The Cruel Hands of a Healer.

"I've nearly finished setting all of the bones in his fingers, but the poor man has passed out from the pain again. If only he could relish this symphony of anguish with us! Every crack of a metacarpal, another note in the praise sung to Najis! Now, hand me my knives. These splinters must be excised before inflammation worsens..."
- Hital, overly enthusiastic barber-surgeon of Ferrith.


Najis is a name spoken in nearly every city, town, and village across the vast cultural region of the Ersuun-descended folk, including even the pristine platforms and towers of Deneroth tucked away in their small yet illustrious corner of the greater world of humans. The name is on the lips of everyone who fears injury, disease, or disorder, those who suffer them, and those who have escaped their worst effects. It is also chanted by those who would call themselves healers acting in the name of Najis, which is their deity. It is the being through which the gifts of healing and curing may be gained, assuming that the proper conditions are met.

Najis has no set facets, qualities, or appearance beyond what the most central myths, lore, and theological writings by its followers state. Besides its relationship to healing and harm, everything about the deity is mutable and wildly varied from place to place. Perhaps this is the reason why Najis is so ever-present and popular- besides the fact that people prefer not to get sick and die, of course. Wherever her, his, or its influence is felt and its healers, priests, and doctors respected, weal may accompany woe in nearly all of its forms.

But for weal to come, woe must exist. And a fact which is often glossed over is that Najis is the wellspring of suffering and respite together. This is readily understood by most of its faithful, layperson or otherwise, for the concept of gods giving and taking in equal measure is a common one to the peoples of those lands. They accept it, and accept Najis as being at least as much help as it is harm to them all. To the most deeply initiated of Najis' mystics, scholars, biologists, and esoteric surgeons, this is revealed to be a lie.

The truth is that the faceless god of healing craves the suffering of every living being by nature, whether it be mindless or fully and exquisitely cognizant of its condition- but with special preference for the latter. The world is an inherently dangerous place, and life leaves it as quickly as it arrives and can dig its claws in. But the period in between birth and death is too brief, the flavors of misery sampled too few, for Najis to be pleased. Creatures never healed from the injuries they sustained, once upon a time, but with mighty clout and insidious means, all other gods were swayed by Najis to allow its great work to begin.

And so those dark primeval days were ended, when tender mercy was first visited upon the dying and pestilent, overwhelmed with suppurating buboes and weeping lacerations. In their desperation, they accepted the gift without realizing how it damned them and all who would come after. With every cut closed or broken bone mended, there is an implicit promise that more numerous and splendid sufferings will be visited upon the survivor, until all is jaded, haggard, and worn down by a long and empty life of pain, and death finally comes to rob Najis of the last few fruits of its carefully-tended nest eggs. To heal is to help in the short term, but harm in the long run. The most cunning deception Najis ever cast upon the world was convincing the living that any life--even a truly hopeless and miserable one--is preferable to the embrace of Ergil-Who-Is-Death.

The development of preventative medicine, then, is the most complete heresy and abomination of purpose to Najis and all those who serve it without the merciful blanket of ignorance still cast over their eyes. To completely circumvent disease or maladies is to earn the ire of a god, and the punishment for this can be years in the making so that it may strike and inflict a thousandfold cruelties, according to the most fanatical of healers. But the truth is known only to these madman miracle-workers. Others seek to cultivate true mercy and compassion, unknowingly and with the best of intentions furthering the goals of Najis.

On the Soil-Slaves.

"That these people have such a strong and visceral reaction to large-scale agriculture built into their mythology is uncanny, and suggestive of a long-lost chapter of their history from which they may still derive the lessons of firsthand experience."

- Roberick Bertrum Litte, Associate Undergraduate Scholar of the Department of Natural Philosophies at the Ivory Tower University of Deneroth.



The outside world of mankind is known to the Fokari, at least vaguely, and much of it fills them with a certain existential dread. Chiefly, they fear that one day the people from the lowland green will rise up and consume them like a dust storm raging in the heart of the wastes. But the anxiety extends to certain practices of "neighboring" peoples which tend not to lend themselves in any way to invading like bogeymen.

There exists within the vast Fokari pantheon a singularly reprehensible creature which is bereft of the usual qualities of dualistic positive and negative. He is a deity, after a fashion, for whom the enslavement and debasement of all creatures is His desire. He is also the patron god of farming, making clear the nomads' equation between working the land and hopeless bondage. It is also no surprise that His name, never uttered aloud by any Fokar, shares an etymological root with the most common word used to describe any acts of sexual aggression, making Him (and His vocation) the metaphorical violation of the Mother Earth figure prevalent in much of the rest of the mythos. Rather than invoking this distressing episode, He is referred to sparingly by the equally sinister epithet of "He Who Reaps and Sows".

The slaves of the soil are those beings miserable and unfortunate enough to be ensnared in His seductive lies of full bellies and surplus. Both people and the animals yoked by them are unwitting pawns of His, set to toil away and struggle against the land to the tune of His silent, mocking laughter. Though the power they are beholden to is a terrible one, the slaves of grain and fodder are more to be pitied than reviled. Such desperation has the potential to clutch anyone. While less common, some versions of the myth even suggest that mind control and enchantments play a direct role in keeping them tied to a plot of land, often taking the form of maankhir, or agonizingly tight metal bands set around their skulls in order to crush out all thoughts of tribe or self.

Years of plenty are His means of lulling all into a false sense of security, and crop failures or freak incidents of pests and natural disaster are, at best, His way of testing His servants and reminding them of the uncaring nature of the soil which will one day consume their decomposing bodies. But more often than not it does not carry any such message of warning, and serves only to amuse Him more deeply. The gradual, imperceptible erosion of soil and the degradation of its nutrients over the generations is the grandest of all cruelties engineered by He Who Reaps and Sows, for it forces over-committed populations to uproot themselves in order to seek literal greener pastures, thereby breaking covenant with Him and inviting upon themselves further punishment, according to His warped mind.

That the borderland frontier farmers eking out an existence at the watered edges of the steppe return again and again to that damning livelihood no matter how many hardships they've faced is admittedly a testament to their dedication and hardiness, but it is an even greater testament to the might of the Grain God.

No rites are performed in His name, though very rarely if a tribe's Seer determines that they've somehow earned His ire or the attention of one of His fiendish spiritual servants, a ritual is performed in order to placate and distract Him. Several farmers in effigy are constructed from sticks and sacks and positioned around a patch of tall grass. The grass is then cut close to the base like grain being harvested, and then the farmers themselves are felled one by one, like lives being taken by starvation and disease. While this is all being acted out by one very brave volunteer, the rest of the tribe rapidly breaks camp and flees as far as it can move in a half-day's time. Upon completion, the volunteer sprints to keep up, and undergoes a cleansing ritual once he or she has reunited with their breathless fellows.