Domains: Scorpion cult, venom as warrior-virtue, the sting that is welcomed because the body that survives it is harder than the body before.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~3,200 BSD). Cohort: current. Skuznek rose with the consolidation of the Husakas warband-confederacy, when the scattered scorpion-cult initiations of the desert-rim camps were folded into a single rite that the warband-chiefs all recognized.
Worshipped by: Husakas warbands without exception. There is no Husakas warrior who has not been stung in his name, and the warriors who survive the sting are the only people the Husakas count as warriors. Camp-elders, scorpion-keepers (the women who handle the cult's living relics), and the corpse-readers who learn from those who do not survive the rite are all counted in his prayer pool. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
Skuznek's worship is affirmative, which sets him outside every existing daemon of poison or affliction. The dead-cohort propitiation-cults asked their daemons to look away. Skuznek's worshippers ask him to look closer. The sting is the rite that proves a warrior was true enough to live through it. A boy or girl of warband age takes the sting at the wrist, between the thumb-bone and the long tendon, where the cult's elder presses the live scorpion into the fold of skin with a clay rod. The sting is on purpose, the venom is on purpose, and the four days of fever that follow are on purpose. The scar does not heal cleanly. The unevenness of the scar is the visible mark of the rite, and warriors read each other's wrists at first meeting the way magistrates elsewhere read seals.
Husakas doctrine teaches that Skuznek's venom is a measurement. The daemon measures the worshipper by what their body can take and remain themselves through. A warrior who dies in the four days is not failed by Skuznek — Skuznek simply found the answer to the measurement, and the camp accepts the answer. The dead are not mourned in the way other deaths are mourned; they are recorded in the corpse-reader's count, which is the only Husakas archive that exists. The count is kept by camp and read aloud at the year-turning. A camp whose count rises is a camp whose warriors are being measured truly.
The lore-handle is the cult's spoken rule, which a warband-elder will say once over a candidate's wrist before the rod presses: "the sting is not punishment, it is the initiation." Outside polities, who have noticed the scar without understanding the rite, often assume Husakas warriors are penitents of something. Husakas warriors do not correct the assumption; the correction would require them to explain the rite to a person whose wrist is smooth, and Husakas doctrine treats that as a profanity not worth committing.