The Gods: The Tlokiriqáluyal
Sárku
the Five-Headed Lord of Worms, Master of the Undead, Guide into Darkness, the Demon-Lord of Decay.
Sárku seeks a slower, colder winding down in Hrü’ü’s final Nullity: the low and certain transition of life and death. To the Worm-Lord, life is but a brief orgasmic spasm before the long, dusty eternity of the tomb. Yet life and death are only two aspects of the same being, and the latter is the more perfect because it endures. The one condition of Sárku’s faith is the survival of the conscious intellect—the ego—which must continue to live and have awareness even in the sepulchre. The other demands of the body do not persist after death, but if the intellect has cognition throughout all eternity, it can witness and savour the final victory of the Dark.
His realm is the necropolis, and there he aids those who serve his undead legions, those who worship the intellect and care little for the needs of the body, and those who send the living down to him in the unutterable stillness of death.
Sárku is represented as a mighty serpentine form having five vermiform heads, each with a gaping, suckered maw. A mass of coiling tentacles hangs beneath each head, and these bear some symbol of the grave: bones, rotted cerements, skulls, and corpse-candles. His emblem is a wavy black or copper line (Sárku loves copper and dislikes iron) with a red circle at one end, signifying the Eternal Victory of the Worm. He has 108 Aspects. His priests and priestesses wear earth-brown robes, whitened armour (females don a bodice of grave-hued cloth), and headdresses of skulls. His clergy (and also his ordinary worshippers on festival days) also paint their faces with white pigment in the form of grinning skulls.
Power Centres
In Tsolyánu, Sárku is almost sole master of the Kraá hills and the City of Sárku. He is also patron deity of the Ito family of the Chakas, and he has lesser centres in Sokátis, Jaikalór, and in Urmish.
Factions
Sárku’s priesthood is split between the Copper Tomb Society, another ally of the Ndálu Clan, and the Brotherhood of the Victory of the Worm, which cares little for this world and devotes itself to the rituals of the catacombs.
Durritlámish, Cohort of Sárku
The Cohort of Sárku is Durritlámish: the Black Angel of the Putrescent Hand, Opener of Catacombs. He marshals the undead, and is depicted as a rotted corpse seated upon a throne of bones, holding a bowl in one hand from which smoke rises. His emblem is a stylised image of this bowl, the Vessel of the Vision of the World in which all the Skeins of Destiny of every creature in the universe may be seen. He has 16 aspects.