains are Passion, Confidence, Secrets, Tyranny, Star and Kung Fu.Favoured Weapon
The Night Lady's favoured weapons are the wakizashi and unarmed/kung fu. Her Relic wakizashi is the elegant but deadly Aizenkunitoshi.
She is the divine master of Satsujinken or Mantis style kung fu. It's a brutal martial art that specializes in painful and debilitating point strikes, often used to debilitate and humiliate their opponents before victory. It is a style that's especially popular in the Izuka, Oronaga and Iname clans of Marai.
Asphodel
Godhood
Ascendant (Middle First Age) Alignment
LE Domains
Perfection, Passion, Confidence, Secrets, Tyranny, Star, Kung Fu Favoured Weapon
Wakizashi, Unarmed Relic Weapon
The Aizenkunitoshi Divine Technique
Satsujinken (Mantis Style)
Banner art credit: Kuri Huang
Profile art credit: Takemiya Keiko.
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