Codex

Vrokún

Daemon

Domain: wilderness, untamed places, the margin beyond civilization; dead cohort (Golden Age); the chthonic god of the world that refused the cities.

Type
Daemon

Domains: Wilderness, untamed places, the margin beyond civilization.

Era of ascension: Golden Age of Man (~160,000 years ago). Cohort: dead. Died: God War & Long Winter (~75,000 years ago), when the last hermits in his domain starved or froze three generations into the Winter — the slowest cult-collapse of the Golden-Age dead.

Worshipped by: Fringe communities of the Golden Age, the hermit-cults that put themselves outside the city walls on principle, and the small clan-traditions that had never made the move into urbanism in the first place. No living culture maintains his worship. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)

Vrokún was the wild itself, non-instrumental: the simple unbroken presence of country that had never been used. He was not the hunt that took from the wild, which was Ezzaróth's, and not the dark depths beneath the world, which lay elsewhere. His cult was sparse by definition. To worship him with any seriousness meant going out into his domain and staying there, which meant accepting the diet, the weather, and the very high probability of not surviving long. His priesthoods, when they could be called that, were the small ascetic orders that had cut themselves off from the cities; his greatest concentrations were in the high northern forests and the unsettled river-mouths of the southern coast.

The Winter took him last among the Golden-Age dead, and at a strange angle. His worshippers were already adapted to scarcity. The cities collapsed in two generations; Vrokún's hermits held out for three, sometimes four, because they had always eaten what could be found and slept under what could be built. The last of them died in scattered places nobody recorded, in a wild that was no longer his — the wild he had presided over was the living margin, and what the Winter left was the still margin, which was already its own god's province (or no god's; the texts disagree). His name leaves the record without ceremony, in lines that note only that the hermits were no longer being seen.

Vrokún outlasted the other dead, but not the failure beneath them. The anchor-vessel rite that held him to the material plane ran through Krathokh's priesthood like every cult's, and once the God War broke those orders his presence attenuated whether or not a hermit still kept his fast in the high forests.

The Codex of Alaria