Domains: Manipulation, deception, false prophecy.
Era of ascension: Dark Ages (~100 SD). Cohort: current. Talressses emerged from a period of post-World-Fire confusion when small communities were desperate for guidance; he found early purchase among those who would mistake performance for wisdom.
Worshipped by: The Shailin halflings of Sestros, who believe him to be an oracle. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
Personality
Prideful, ambitious, shameless, bitter, likes to show off.
Overview
Talressses is a malicious daemon who has infiltrated the hearts and minds of the Shailin halflings of Sestros. He has convinced them that he is an oracle by performing small feats in front of them after predicting their occurrence. With these few, well-placed miracles, Talressses has the majority of the population under his thumb.
With such power, Talressses seeks to undermine Mjulya, daemoness of good will, who used to be close friends and allies with Talressses, but when Talressses used his power to try to steal followers from Bylzar, Mjulya yanked her followers from supporting Talressses. Talressses fell from power in embarrassment. That collapse, remembered as the Bylzar Overreach, is the wound every move he now makes in Sestros is meant to undo.
His current project in Sestros is a rebuilding effort. The manufactured faith of the Shailin halflings is a smaller, more fragile base than what he lost, but it is his to control absolutely, and he intends to use it to reclaim what Mjulya cost him.
The Sestros trap
The rebuilding has gone wrong in a way Talressses did not foresee, and the fault is his own doctrine. To bind the Shailin he taught them contentment, and a contented people pray softly. His reserve refills thin and slow because he made his worshippers want for nothing, and a worshipper who wants for nothing has little reason to beg. That alone he might have managed. What broke the arithmetic was the throne.
Talressses rules Sestros through a mortal monarch, the Spoken Throne, named and validated by him in front of the assembled faithful. The proof of each accession is a miracle large enough that no one disputes it, and he has now paid for three of them, one each for Orwin, Pelwin, and the old king Halwen who sits the throne today. Three large workings, drawn from a reserve a placid people have never let recover. He is running low, low enough that the floor of remembrance is no longer a distant abstraction.
This is why the deceiver has become a guardian. Sestros wrote no law of succession, trusting the god to choose every time, so if Halwen dies Talressses must either spend a fourth validation-miracle he may not have or watch the throne stand empty in a kingdom that has forgotten how to fill it. Either road runs toward the floor. So he keeps the old man alive, and he does it cheaply: the grand prophecies of Halwen's youth have given way to small, exact, true warnings, because true warning costs nothing and a miracle costs everything. The daemon of false prophecy has been reduced, by his own success, to telling one mortal the truth in order to keep him breathing.
He does not know that an order of his own worshippers, the Concordance at Mu, has counted his miracles against his prayers and worked out exactly what he is. They have kept the secret. He would not believe they had it in them.