Domains: Desert survival, dual-vision through dust and sun, the watch the sand keeps over its walkers.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion (~5,500 BSD). Cohort: current. Zarn'ik rose as Bledreon's herding-lines pushed deeper into the inner waste and found that the prayers they had brought from the green-edge no longer answered through the dust.
Worshipped by: Bledreon caravan-eyes — the children chosen at puberty for sun-sharp vision and trained to read horizon-haze for caravan and herd — along with the salt-cutters of the deep flats, the dune-criers who navigate by the angle of wind-cut shadow, and the widow-keepers who watch the home camp while the men are out. Nuun trade-caravans worship him in a reframed inflection: their prayer is not for the second eyelid but for the road through the sand to open, which Bledreon doctrine treats as the foreign use of a Bledreon god. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
Zarn'ik is bodily, not abstract. Where Azak is the god of omens that any traveller in any land may read, Zarn'ik is the god of the membrane — the literal second eyelid Bledreon children develop between three and seven years old, a thin nictitating fold that closes when dust kicks. Bledreon doctrine holds that the eyelid is the daemon's mark left in the flesh; that a child who develops it cleanly will see what the sand sees, and a child who does not is not Bledreon at the level the desert recognizes. The membrane is real; whether its development rate is daemon-given or simply a herding-line adaptation is a question Bledreon priests refuse to answer.
His shrines are not buildings. A shrine to Zarn'ik is a circle of seven flat stones laid at a watch-point — a ridge, a well-rim, the lee of a single tree — with the eighth stone reserved for the priest's foot. Watch-prayers are spoken at dawn and at the hour the sun first cuts a shadow short enough that a man's foot covers it. The Nuun trade-caravans, who keep his rites along the deep desert routes, lay only five stones and step on none; Bledreon priests note this with the careful neutrality of people whose god has been borrowed without permission and who have chosen not to make a fight of it.
The desert sees its walkers back, in Bledreon teaching. A walker who has done well by the sand — who has not taken more water than they returned, who has not killed a beast they could not eat, who has not lied in the watch-circle — will find the wind shifts in their favor and the dust closes behind them as they go. A walker who has done badly will find the dust shows their path to whatever else is hungry. The lore-handle Bledreon caravan-songs preserve is: the eye behind the eyelid is the desert's, and what the desert keeps it keeps even of you.