Codex

Ozravak

Daemon

Domain: plague, sickness, contagion; dead cohort (Golden Age); the propitiated malevolence whose cult was the first to die when the Winter compressed populations indoors.

Type
Daemon

Domains: Plague, sickness, contagion (propitiation).

Era of ascension: Golden Age of Man (~145,000 years ago). Cohort: dead. Died: God War & Long Winter (~75,000 years ago), when the cold drove populations into close quarters and disease tore through his propitiating cults faster than through any other faith-base in the Golden Age.

Worshipped by: Golden-Age plague-cults — communities organized around the practice of keeping his attention turned away rather than asking for relief. Coastal port-cities with regular outbreaks, riverhead towns at the head of trade routes, the settlements that had learned the hard way that disease arrived faster than priests could pray it back. No living culture maintains his worship. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)

Ozravak was never asked for anything; he was paid not to look. His worship was apotropaic in the strictest sense — small daily offerings at the household lintel and the city gate, prayers that named no requests, ritual silences that the priesthoods enforced by going personally house to house during outbreaks. The theological premise was unsentimental: he was a real and active malevolence; the only sane posture toward him was to not appear in his attention. Healing was someone else's province (later Harath's, in the next cohort — the structural counterpart deity who would do what Ozravak's worship had explicitly refused to ask for).

The God War broke his cult by changing the terms. As populations compressed inward against the cold and the disrupted supply lines, the houses filled and the gates closed, and there was no longer anywhere a person could be that his attention would not find. His worshippers died first of every Golden-Age cohort — the irony was noted by survivors, who joined other cults on the grounds that the propitiation had failed conspicuously. By the time the Winter killed the rest, Ozravak's name was already passing out of use in the cities he had been heaviest in.

The Codex of Alaria