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Chokluk may be a tiny, isolated village way out at the edges of Infernal territory, but being its patron diety isn't a bad existence.
Teerdavk is a small Infernal god of decay in its aspect as the theft and redistribution of growth and vital force, or put in simpler terms, a sort of vampiric compost god. Chokluk had been founded by a lost foolhardy goblin explorer who happened to stumble into the cavern where Chokluk has been built, and the adjacent bat-infested cavern whose floor was caked with their fertile droppings (for which the village is named, in the Infernal language) and ancient accumulated bat-corpses.
Teerdavk had found itself manifested for the first time as a personification of the village's reclamation pit which is fed by nourishing wastes from the bat caves, cavern insects, the various detritus from the villagers, and occasionally the remains of deceased villagers themselves. The villagers respectfully sacrificed these materials to Teerdavk, who stole the fading vitality from the rot and the scavengers living in it, and in return used it mostly to produce an admittedly monotonous abundance of nutritious mushrooms that kept the entire village well-fed.
This vitality and raw organic material was occasionally transformed in other ways as well.
–
Gods, by their very nature, are generally exempt from the petty troubles of the mortal world, but they do have concerns of their own. In fact at this time, Teerdavk had three in particular.
Firstly, naturally, was the innate urge to *grow* and be *more* that a typical young diety develops. Teerdavk had felt its potency increase gradually from that first, faint communion with the lone lost goblin who first seeded the cavern's pit with wastes and fungal spores, to the small but well-established village populated almost entirely with infernal persons born one by one from the pit. Teerdavk's new existence as a god of Infernal people granted it certain bits of knowledge gifted to it by The Deepmost, who rules all Infernal gods. Teerdavk now understood that other Infernal gods might become aware of it and seek to steal away some of its potency and influence. Teerdavk also became aware of the existence of the defiantly-oppositional Celestial gods ruled by The Distant, who would seek to destroy Teerdavk outright if they could. In this situation, Teerdavk knew that growing its own power was not only the most gratifying, but also the safest course of action. Better that other Infernal gods should seek to collude, and Celestial gods seek to avoid, and ideally that both should fear opposition to Teerdavk.
This led to Teerdavk's second concern. As it grew, Teerdavk began to feel the presence of other gods. At first, just the overwhelming but far-away existence of The Deepmost, and then later an Infernal god of cold, dark waters who was the patron god of the next-nearest Infernal population - the mostly-inaccessible town that Chokluk's founder had left from to go exploring. Teerdavk felt little interest or intent from that one. However, Teerdavk had very recently begun to notice, just at the edge of its perception, what felt like a forgotten, diminished god. It was old, and quite small, and seemed unlikely to be any threat to Teerdavk regardless of its nature, but its Infernality or Celestiality seemed bafflingly ambiguous, and it was restless.
If gods were purely rational beings, these would have been Teerdavk's far most pressing concerns, but Teerdavk's defining nature recognized a far more urgent problem: Teerdavk was bored of its diet. Gauno, half-fossilized bats, cave insects, and fungus. And of course the townsfolk and their garbage, but since virtually everyone and everything in the town was born of The Pit, it was all in effect simply slightly-processed guano, half-fossilized bats, and cave insects and so provided very little additional variety. This limited Teerdavk's options, and in any case was no way for a respectable god to live. It was time to have something done about this.
Teerdavk set off through the Dreamlands to find a gatekeeper.
–
There are deep philosophical questions about the nature of the gates of Death and the beings whose purpose is to usher the spirits of the dead through them. From the few who can remember ever seeing them somehow, the appearance of both the gates and their keeper varies substantially. Are there really multiple gates, and multiple keepers? Is there perhaps only one gate and one gatekeeper which appears differently for every spirit who sees them? Is a gatekeeper an agent of the Deepmost, or is it a manifestation of a part of the Deepmost itself? Do they even exist at all, or are they purely symbolic concepts?
For Teerdavk, a godly spirit and therefore entirely native to the Dreamlands, the answer to all of these questions is “It's irrelevant.” If an Infernal god wants to find the Gates of Death, they will be found wherever in the Dreamlands an Infernal god expects to find them, and they will serve the necessary purpose.
The gates of Death rose, just slightly, from the middle of a flat expanse of grey sand. The structure was similar in size to what one might expect the sarcophagus of a vain, wealthy person to be, but angled upward as if for display, and seemingly carved from a single block of bland grey sandstone. Instead of the stone slab like a sarcophagus, the top of the gate was a narrow pair of doors which appeared to be of a dull metallic material. Undecorated blackened metal handles were set in them. Next to the gates, a short featureless column of the same grey sandstone, perhaps a very dull lectern. The gatekeeper stood behind it.
If the gatekeeper had been a physical being in the waking world, it might have been described with with words like “squat”,“muscular” and “menacing”, Its real presence only hinted at these qualities though. It was like a creature sculpted out of oblivion itself, a silhouette that was only visible in the sense that where it was, was the only place where nothing could be seen. As it seemed to straighten up and turn a bit to face Teerdavk, the outlines of strong arms, a wide body, a thick neck, and a head with short forward-curved horns sprouting from where a forehead would be. Short claws or long nails at the ends of its fingers were briefly discernable as it reached forward to brush dust from the top of the lectern before setting a similarly-unseeable flat, box-like object atop it.
“Welcome, Teerdavk”. Its voice was a paradoxically reverberating whisper that seemed almost to come from the listener themselves. “It has been longer than we expected. Is it time for your little village to grow again? Shall I fetch another spirit for you?”
“I have particular requests this time.”
The gatekeeper leaned forward slightly, intrigued. “What do you require from us?”
“One that is inquisitive. And also acquisitive. Oh, and with a hunger, so that it can better understand what I want of it.”
The gatekeeper said nothing, but reached for the object it had placed atop the column and lifted the far upper corner, revealing it to be a codex. Its content, if any, was as inscrutable as its cover, but the pages like impossibly thin slices of lightlessness being flipped through by the gatekeeper suggested that something would be there to read if it could be seen. It turned towards the last pages of the codex, tracing along with its finger until it located what it sought, and then turned back to somewhere in the middle. It read, turned another page, read some more. Then the gatekeeper tapped the page it was reading with a finger. “I have one for you.”