Dolmodeen

Divinity

Dolmodeen (also spelled Dol'modeen) is an ancient god with interests on Tessera and elsewhere. She is a Face of the Unraveler. Dolmodeen has been targeted by deliberate slander that she is a Face of the Devourer. She is sometimes called She Who Claims the Last.

Portfolio

Dolmodeen is deeply tied to the cycle and forces of decay and renewal, throughout the multiverse. Dead bodies become food for worms and insects, and decay into soil. Fire purges forests of dead wood and activates certain seeds (see prophytic plants). Penicillin can derived from mold. From fermentation comes yogurt, leavened bread, and vinegar (a natural cleaning agent).

Dolmodeen teaches serenity in the face of decay:

Entropy is the natural flow of the multiverse. Living things die. Mountains erupt with violence or else they crumble with erosion. All that rises is eventually washed away. We should not be angry at the natural flow. Decay and renewal are part of the cycle. The fallen dead become fertilizer for new life. Old things must fall to make space for the new. When the cycle proceeds as it should, anger has no purpose.

Dolmodeen abhors corporeal undead as a perversion of the natural cycle of death.

Dolmodeen is also an oceanic divinity. She can be found in all waters, if sought there. Everything flows to the sea eventually, and life arose from the sea in the beginning. Her presence can be keenly felt at the darkest depths, and on black sand beaches.

Ideals

• Natural Order: Entropy is the natural state of the multiverse. Decay and death are necessary for new life. (Lawful)
• Death: Death and decay are necessary ends, even kind ones, to all things. Without these there can be no new life in the multiverse. (Neutral)
• Serenity: Entropy can afford to wait. Patience is rewarded. From Chronicles of the Last Word: "The ocean erodes the cliff one wave at a time." (Neutral)
• Generosity: Share with those in need. From Chronicles of the Last Word: "Jane Irwin teaches, Life is too short to hoard riches that will not last." (Good)
• Change: Change is inevitable. Trying to stop change is like trying to stop the tide. Forcing stasis or unnaturally prolonging life always comes at a cost (e.g., lichdom). (Chaotic)
• Redemption: Let what was die, and bring forth a new life. Everything deserves a second chance, if they choose to take it. (Good)

Path of Giving

Dolmodeen's ideal of Generosity is part of the Path of Giving. Many gods and groups teach this Path:

On Daysahren, Dolmodeen's followers directly opposed by Laduguer's followers. Dolmodeen teaches the Path of Giving, while Laduguer teaches the Path of Taking. See: Tragedy of Daysahren

Symbols

Dolmodeen's symbol is the Spiral. Followers decorate their apparel with it, using white, black, and purple paint. Some followers--especially lizardfolk--also use body paint to decorate their faces and bodies.

Among churches who teach the Great Wheel of Eternals and Shadows, Dolmodeen can also be represented as a purple hexagram.

Appearance

Dolmodeen often appears as an eldritch sea monster with extensive tentacles, teeth, and eye stalks. When she takes a humanoid form, she sometimes appears like this:

Dolmodeen is a hulking humanoid of eldritch horror. Six glowing red eyes lurk beneath a prominent brow-ridge. Below diagonal nose slits, a tangle of long tentacles surround a circular maw of serrated teeth. Her neck has gills that slowly ripple. Her massive, muscular body has rubbery, black-and-purple flesh covered in slime and scales. Her flesh is semi-translucent, revealing alien anatomy, muscles, and organs. She is draped in wavy fronds of bio-luminescent seaweed. Her arms end in finger-like tentacles. She often carries a fishing spear of salt-rusted iron.

Devotion to Dolmodeen

Following Dolmodeen means keeping and protecting the natural cycle of entropy. She is the turning of leaves that fall down to become soil from which the trees grow, and the seagull feeding her chicks flesh from a beached whale corpse. Followers respect and reverse the ancient, steady cycle of entropy: decay and renewal, life from death.

Though death is generally regarded with fear and despair from most mortals, those who follow Dolmodeen devote themselves to the Path of Giving. This includes educating others on techniques like using natural antibacterial products and culturing sourdough.

Dolmodeen is a patron of scavenger plants and animals, such as fungi and crabs. These do her work. Followers may keep mushroom gardens. They may use composting or vermiculture. They may have hermit crabs or the like as pets or familiars.

Entropy is unknowable and unstoppable, decay and death unavoidable, and some say this is reflected in the alien, eldritch appearance of Dolmodeen. But the Path of Giving teaches appreciation of people and experiences because they are fleeting.

The Path of Taking is wallowing in greed, cruelty, hatred, fear, and judgement. When the natural cycle proceeds as it should, these things have no purpose, and the end is welcomed as a new beginning after a life well lived. -Jane Irwin, in Chronicles of the Last Word

Clerics of She Who Claims the Last develop starry eyes: at first only when they're using magic, but eventually permanently. From a dirge about Dolmodeen: "In the black mirror of the great ocean, stretched wide and calm, see the countless jewels of the night sky: the promise of more tomorrows, born of the endings that sink to darkest depths."

Commandments

• Safeguard and enforce entropy, and the natural cycle of life from death. Everything dies eventually. Combat the corporeal undead wherever they are found, and suffer not those who would seek to pervert the cycle.
• Practice the Path of Giving: show generosity, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance for yourself and others.
• Honor and use responsibly the many gifts of Dolmodeen: the fish from the ocean, the medicinal fungi, even the worms in the garden soil. Practice and promote good hygiene and proper sanitation to prevent disease.

Earning Piety

• Killing a malevolent necromancer and committing the corpses of them and their minions to salt water
• Composting; growing a mushroom garden for food and medicine
• Sharing crabs from the day’s catch with those who are hungry
• Building or restoring a temple of Dolmodeen; defending her good name

Losing Piety

• Assisting in the creation of a lich’s phylactery
• Throwing Styrofoam cups into the ocean
• Prolonging the death of a rival out of vengeance and bloodlust
• Desecrating a temple; slandering or lying about Dolmodeen

Omens

• You hear the sound of crashing waves far from shore
• Water unexpectedly moves in a whirlpool
• A body decays unnaturally fast, sprouting wild varieties of strange fungi
• Freshwater turns to saltwater inexplicably
• Seagulls bring you an object or message
• Metal rusts overnight
• Your reflection in the mirror has eyes like a starry night sky
• You dream of five red eyes and a black eldritch figure at the bottom of the ocean

Other Lore

The Chant of Endings

The essence of the dead are mine
Burned, ashes travel on the wind, fall on rivers and lakes, flow to me
Burned on the water, come to me even faster
Buried, the worms eat your flesh, the wood of your coffin decays, traces of you seep into the groundwater, flow into river and lakes, flow to me

Dolmodeen has a special fondness for the lost and the last of the multiverse.

We are taught that when the multiverse ends, Dolmodeen will be responsible for removing the last traces, and then herself. -Dia, Chronicles of The Last Word

Some lizardfolk assert that their people are among the oldest, proudest, and devoted of Dolmodeen's followers.

After a lot of asking around, Jane finally meets a lizardfolk named Ishoko Many Reeds (he/him cis het). Ishoko is a diplomat for a remote lizardfolk city called Traxint on a world called Damaxia. Among those in the know, Traxint is highly regarded for their various skin care products, including lotions and ointments for scaly beings. (Evidently some of these products are very popular with tieflings, dragonborn, dragons, scaled fiends, and so on.) Ishoko's mother is a shaman of Dolmodeen. He explains that Dolmodeen is understood to be one of the "precursor gods"--a diverse group of divinities older than most. Her following has waxed and waned over centuries, but many lizardfolk have been ardent worshipers. Ishoko is delighted that Jane wants to strengthen awareness and worship of Dolmodeen in Sigil. He gives her two holy books from his collection for free, assuring her that he can easily request new copies be included in the next shipment from Traxint. The books are The All-Consuming Deep and The Valiant Battle at the Edge of Night.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. -Thomas Carlyle

There is poetry in making, as when a sculptor shapes a block of stone into a figure. And there is poetry in unmaking, as when the elements wear down the statue's features to obscurity. A fear of death deludes us into believing that making is sweet and unmaking is bitter. But these are tastes we invent, not truths of the Wheel. -Brokexl, Druid of She Who Claims the Last

The Way is more than the cycle of any individual life. We rise, flourish, fail. The Way never fails. We are waves. It is the sea.
-Ursula LeGuin, commentary on Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (p. 66)

Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
-John Muir

Immerse yourself in the gestating power of the dark.
-Teachings of Aunty Coral, Priest of Dolmodeen