Domains: Witness of the conquered, survival in the smoke-after, the recitation of what was burnt.
Era of ascension: Seventh Dawn (~3,020 SD). Cohort: rising. Ascended in the long aftermath of the 2900 SD Chimean invasion, as cult crystallized among Hell Creek's surface communities and the refugee diaspora whose villages the invaders did not leave standing.
Worshipped by: The Fieri of the surface borderlands above Hell Creek, alongside scattered refugee enclaves of invaded peoples who fled the invasion path into adjacent regions. Among the Fieri the worship is syncretic — their molten-stone patron remains primary; the Ash-Bearer is held as the keeper of the count when the fire patron does not keep it. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
The cult does not pray. It recites. A prayer is the name of a specific dead person, the year they died, and the manner. Some recitations take a quarter-hour and name eighty-three people. Others name one, and that one is named every dawn for forty years. The Ash-Bearer's worshippers hold that the conquerors wanted the names lost, and that any year a name is still spoken aloud is a year their war is unfinished.
This puts the cult at an odd angle to Ghet, who shares the rising cohort and the modern grim register. Ghet's domain is the act of breaking free; his worshippers chose, and acted. The Ash-Bearer's worshippers did not choose and could not act. The cult is for those who endured what was done. Where Ghet's theology is "I refused," this one's is "I remained, and I remember."
The cult is small and discipline-bound. A worshipper who forgets a name is considered to have dropped a coal from the hearth, a wound rather than a sin, repaired only by another worshipper picking the name back up. Lists are kept, copied, smuggled across borders, hidden in the leaves of unrelated books. Among the Fieri, who entered the cult after their first surface villages went, the lists rest in lava-room antechambers where the heat keeps casual readers out. In the human refugee enclaves further north and east, the lists are knotted into prayer-rope by women old enough to have outlived their own dead.
The daemon's power grows slowly because faith of this kind grows slowly. Every year fewer surviving witnesses are left to teach the discipline; every year the list-keepers worry that some name is being kept only by them. Inside the cult this is the wager, that the Ash-Bearer's hold on the cosmos is exactly as wide as the cult's willingness to keep doing the work, and that if the work stops, what the conquerors wanted will have happened.