#pathfinder lore

Since Arazni is yet to get her own divine realm, I like to imagine her crashing on Calistria’s couch

Edelgarde Midwyck, professor of theology and cosmology Lepistadt University, Lepistadt, Ustalav

Before the birth of everything, there came an ending, to which only one survivor bore witness.

In an ancient time inscrutable to us who now live, a universe unknown met its end. Whether this realm exploded in an unquenchable fire, or found itself snuffed quietly out like a candle, none can say. All that remained scattered amidst the blackness of space, speckling the void with the dying embers. Nothing remained but she: The Survivor, the Lady of Graves, the Mother of Souls. She, who threads the weft and warp of fate across the centuries; who holds life and death in her hands, gathered the remnants of existence and began anew. 

Her name is Pharasma, the First and the Last. 

Pharasma’s role as mother to our universe may seem strange to those who do not know her. After all, is she not the goddess of death? Does she not author the final pages of our soul’s journey? Those more familiar with her worship know better; after all, she also safeguards the passage into life. Midwives invoke her name and bless their knives with water drawn from her holy fonts. A goddess of cycles, she sharpened her skills on the greatest birthing of all: that of reality itself.

What her role might have been in those days before, none can guess. After all, we have nothing to draw from, save the groundless assumption that this previous incarnation must have resembled the current. I have my own suspicions, as do dozens of my contemporaries, the scholars and ascetics who dedicate their intellects to untangling the riddle of what could have been. Personally, I wonder if the Pharasma we know and the one that traversed an all-consuming apocalypse eons ago were much alike at all.

Consider Nocticula: once a demon lord, she murdered her contemporaries and assumed their roles, stole their devotees and quite literally built her kingdom upon their backs. Now, she has transformed herself into something new – a goddess of freedom and redemption. Perhaps, like Nocticula, Pharasma transformed herself upon the death of what came before, changed into a deity to suit the season of creation and destruction. Perhaps, Pharasma once knew a time when life and death did not hang in the balance of her every word and gesture.

Of course, if we further explore my theory, one must then wonder what sort of deity Pharasma could have been, back in those unfathomable days. I can envision her as a young deity bursting with vigor and life, ushering the fragile souls of the unborn into the light, guiding the hands of those wise, skilled women without whose ministry so many would meet an untimely end. Perhaps she walked among the people, with bare feet and ruddy cheeks warmed by the sun of an ancient world. Perhaps then, her face was not haunted by millennia of shadows.

Regardless of what form she took then, I cannot help but imagine how devastating that moment must have been – the moment when Pharasma looked around herself and saw that she truly existed alone, swaddled in void, with no one but the vast, unknowable Outer Gods watching from beyond with hungry eyes trained on our little empty scrap. How brave of her to take that solitude and wrap it around herself like a mantle, mold it into a shape that we could call home, breathing life into the ash and embers of the things she’d loved and lost. As a mortal, it may not be my place to do so, but I cannot help but pity her.

Sarkonians are Kellids. While the still living Kellids of Numeria and the Realm of the Mammoth Lords aren’t based on a real culture, and are instead based on the barbarian peoples of pulp fantasy, they are a historically persecuted people in fiction. They used to populate most of northern Avistan, until they were invaded and genocided (both literally and culturally) by the Taldorian empire. Mendevians aren’t descended from Taldorians, like a lot of modern people in Avistan. They’re descended from the exiles of the Ulfen settlers of Iobaria. Ulfens are based on scandinavians. But culturally, especially with how the Church of Iomedae dominates, they are very pre-infernal Chelaxian. So very White People/standard European fantasy. Another group of Kellids we know about are the Horse Lords of Nidal, who before Earthfall and Zon-Kuthon dominating their people were based on Mongolians/steppe people. They also have/had shamans. 

We see in game that there is a bit of a Sarkonian diaspora. Either a shaman from that or from the Realm of the Mammoth Lords could have tried to do what Camellia did from the right perspective, and perhaps still found that the spirits of Sarkosis were consumed by blood and corruption. But they wouldn’t have been so eager to fulfill those urges and got off on doing so. Camellia is just a different way to address the same storyline. This is just an alternate character concept, perhaps for a tabletop Wrath of the Righteous campaign. I also have the feeling that the reason why Areelu Voresh is evil is because she pledged herself to Desarki to escape Threshold. So this character could also grapple with wanting to preserve your marginalized culture (since the crusade is fighting for Mendev, not Sarkosis, and most of Avistan sees Kellids as uncivilized) while also knowing it has some fucked up things in it. 

At the moment I'm mostly interested in The Expanse (books and TV show), Pathfinder lore (all things Golarion make my soul sing), and Supermassive horror games (Until Dawn, The Quarry, Dark Pictures Anthology).