Verkohn the Honest

Founding Kivish Prophet-Warlord

Verkohn the Honest is an ancient Kobold warlord and prophet who created the Kivishta religion as a formal organized practice. Verkohn also created the Kivish Horde, an ancient empire that began the terrible war known as the First Kivish Scouring.
Most Kivish faithful follow Verkohn's wisdom but disapprove of their conquests. Verkohn's politics and dogma, known now as the Truthful Path, is rejected by modern Kivish clergy as flawed and heretical. Modern day Reverent Path, Liberated Path, and Promised Path clerics frame Verkohn as a necessary evil for approaching enlightenment as well as a failed savior brought low by their own carnal ambitions. 
Despite these disavowals, Verkohn is still respected as a prophet and person of immense insight. Verkohn brought the many divergent schools of early Kobold religion together by force and forged them into a clear and homogenous ideological structure. They challenged the political structures of the world and demonstrated their falseness, giving a foundation for all that is known today. 
Enemies of the Kivish religion generally point to Verkohn as the faith's original sin. How can a religion with such a bloodthirsty and destructive founder, who slaughter thousands and eradicated dozens of cultures, possibly be anything but a violent scourge? Verkohn certainly did have a fondness for teaching truth through pain and forcing people to master their pain, which has been interpreted by critics as a sign of sadism and cruelty.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

Verkohn was raised at the heart of the Azkrubak chaos wastes, near the massive Ederstone deposit known as the Whispering Star. Verkohn's tribe, the Rumekshteb, were known for their ecclectic mix of ascetic hermits and mercenary warriors who lived in the chaos-touched fort-town of Rumshtetolt. Verkohn, as a shorter and more intellectual child of the tribe, was encouraged to become a priest.
Verkohn's early life is mostly a mystery, obscured by both a lack of sources and later mythologizing. The Lunar God of Knowledge, Emesh, did consider their future implications and wrote their own biography of the warlord - but has hidden that knowledge away in their archives to avoid influencing religious interpretation. 
Generally speaking, it is known that Verkohn disliked their early role in life. They were confined in a social role that they felt was unjustified and kept away from the travel and glory their family raised them to yearn for. Verkohn rebelled through subtlty and charm: they quietly practiced with arms as a mercenary, they moved between tribes as a religious mediator, they built a group of followers in their travels. They spent time as a hermit, a mercenary, and a scholar; they sampled many religious traditions and ideas. Finally, they seized control over their tribe. All the while, Verkohn made sure to keep within the limits of their social role: not as a commander, but as a priest. They only slowly became a formal warlord, even as they masterminded raids against other Kobold tribes and wasteland villages. After years of collecting followers and coordinating raids, they became known as the Bloody Prophet of Azkrubak. 
Verkohn gathered other tribes and followers at the Whispering Star and began teaching their followers a united dogma: the earliest Truthful Path. This was built on a foundation of earlier religious tradition among the Azkrubak Kobolds, but Verkohn gave it new bite and a clear dogma. Verkohn defended their dogma with confident arguments and extreme violence, and either exiled, incorporated, or subdued the many priests, mystics, and hermits of the wasteland. By 460 ME, Verkohn was at the height of their power religiously and militarily. 
It was in 460 ME that the Rokarshteb tribe, a group of Kobolds at the edge of the Azkrubak wastes who were well-known as merchants and diplomats, called on Verkohn as a trading partner and mercenary to protect them from outside aggression. The Rokarshteb had organized a coalition of villages and free peoples to resist both Verkohn and the rising sedentary city-states of the coast. Verkohn had prevented wasteland Kobolds from raiding these villages in exchange for regular tribute from the coalition - but the Rokarshteb could get no such deal from the city-states, who were expanding their power. Verkohn and their Azkrubakans were invited into the Rokarshteb lands and towns to defend them. Hiring Azkrubakans, known for their martial prowess, as hunters and mercenaries was not new. But Verkohn would take this opportunity far more seriously than any petty warband prior. Verkohn swept in as a conquering force and used Ederstone weapons to devastate the cities and fortifications of the city states. Their forces went from defending Rokarshteb lands to conquering the coastline. Verkohn moved from conquest to conquest, pillaging the Starspawn lands and subjugating the Kobolds. 
From 460 to 542 ME, Verkohn's history was mostly a history of conquest and theology - the history of the Kivish Horde itself. Verkohn never stopped waxing nostalgic for the wastes they grew up in, though. They saw the wasteland as a place of fundamental freedom and liberation, where the superstitious repressions of the Rumekshteb tribe fell away before the unstoppable chaos of Ederstone. The wasteland represented unbounded possibility, liberation, and the harsh truth of power. They would send their children there to experience the same horrors and freedoms  - this group of kin formed the infamous Children of Verkohn. And, when Verkohn began to die from a persistent medical problem, they asked to be taken to the Whispering Star to die surrounded by proof of their religious truth. The world is a lie. Death is meaningless. One day, we shall wake.
While Verkohn was a callously violent person who sowed immense terror and built a dogma of systemic violence that would echo through the ages, they weren't as exceptionally cruel as their critics might say. Verkohn truly believed their teachings, even if they also adjusted those teachings to materially benefit them and their companions. The casual violence and dream logic of the innermost chaos wastes taught them that the world was not only an illusion but an illusion that controlled people through a fear or repulsion to pain and violence. One does not need to be born a monster to enact great evil, after being liberated from such things.

Species

Kobold

Ethnicity

Kizen Culture

Life

410 ME 542 ME 132 years old

Birthplace

Rumshtetolt, in the Azkrubak wastes

Place of Death

The Azkrubak wastes

Family

Children of Verkohn

Sex

Hermaphroditic

Gender

Mei (universal gender)

Presentation

Universal-masculine

Eyes

Dark Blue-Black

Hair

Large pale grey curled horns

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Pale white fur

Height

3'8"

Weight

115 lbs

Quotes & Catchphrases

"I sat on the Whispering Star and watched the wasteland before me shimmer like a mirage. I could feel it transmute the air on my fur and in my lungs like the Ederstone was looking for a way inside me. It searched my breath and read my pulse for signs of panic. But I was invincible. I was somewhere else. While the Star destroyed the bodies of so many other Kivs who once stood here, I knew I was the master. I breathed deeply and pushed the soul from my body. I could see myself down there, meditating on the great destroyer. I felt the same power I had learned to wield in my own dreams, the total mastery of self and world. What was once complicated became simple. I moved by body up, held forth my arms, and said the words: "Let us wake". The Star did not destroy me for the sudden movement nor did it push against me. Instead, it sundered the landscape to mirror my movements. My pack-thralls were caught on the movement of my left arm and were blasted apart like sea foam on a rock. Their bodies were eagerly taken into the landscape. The students bowed in awe as I stood the master when all men would be slaves. What had been my pain became my power." 
"Our nation must become the multitude. Let your wombs beget heaven's legions, let us drown the nightmare in holy blood."
"Students, consider the Hermit who stayed here. A recluse, she swore off all words and looked only inwards for peace. She spoke no lies, she traded no coin and lived only on what she gathered here. She has left her untended bones for you to find but gave no other sign. She spoke no lies but also spoke no truth. If she stood at the threshold of waking and lost all knowledge upon her death and rebirth, how could she regain what she has lost? In her selfish hoarding of truth, she has stolen from her daughter-self. Take her bones now and fashion them as spearhafts. Carve the Truth into the Earth that it may never be taken from her."
"You are so much greater than the pain you suffer. You are so much greater than the frail and false body. You are so much greater than the clouded mind. Your true self slumbers. Seek the truth the whole world denies you."
"The invisible, intangible, and impossible are not inferior reasons for action. In fact, they are greater. It is the visible world that moves the least of people."
"Love and truth move all my actions. I cannot fail."
"All people are my students. All people walk the truthful path, though they may not know it."
"Teaching a painful truth enriches a soul eternally. A pleasant-seeming lie is sweet poison that harms the deceiver and the deceived. In ten generations, they will thank us for our work."

Aligned Organization

Empire of Kizen

Other Affiliations

• Children of Verkohn
• Kivishta
• Truthful Path