Jeheka the Hidden One

Jeheka is the enigmatic god of mysteries, knowledge, destiny, horizons, and Anima. His followers claim that he knows not only everything that is known at present, but everything that has ever been known by anyone and everything that will ever be known, though this last allegation proves nearly impossible to verify due to the enigmatic god's reticence.
Quiet surrounds Jeheka like a shroud. Standing apart from the other gods, he speaks rarely, even to his most favored followers. His oracles are only slightly more lucky. When he does communicate, it is often as a barely audible whisper or as a revelatory vision of some cosmic truth that most mortals do not have the context to comprehend. Jeheka can speak with a booming voice directly into the minds of all the other gods simultaneously, though, doing so when something threatens the cosmic order as it is his eternal responsibility to oversee the order of the cosmos, ensuring that all things remain in their proper place, knowing how easily the cosmic balance could be undone if he were not vigilant.
Jeheka's preferred form is that of a powerful half-Orc dressed in robes and cloaks fashioned from the swirling cosmos. His hair and beard are stellar silver, his hair worn in a top knot and the sides shaved, and small tusks peek out from behind his lips when he speaks. He might also appear as a bird, cat, or whale.
Jeheka holds dominion over everything unseen or unknown. He is associated with the horizon—the brink of the unknown—and with navigation. To Jeheka, perfect understanding is like the horizon: easy to move toward, but impossible to reach. Jeheka knows everything that has ever been known in Etheria, so he and only he decides which secrets should be loosed upon the world and which must be kept forever hidden. Among the Etherian pantheon, he stands as one of the first gods to be born and numbers among the few who understand the role of mortal belief in shaping the deities, something even most gods don't fully comprehend.
Jeheka is the only being who has the ability to seal the borders between the mortal realm and that of the gods. He uses this power to safeguard the mortal world from reckless divine meddling and enforce the balance of power among the gods and their faithful. While many mortals do not follow the mysterious Jeheka as fervently as the other less abstract deities of the pantheon, his most devout of followers include scholars, sages, and a handful of sailors who have an inclination toward the mystical, all of whom make up the general population's lack of fervor. That being said, what the majority of individuals lack in zealousness, they make up for in countless albeit tepid numbers—as the god of Anima, every act of Willing itself is an acknowledgment of him and every moment of time spent perfecting a spell is a prayer. Even if Jeheka did indeed possess but a few mortal devotees, the other gods would still perceive him as a significant force within the pantheon, worthy of both respect and wariness, as they already do.
Many pray to Jeheka when they need to find something lost, but few dedicate themselves to his worship. Cults devoted to Jeheka fiercely guard their secrets, and their initiates typically refrain from drawing attention to themselves. Some followers and champions of Jeheka travel the world in secret, searching for hidden truths. Many use secret signals to enable them to find safe lodging with other worshipers nearly anywhere. Rituals honoring Jeheka are usually performed at boundaries, both temporal and spatial: shorelines, riverbanks, equinoxes, and sunsets. One of the god's greatest holidays is Virthalia, an Etherian holy day marking the end of winter and the close of the year.

Myths of Jeheka

The Temple at the Edge of the World

Legends say that Jeheka's holiest temple of mystery stands at the edge of the world right upon the threshold of the mortal realm and Nyktheon itself. Dominated by Jeheka's majestic trees, the temple overhangs Nyktheon itself, jutting past the vast waterfall that marks the edge of the mortal realm. The site's location can't be found on any map, but tales claim it is one of the few places in the world where mortals can pass directly into Nyktheon. To pass beyond the waterfall anywhere else is to dive headfirst into the afterlife, if not immediately then certainly once one plummets into the infernal realm of Demons.

Jeheka's Warning

When Orodamas the Ringing Hammer attacked Helionax the Light-Crowned in a destructive rage when he stole away her lover Kallinephes the Thundering Heart, Helionax demanded that Jeheka intervene. Jeheka constrained the forge god's mind and memory in punishment for her attack, hobbling her creative drive and passion. He warned all the gods that if they threatened the mortal realm with their squabbles and quarrels, he would bind them all to Nyktheon for as long as he saw fit. Though no god has dared to test Jeheka's threat, there are certainly some among them who might try if they could see a way to retain their own powers. Chief among them is Orodamas who nurses an eternal grudge against Jeheka for a punishment he himself has regretted for its excessive harshness and cruelty.

The Silence

When the squabbling of the gods threatened the world once more despite Jeheka's warning, he etched all their names—including his own—in the bark of his great trees at the edge of the world. Immediately, the gods' oracles could no longer hear them, their blessings faded, and the night sky held only unmoving stars. The great Silence of the gods serves as the backdrop for numerous tales of heroism and sacrifice. Many alive today have forefathers and foremothers who witnessed the sky go dark and the temples grow quiet. Most consider the Silence a terrible mistake that led to the rise of Ameros as an industrial and slaveholding superpower, but followers of Jeheka know that it was a grim necessity to prevent far worse calamity, calamity which they refuse to speak of.

Theophilian Mysteries

Some of Jeheka's worshipers don't identify with their inscrutable deity, but with Theophilia, a legendary naiad who entered Nyktheon and whose transcendent encounter with Jeheka each initiate strives to duplicate. The naiad's journey is celebrated in hushed chants as blindfolded initiates are led across a boundary, often stepping into a river or over a low stone wall, an act that symbolizes crossing the horizon. Then the blindfolds are removed as the faithful intone a paean to Jeheka. The hope is that Jeheka will choose to reveal himself at the climax of the ritual, whether by the appearance of some omen or in a personal epiphany. Such a revelation isn't always positive, though, as Jeheka often imparts a glimpse of cosmic truths for which mortals have no possible context.

Divine Domains

Knowledge, mysteries, the arcane, destiny, decisions, choices, and potentiality; willpower, Anima, leylines, and cats; and thresholds, gateways, crossroads, navigation, borders, liminal spaces, dawn, dusk, comets, and horizons.

Divine Symbols & Sigils

Sacred Animals: Cats, whales, kingfishers, swifts, and chimeras.
Sacred Plants: Lotuses, saffron, aconite, dates, heather, and pines.

Divine Goals & Aspirations

More than any other god, Jeheka simply is. He seeks nothing but to oversee the acquisition of knowledge, maintain the cycles of time, and uphold the divine order. He views many of his fellow gods as petty and vengeful, and he opposes anyone who tries to obtain power that would upset the delicate balance of the pantheon.
Jeheka is the eldest of the gods and sees it as his responsibility to rein in the excesses of his younger siblings. Unlike arrogant Helionax, Jeheka knows that he isn't—nor are any of the gods—powerful enough to impose his will unilaterally. Instead, Jeheka plays the other gods against one another when he must and serves as a mediator in their endless disputes, and he takes especial care to remain impartial in every decision he makes, perceiving that to be any less would be a failure in his vigilance and would not only make him no better than the other squabbling gods but would upend the cosmic balance.

Social

Family Ties

Jeheka strives to hold himself above the disputes of the gods, but like any other god, he has both rivals and allies.
Chief among the former is the sun god Helionax the Light-Crowned, whom Jeheka sees as an arrogant, dangerous threat to the balance of power among the gods. He seldom acts against Helionax openly, preferring to warn others about the sun god's efforts to seize power at their expense.
Since every mortal soul must eventually pass beyond the horizon and into the afterlife, Jeheka respects both Thanatimetra the Merciful Mother and Eleuthemene the Star-Dappled. He sees Thanatimetra as a necessary check on Helionax's power, and he appreciates her, her wife Eleuthemene, and her brother Theromedeon the Wild Guard for being concerned with the precarious natural balance. These three gods, more so than the others, share Jeheka's delight in the world's natural cycles, and this pleases him.
He also respects the other gods whose interests balance creation and destruction, such as Thalassakles the Crashing Wave and Orodamas the Ringing Hammer, considering them better attuned to Etheria's needs and destiny's myriad outcomes than gods who could potentially inspire mortals to defy destiny or who themselves pose the threat of overstepping their lot, such as Amaphoron the Herald of Civilization with her ravenous colonization, Deimophone the Dream-Clad with her dream-inspiring nature that indulges mortals to engage in flights of fancy, Iroanos the Battle-Wise with his passion for overcoming insurmountable odds, and at times Thanatimetra herself for taming nature.
Of all the gods, only Ginnir the Silver-Tongued and Inyu the Bloody One truly concern Jeheka. Ginnir's creations of commerce and politics are double-edged swords, necessary and even beneficial to the cosmic order, but also potential threats as they both create systems and environments for mortals to exploit and cheat destiny. It also does not help that the Silver-Tongued has no loyalty other than to himself and that he inspires his followers to behave likewise. Despite this, Jeheka recognizes that there is a need for such a deity as Ginnir, even if Jeheka personally does not like it. Regarding Inyu, Jeheka feels an unsettling and ominous weight as the centuries pass. Their temperament has always been volatile, but as the project of humanity and civilization progresses, their rage has only grown more explosive and more unpredictable. Jeheka sometimes finds himself worried that such wrath might be able to plunge the world into chaotic abandon and lawlessness if trends continue.

Divine Classification

Deity

Species

Orc

Gender

Male

Eyes

Brilliant stars

Hair

Top knot with shaved sides