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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 made it obsess over a far more urgent problem: Teerdavk was bored of its diet. Guano, 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, cave insects, and fungus, 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 of a lid, 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, there were 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?”
“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. The gatekeeper 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. tThen the gatekeeper tapped the page it was reading with a finger. It seemed to nod slightly and then strode directly to the front of the gate and opened the doors. They swung silently apart except for the dull thud at the end of their motion.
The opened gate resembled the entrance to a root-cellar filled with heavy black smoke. It was as opaque as tar, but wisps of it flowed out of the lower edge of the gate a short way before evaporating. There were no sounds of footsteps as the gatekeeper marched down into this darkness, but its head bounced downwards in a way that implied stairs before it sank entirely out of sight.
Don't ask where it came from (this is the Dreamlands, after all) but while it waited, Teerdavk began setting a table for two guests.
It seemed to have only been a short time before the gatekeeper's head came bobbing silently back up from beyond the gate, and beheld the table with two plates, one heaped with mushrooms, the other holding just a single large one. The gatekeeper paused only a moment, then stepped up out of the gate. Before it, it held what Teerdavk sought. The spirit resembled a ball of the same opaque smoke that filled the gate. Two bright spots - a memory of eyes - slid together from place to place on the spirit's surface. They turned towards the table. A smokey pair of tendrils emerged from the spirit, reaching for the table. Not able to reach far enough, another pair of tendrils stretched from the bottom of the spirit and flailed clumsily.
“It still remembers arms and legs?” remarked Teerdavk.
“This one has only been beyond the gates for a hundred thousand breaths of the waking world or so. Grasping and running are fundamental elements of this one's nature. It's not unexpected.” replied the gatekeeper, shrugging slightly. “It should serve your requirements nicely.” And then, the gatekeeper stepped up to the table to collect its payment. Holding the retrieved spirit to itself with one arm, the gatekeeper picked mushrooms one by one from the larger plate, pushing them into its face where one would presume there must be a mouth. It paused only to occasionally slap away the roughly-formed spirit's limbs that reached out to try to join in. When the last mushroom was finally devoured, there was a small, subtle sound that might possibly have been a slight sigh of contentment. Then the gatekeeper pointed to the other plate.
“And who is that for?” It was spoken more like a statement than a question, as if the gatekeeper knew the answer but wanted to hear Teerdavk say it.
“It's for that one” Teerdavk answered pointing to the spirit. Teerdavk paused to remember the word for the concept it had heard in the distant voice of the Deepmost. “It is…investment?”
“Ambition *and* wisdom. You grow quickly, little god. Go ahead.” The deepmost held the spirit out towards Teerdavk, who broke the remaining mushroom in half. One half was returned to the plate. The other, offered to the spirit who grabbed at it with half-formed limbs and shoved it eagerly into the wide hole that formed below its eyespots. The hole was surrounded by jagged protrusions suggesting a memory of sharp teeth - well, Teerdavk *had* said it wanted one with a natural hunger. The symbolic binding complete, the gatekeeper handed the spirit to Teerdavk, told Teerdavk the spirit's name, and turned to walk back to its place by the pedestal. Then, uncharacteristically, it stopped and turned back.
“We are not expected to have opinions on such things, but we do hope you remain manifest long enough to reach a worthy end. We expect your progress to be entertaining, and the form your payment takes…” There was a brief pause. “Elsewhere, we have dealings with a small god of suffocating stench, for example. They are an effective and loyal contributor to the Infernal cause but…” another pause. “We find eating mushrooms pleasant.” Then the gatekeeper turned again and stepped behind the pedestal, picking up the inscrutable codex and returning it to whatever mysterious place it had come from, and then crouching down to wait for its next client.
Teerdavk went home.
Teerdavk's home was the metaphysical meeting of the village of Chokluk's reclamation pit in the waking world and the near-Dreamlands.
Teerdavk was not entirely sure if the unusual level of personal interest from the gatekeeper was particularly promising, or particularly sinister, but there was no time to ponder. Without a life to sustain it, a spirit will degrade quickly. Simply “creating life” was something that only those disgusting Celestial-god perverts did. Decent Infernal gods did this sort of thing the appropriate way - by reforming and repurposing already-existing life. Teerdavk directed its intent at the waking-world half of its existence, and felt a mass of worms, beetles, slime-molds, and the diffuse vitality of rot obey, pushing itself together into a unified body. At the same time, Teerdavk pushed the spirit to mingle with the coalescing flesh, and felt the spirit take hold. Now the spirit could choose its own shape, and Teerdavk could concentrate on the last important step - the gift-giving. The gift of language. Knowledge of Chokluk and its vicinity, to the extent that Teerdavk knew it. A purpose. The *hunger*…this gift was, metaphorically speaking, not merely accepted but outright eagerly ripped from Teerdavk's hands and slid into place with unexpected ease. Teerdavk hoped it had not overdone it. Teerdavk paused. Wasn't it forgetting something?
Oh! Of course.
Consciousness.
The sleepy goblin who served as high priestess of Teerdavk for the village of Chokluk was roused from her daily nap by the insistent squelching sounds of a new villager being born from the pit. She yawned and brushed the cavern dust from her ceremonial mushroom-hide robes, and picked up her ceremonial mushroom-fiber staff. It had been a while since a new villager had been born, so she also quickly reviewed the little speech she gave to all newborn villagers.
A substantial portion of the tiny lives in the pit crushed themselves together at the surface of it, forming a fleshy pulsating wad, which then gradually reformed itself into a recognizable body. It solidified into a smallish infernal person. It had short horns on its forehead, fingers that were long and slender, talons for feet, and a whiplike tail. It took a breath. The priestess raised her staff dramatically.
“Greetings, new villager…” she began. Then: “Uh…hello? Are you awake?” The newborn imp snored slightly. Then, its eyes snapped open and it sat up. The priestess sighed quietly, and tried again. “Greetings, new …villager…” she trailed off, distracted. The god was speaking to her! Directly to her!
It explained what was happening. Oh.
“Oh” she repeated, aloud.
“Rejoice, new villager! The god instructs me to ask your name.”
“Oordo.” replied the imp, their eyes still examining their surroundings.
“And what is your purpose?”
Oordo the imp stood quickly, and turned to lock eyes with the priestess. They spoke up with conviction. “Oordo feeds the pit.”