Xel'Vakar

The Ever-Hungering King

Xel’Vakar is the god of undeath, gluttony, and forbidden knowledge. A devourer of endings and defier of natural law. Once a mortal sorcerer-king who erased his own name from time, he ascended through sacrifice, necromancy, and the consumption of truths the gods themselves sought to bury. Now undead and divine, Xel’Vakar represents the refusal to die, the hunger to possess, and the belief that death is a failure of will. His faithful say the grave is a lie, and only those who are willing escape its grasp.

Appearance

Xel’Vakar is depicted as a towering, skeletal figure robed in shadowed silks and bound in chains etched with cursed scripture. His skull bears a broken crown of horns, and his eyes blaze with sickly hunger. Not for food, but for memory, life, and truth itself. His form shifts subtly when observed, as though feeding upon the gaze of the living. His voice is dry, slow, and terrible. The sound of parchment burning in a sealed tomb. In symbolic form, he is represented by a skeletal jaw consuming a closed eye, or a chain wound around a blackened crown.

Dogma

The god of undeath teaches that death is surrender. The true path to power is through transcendence of mortality, by devouring what would be lost and binding it to the self. His followers view undeath not as curse, but as proof of dominion. Hunger is sacred, for it drives the will to take, to keep, and to endure. He exalts those who reject the cycle of decay and dares them to master what others fear. The soul, the body, the grave. Nothing should be wasted. Nothing should be relinquished.
To die is to be consumed. To rise again is to claim.

Worship

Worshipped of Xel’Vakar is conducted in catacombs, hidden libraries, and necropolises soaked in ritual ash. His cults are composed of necromancers, liches, warlords, and forbidden scholars who believe that knowledge, especially the kind meant to be forgotten, is sustenance. His clergy wear chains across their mouths or inscribe prayers onto their skin in ink and bone. His primary scripture is The Ingested Gospel, a blasphemous text often written in the blood or ashes of the old.
His sacred rite is The Feast of Silence, in which a soul is ritually bound, its story consumed, and its essence used to fuel magic far beyond the bounds of mortal spellcraft. This is seen not as murder, but ascension.

Relations

Xel’Vakar views most gods as misguided, blind to the power they waste by allowing death, loss, and forgetfulness to persist. He has little regard for Aurora, whom he sees as weak for restoring the broken, or Ezariah, whose self-sacrifice he calls “a meal served cold.”
He is warily respected by Velkareth, who understands that to erase is to control. Myrrad is one of the few gods he does not seek to consume, not out of fear, but because he believes their paths once converged. Nyxarion is despised, not because of their cruelty, but because their obsession stagnates what Xel’Vakar would feast upon. To Ashmedai, he is a rival in claiming the souls others discard. But where Ashmedai punishes, Xel’Vakar devours.

History

Xel’Vakar was once a mortal king, sorcerer, and scholar whose lust for power grew insatiable. He razed his own name from history, binding his identity into a ritual that would let him consume the veil between life and death. Through forbidden rites, he feasted upon forgotten gods and enslaved the echoes of dead empires. When death came for him, he swallowed it. When his soul began to fade, he forged it into a weapon. He did not ascend so much as consume divinity, leaving behind no legend, only fear and fragments.
Now, his name is spoken in dying breaths, his hunger etched in every grave robbed for power. He waits beneath the skin of the world, in crypts, in dreams, in the silence between funerals  and when the last name is forgotten, he will be all that remains.

Divine Classification

Ascended God

Alignment

Neutral Evil

Species

Lich

Realm

Abaddon

Honorary & Occupational Titles

• The Ever-Hungering King
• Binder of Flesh and Soul
• Lord Beyond the Grave
• Devourer of the Lost

Pathfinder Statistics

Divine Attribute: Constitution or Intelligence
Divine Domains

• Indulgence
• Magic
• Soul
• Undeath

Divine Font: Harm
Divine Skill: Intimidation
Favored Weapon: Scythe
Cleric Spells: 1st: goblin pox, 2nd: false vitality, 7th: mask of terror

D&D 5e Statistics

Suggested Domain

• Death Domain
• Grave Domain