Domains: The anchor-vessel rite as divine invocation; the moment of binding a daemon to a living conduit; the priestly act itself, distinct from the priestly technology.
Era of ascension: Golden Age of Man (~145,000 years ago). Cohort: dead. Died: God War & Long Winter (~75,000 years ago), when the God War shattered the anchor-vessel priesthood and the act that constituted his worship ceased being performed across the world simultaneously. His death is the structural keystone the rest of the Golden-Age pantheon's deaths rested on.
Worshipped by: The anchor-vessel priesthoods of the Golden Age — the trained institutional class who performed the binding rite to install daemons into living conduits, and whose work, across cultures, was the load-bearing infrastructure of every Golden-Age cult's continued material presence. No living culture maintains his worship. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
Overview
The anchor-vessel was the priestly technology — a vessel (sometimes a person, sometimes a constructed reliquary, sometimes a temple itself) prepared to hold a daemon's presence on the material plane. Krathokh was not the vessel. He was the daemon of the rite that invoked the technology, the divinified act of binding rather than the bound thing. The doctrinal distinction was load-bearing across the Golden Age pantheon: every other daemon's continued material reach depended on the regular performance of the rite Krathokh embodied, and the priesthoods who performed it across cultures were therefore the structural class without which the whole pantheon would lose its hold.
His cult understood itself in exactly this way. The anchor-vessel priesthoods of the Golden Age were not the priests of Krathokh in the populist sense — they were tiny, specialist, internally hierarchical orders that maintained the rite for all the other cults, which paid them and supported them and treated them with the wary respect due to the people on whom every other priesthood depended. The doctrine was meta-religious. A priest of Aedorath could keep the harvest rite; only a priest of Krathokh could bind Aedorath into the vessel that made her continued presence at the rite possible. Without him, the harvest priest was praying at an empty altar.
Fall
The God War broke the priesthoods directly. The first decade saw inter-faction violence target the anchor-vessel orders specifically — every faction grasped that the rival cults' continued material presence ran through Krathokh's people, and every faction therefore tried to capture or destroy the relevant priesthoods. The orders were small, geographically distributed, and slow to replace — formation took thirty to forty years — and inside a single decade they were operating at fractional capacity across the world. Vessels that needed re-binding went un-re-bound. Vessels that broke could not be replaced. The other daemons' material reach attenuated visibly in the years before the eruption, in measurable degradation of the rites that depended on the technology.
Krathokh died in this attenuation. The rite that constituted his worship was no longer being performed at the cumulative volume his god-body required, and his presence on the plane thinned correspondingly, even before any of his individual priests were killed. The texts describe his absence from the rites in the late pre-eruption years as a gradual fade rather than a discrete death — the bindings simply began not taking, the way a coal gives less heat as it cools. The eruption killed what was left of the orders directly; the cold finished the rest.
His death is the structural reason the Long Winter killed the Golden Age pantheon so completely. The anchor-vessel rite had been the institutional substrate for every other daemon's continued material existence; when the rite stopped, every cult was on attenuation timer regardless of whether the cold had reached its priests yet. The other gods died on their own timetables. Vassanéth went in days, Henélleth in weeks. Aedorath lasted two harvests, and Ezzaróth, her wild counterpart, outlasted her by a single decade and no more. Romath held only as long as the last kingdoms held, which was not long. Dyos died loudest, at the mountain his own follower opened, though his binding had worn through before the first ash fell. Vrokún, rooted deepest, took three generations to go cold. Every one of them died because the rite that anchored them had failed first. He is the keystone the entire collapse can be diagrammed against.
In the last years before Kajiit, a binder would set the rite exactly as he had a thousand times before, and the vessel would take nothing. Every word was right. The god of the act had simply worn too thin to lend the act its weight, so the act no longer held, so the god wore thinner still. Krathokh died inside that circle, the first of the pantheon to go and the reason the rest would follow him down.
No successor daemon ever covered his domain. Mernath later partially organized the memory of the rite; nobody ever performed it again at world-altering scale.