Domains: Alchemy, volatile vapor, the substance that becomes another substance and the trace it leaves of itself in the change.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~1,600 BSD). Cohort: current. Phrelen rose late in the Expansion, with the Dengar alchemical-house consolidation — when the scattered family-trade alchemists of the Dengar villages began to organize into the workshop-houses that became the Dengar trade pattern.
Worshipped by: Dengar alchemists, the apprentice-vaporers who learn to read distillates by smell before they are trusted with the fire, the flask-glaziers whose work is so close to the alchemy itself that the glaziers are counted in the workshop's prayer pool. Dengar is the only halfling people to worship Phrelen; the alchemical-house tradition is doctrinally exclusive and the Dengar do not teach the worship outside the trade. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
Phrelen's domain is the change between substances and the trace that survives the change. Where Ghet — the gnome golem-daemon — presides over the mechanical truth of a built body, Phrelen presides over the chemical truth of a substance that has been transformed and the question of whether the transformation was complete. Dengar doctrine teaches that no transformation is total; every substance carries something of what it was before the change, and the alchemist's craft is the reading of what survived. A flask that has held mercury and been washed will hold a trace of mercury for years; a worktable where a base has been poured will alter the smell of the next compound mixed on it. The alchemist who has not learned to read the trace will be poisoned by their own bench within five years; Dengar masters take this as the daemon's instruction in patience.
The workshop-rite is the daily prayer. A Dengar alchemist opens each working day by drawing a single drop of the previous day's distillate from a stoppered flask kept for the purpose, touching the drop to the tongue, and naming the substance aloud. The naming is the prayer. An alchemist who cannot name what the drop was — who has lost the discrimination of the tongue to a cold, or to age, or to too many years of careless work — is required to leave the bench until the discrimination returns; the workshop will not allow a flask to be opened by an alchemist who cannot read the trace. The Dengar workshop-houses keep the rule strictly, and the strictness is the worship.
The lore-handle Dengar alchemists carry is: the vapor remembers what the flask forgot. The doctrinal corollary is that an alchemist who has forgotten what they put in a flask will find the flask remembers — sometimes by changing color, sometimes by smell, sometimes by reacting badly with the next compound poured in, and in the worst cases by carrying a slow contamination into a finished work that will not be discovered until the work has been sold to someone who suffered for the contamination. The Dengar workshop-houses keep their reputation by reading the trace and by paying — in coin, in remediation, in shame — for the works where the reading failed. Phrelen accepts the payment; the workshop-house's standing recovers; the rule holds.