Ullecate
Beast of 1000 Mouths, The Slavering God
A force of nature born from the form of a wolf, the god Ullecate oversees the world with the eyes of a predator. The weak shall be preyed upon by the strong, but the strong themselves must know their limits, lest they fall victim to those stronger even than themselves.
Divine Domains
Ullecate is the god of beasts, and of unfettered, irresistible hunger. From the wolf pack to the mortal hunting party to the flock of circling vultures, this feral god watches over all who succumb to their basest, most bestial desires. Chefs pay him grudging respect for bringing patrons to their door while the lost or destitute curse his name for subjecting them to the pain of starvation. It falls to Ullecate to watch over and regulate the populations of beasts throughout the world - the predators in particular, but also the prey - but more often than not mortals forget this duty, remembering only the worst aspects of the god’s domains.
Less well-known by the general public is the fact that Ullecate is also the patron god of Vampires, having created the first of their kind centuries ago in answer to the one and only direct prayer the god ever answered. Though this act was one of petulant defiance against the other gods, who constantly questioned his isolationist ways, Ullecate steadily grew to enjoy watching what his inadvertent children get up to on the mortal plane. In the modern age, he communes more with his vampiric descendants with worrying frequency.
Divine Symbols & Sigils
While many gods determine the symbol that their worshipers will use to represent them, Ullecate never bothered to instate one of his own. Instead, he fostered a mortal tradition that spawned a decade or two after his ascension: Those in professions that rely on Ullecate’s blessing, hunters most of all, will hang the jaws of the deadliest beast they’ve personally slain - or butchered or cooked - somewhere within their homes. When they are at home, safe and content, the jaws will remain shut. However, when a hunt begins, the jaws are swung open, symbolizing the hunger that drives them out.
Tenets of Faith
As with many of the more fearful gods, Ullecate has few true worshipers. Instead, his very presence has inspired traditions and rituals that differ from culture to culture. Aside from the hanging of animal jaws in the houses of the ‘devout’, one of the most common of these rituals is the leaving of a sacrifice to the Beast. After a successful hunt, hunters will often remove one of the more desirable cuts of meat or internal organs from one or more of the slaughtered prey and leave it somewhere in the open as an offering. Sometimes other animals clearly make off with these leavings, but it’s not always clear how the meat disappears from the plates, holes, or trees in which they are left - though disappear they do, without exception.
Beyond these and more region-specific acts, mortals at large tend to mostly pay lip service to Ullecate rather than act to earn his favor. As hunger and natural predation will always exist within the world, and because his vampiric children will always provide a certain level of familial affection for him, he seems to be unperturbed by this lack of direct attention.
Divine Goals & Aspirations
Something of an enigma, even among the gods, Ullecate seems to alternate between acting on some form of bestial instinct and a surprising, if rather detached, intellectual calm. One moment he prowls the world, seeking out the weak and helpless and watching as beasts of prey tear them apart, and the next he finds someone strong and proud and foils their efforts, as if hoping to teach them some humility. He rarely, if ever, speaks to the motives of anything he does. Rather, he acts, impassively watches the results of his actions, and seems to catalogue these findings to no discernable purpose. Though he shows emotion only in moments of rage or feral bloodlust, he appears to take some form of pleasure in witnessing the brutality of nature, and the circle of life. Arcane texts sometimes note that individuals on the verge of death can spot not only one of the gods or death or their psychopomps waiting in the wings, but also something monstrous and hungry lurking in the distant shadows.
Physical Description
Body Features
As a god of beasts, it is only natural that he should appear as one when addressing mortals, be it in the guise of a mortal beast in the material plane or as warped, eldritch monstrosities in dreams and visions. However, Ullecate makes a point of never appearing to be the same creature more than once within a given decade. This well-recorded multiplicity has earned him the title the Many-Skinned Beast or, in some regions, the Beast of One Thousand Mouths. Although he is generally feared and hated by mortals - particularly in societies that no longer rely on hunting as a source of food and wealth as much as they once did - speaking Ullecate’s true name aloud has not developed the stigma that many other loathed gods’ names have, as it is believed that Ullecate is always present, always watching. As the tales go, it is of little consequence to the Ravenous God what tongue his name happens to be on at a given moment, as all will eventually succumb to him regardless.
Ullecate has no concrete form, at least as far as mortals are concerned. When appearing on the mortal plane or within their dreams, his appearance is often a fusion of elements from many of the local fauna of the region in which the mortal lives. The dominance of these combined elements will be dictated by the populations of the creatures in question, leading to a different mix no matter who he appears to, but common elements everywhere within a given continent, so long as it's not a repetition of something that's been seen in recent generations. Whatever the exact mixture is, however, the form is always warped in some way, twisted and hulking, with exposed ribs and bared teeth. Nevertheless, accounts of visits from the Beast Lord describe his voice as calm and refined, soothing and tantalizing despite the horror of his visage.
A question sometimes posed by philosophers as an ‘unknowable paradox’ is, “What does Ullecate look like amongst the gods?” As common knowledge states the gods live nowhere on Teicna itself, but rather far above it, among the stars, it is believed that he would have no ‘local fauna’ on which to draw, leaving him with no appearance whatsoever. The reality of the situation is, sadly, quite a bit more mundane: As Ullecate was once a common Duwallish marshwolf before ascending to godhood, his neutral appearance closely resembles their kind, albeit vaguely anthropomorphised and bearing the same unnatural, emaciated features as his composite forms.
Ullecate has never, in recorded memory, appeared in the form of one of the mortal sapients. Should he ever find the need to visit the physical plane directly, he does so in the form of a creature native to the site of his visit, or otherwise relevant to the purpose of his visit. This creature is often thin and sickly, with milky eyes and pale features, but otherwise betrays no sense of the divinity it conceals.
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