Akhara the Death-Touched

Akhara is a god of affliction and medicine, alchemy and aging. In the earliest days of the world, Akhara seeded the world with countless secret truths—mysteries of medicine, minerals with strange properties, nexuses of magic, and the like—which she hid among Theromedeon the Wild Guard's wilds and the realms of Thanatimetra the Merciful Mother's afterlife, leaving clues where mortals might find them. It isn't altruism that drives her; she studies the innovation and suffering of mortals, deciphering in them ever greater mysteries as she treats Etheria as her personal laboratory.
Akhara typically takes the form of an elven woman with dark skin, a scorpion tail, and hair like spider's silk. She is never without her chalice within which she can produce virtually any medicine or toxin. When her aims require subtlety, Akhara often takes the form of a serpent, spider, or scorpion or sometimes an aged mortal.
Little escapes Akhara's cool gaze. Even when outwardly friendly, she is cunning and calculating, watching for the slightest sign of weakness or desire that she can exploit later. Those who offend her rarely recognize their misstep until she strikes.
Akhara represents the duality of life and death distilled into a single draught that can serve as tonic or toxin, depending on the dosage. She is most associated with affliction, whether that phenomenon takes the form of a disease, a venom, a drug, or the passage of years. Her cures are reliable but come at a cost. In some cases, that cost is pain as the medicine courses through the imbiber's body. In other cases, she demands years of life, either from the patient's lifetime or the researcher's labor.
In her oversight of life and death, Akhara acts as a patron of alchemists. Pharmacists offer prayers to her while crafting potions, as do the ill or infirm before imbibing a supposed remedy. Likewise, a body's slow transformation as it ages is sacred to her.
The diseased and the dying alike often make written entreaties to Akhara for a remedy. Prayers are written on scraps of paper or shards of pottery, sealed in small pots, and buried in bogs, leaving them as secrets for others to exhume years later. Many people pray to her before undergoing a medical procedure, picking herbs, or confronting a venomous animal. Nights of a waxing crescent moon (roughly the first week of each month, when a sliver of moon lingers in the early evening) are sacred to Akhara (for her role in providing the elixir necessary to cure Eleuthemene from her deep slumber) and are thought to be an auspicious time to harvest medicinal plants.
Akhara's followers also include members of several small mystery cults, which embrace varying aspects of her divine nature. Most champions of Akhara seek to uncover the world's greatest secrets through science, alchemy, and magic. They are often enamored with the mysteries of life and death, along with scorpions, spiders, snakes, or other venomous creatures. Akhara craves champions who support her ongoing experiments, torment her enemies, and deliver cutting- edge aid to the suffering. Yet, just because someone serves Akhara doesn't mean they are immune to her whims.

Myths of Akhara

Asma's Reward

So impressed was she with the deeds of her champion Asma that Akhara offered to fill her chalice with any draught for Asma to imbibe. The champion asked to taste the nectar of pure joy, and the god obliged. But when Asma took a sip, passion took hold of her, and she quaffed the entire elixir. Overwhelmed with ecstasy, the champion perished, having forgotten that too much of anything—even happiness—can be fatal.

Day of Affliction

During the first week of the eleventh month, several nations of Etheria observe Akhara's winter festival, the Akharieia. The sick and infirm sleep in the god's temples during this festival in hopes of receiving a miraculous cure, and the truly devout imbibe near-lethal doses of poison, trusting Akhara to oversee their recovery. In some tales, a scorpion with a star-strewn carapace or a cobra with rainbow scales appears in Akhara's temple and stings or bites some incurable soul. The envenomed victim pitches and babbles for three days, but their disjointed words prove to be a font of alchemical truths, sometimes bearing the secrets to healing others around them. In most of these myths, the victim expires at the end of these three days—Akhara's price for sharing her secrets—but in some, the patient recovers, thereafter exhibiting remarkable resistance to illness and poisons.

The Basilisk's Greed

In Akhara's earliest days, her mind overflowed with knowledge of all kinds, and she retreated to a secret, verdant glen. There, she set to scribing her secrets into the garden's fruits, hiding within each a dozen forms of knowledge, among them gruesome, agonizing, and slow deaths and their cures. When she retired wearily to bathe, a lizard crept into her grove and gobbled up much of the fruit concerning such poisonous afflictions and medical remedies. It's said that this original basilisk and its progeny are still heavy with undigested medical secrets, and that if basilisk blood is distilled into ink, it can be used to write out forgotten lore.

Waxing of the Moon

Long ago, Helionax the Light-Crowned plotted to remove his twin sister Eleuthemene the Star-Dappled from the sky so that he could reign unrivaled as god of the celestial realms whose light guided mortals. Fearing repercussions of his actions should he be caught in such a dastardly plot, he enlisted trickster god Ginnir the Silver-Tongued to abduct Eluethemene for him. Gleeful at the proposition, Ginnir approached Deimophone the Dream-Clad in search of a sleeping spell capable of enchanting even a god and, after an exchange was made, Eleuthemene began to grow fainter in the sky before disappearing altogether. When Eleuthemene was discovered in a deep slumber much later, it was Akhara who the other gods turned to to create an elixir potent enough to wake the moon goddess, an experiment which she delighted in undertaking.

Divine Domains

Apothecary knowledge, herbs, alchemy, healing, medicine, and health; poison, sickness, affliction, aging, and venomous and poisonous plants and creatures; grief, loss, suffering, catharsis, release, resolution, punishment of the damned, and the accursed afterlife.

Divine Symbols & Sigils

Sacred Animals: Scorpions, serpents and snakes, spiders, frogs and toads, dogs, and polecats.
Sacred Plants: Yew, hazel, mugwort, mint, hemlock, nightshade, chamomile, and oleander.

Divine Goals & Aspirations

To Akhara, Etheria is an ongoing experiment and mortals are her agents in carrying it out. Rather than limit her knowledge to what her own insights yield, she revels in watching mortals decipher the world's wisdom and unearth its hidden knowledge, and she delights in seeing each sage interpret their findings in novel ways. She is willing to do anything to perpetuate experimentation and discovery, even at the cost of turning her less devout followers into specimens.

Social

Family Ties

Despite her venomous reputation, Akhara has provided nearly every god with a cure or an otherwise essential tonic at a crucial moment. As a result, she's rarely in outright conflict with her fellow gods, yet she's always willing to jeopardize peace with her peers if it means indulging some audacious new experiment.
The gods of the afterlife have cordial relations with Akhara. She and Eleuthemene the Star-Dappled enjoy each other's silent company, and Eleuthemene appreciates her dedication to maintaining the mortal balance of life, death, and afterlife, particularly as it relates to her duties in preserving and ending mortal life and overseeing the punishment of souls who led malicious lives in life. Akhara rankles somewhat at the attention Eleuthemene gets from dying mortals as a divine psychopomp, though, chafing at their tendency to appeal to her (as though she has any say in their ultimate fate) when they could beg Akhara for healing or for a painless death instead. Akhara and Thanatimetra the Merciful Mother have a slightly more cautious relationship, at least when it applies to living mortals. Regarding death, both goddesses work efficiently as a well-oiled machine in ending mortal life and suffering, and when Thanatimetra judges the worth of mortal souls, she entrusts no one else but Akhara with the responsibility of overseeing those deemed unfit for a blessed—or even average—afterlife. It is in Thanatimetra's capacity as a god of civilization, though, where the two begin to experience friction.
Akhara and the gods of civilization carefully maneuver around one another's territory, with Amaphoron the Herald of Civilization and Thanatimetra recognizing Akhara's medicinal virtues, and she is always seeking subtle ways to use civilization in her experiments without provoking her peers. She disdains Amapharon's and Thanatimetra's desire to tame the world rather than understand it, though.
Akhara has her most complex relationships with the gods of knowledge. Akhara loathes that Episophon the Cloud-Gazer gifts wisdom to the undeserving, while Kryphios the Hidden One represents mysteries even she has yet to fathom.
No god is more precious to Akhara than Theromedeon the Wild Guard. She adores the Wild Guard as the source of nature's abundant bounty and delights in his warmth. Anyone who threatens or offends Theromedeon is likely to also earn Akhara's enmity.

Species

Elf

Gender

Female

Eyes

Venom-green serpent eyes

Hair

Long white-silver like spider silk

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Dark shadowy skin