With the 24-hour moratorium expired:
[X] Calquetzqui, the Great Architect, the Builder-in-Shadow
(does not use the Seed of Fog)
Calquetzui only began to coalesce with any certainty during the first great battles the lizardmen fought with orkoids on Mochantia, though his prophet Tlaquilqui (once a humble surveyor of Itza) recalls having his first visions decades earlier. Calquetzqui is a peaceful, industrious god, swift and efficient in giving souls their new tasks in their new life.
Symbols: A pyramid sheltering a slumbering lizardman. An architect's square and beam compass. A great tortoise, bearing vast temples on its back.
Category: Death
Variety: Viceroy of the Afterlife
Domain: Architecture, Protection
Methods of Worship: Burial Rites and Construction, especially monumental and tomb structures.
Favored Foes: Chaos Entities, especially the corruptive forces of Nurgle.
Blessing Thematics: The Undying, Construction Empowerment/Hastening, Defensive Fortification, Visions.
Cultic Rituals
The pivotal rites of Calquetzui's worship revolve around the internment of lizardmen in designated ritually structured tombs, mausoleums, or (in a pinch and on the open field) ossuaries. Monumental architecture not directly containing the remains of the dead may also play a role. Calquetzui's cult holds the great vaults and the temples of the relic priests in even greater veneration than other lizardmen, and grows swiftly among the labor force assigned to maintain these sacred sites.
Immaterial Presence
When a lizardman dies and their soul passes beyond the mortal realm, the Builder-in-Shadow greets their coalescing immaterial form. He appears to them as a venerable skink of unusual physical stature, with scales forming intricate and flawless patterns of amethyst and obsidian, bedecked with all the tools of the engineer's trade.
He directs the dead to proceed diligently to join the great work-teams that labor to construct an ordered and precise realm safe for the races of the lizardmen in the greater, disordered maelstrom of the Warp. His comprehension of the proper structure and alignment of this realm is nigh-limitless. He oversees this construction through the calm, watchful eyes of a vast collection of armored tortoises, who serve alongside the other beasts of burden as His special agents.
Calquetzui lives-in-death to protect the sacred purpose of the lizardmen. Without His guidance, death is failure for the lizardmen, as Chaotic forces consume all that they are, endangering their contributions to the Great Plan. Calquetzui will not allow this.
When Calquetzui's charges are threatened in the afterlife, He takes swift, decisive, yet usually indirect actions. With a sweep of dividers that span worlds, He forces the Immaterium into Euclidean order, drawing barriers that are anathema to the corruptive and distorting powers of the Warp. With a gesture of his measuring-rod, innumerable toiling legions erect fortresses of His design, interlocking and forming barricades of adamant perfection fit to repel the crawling chaos of a trillion malicious creatures, and whose intricate geometries branch out into fractal corners of unyielding stone that slice apart, deny, and dissolve into nothingness the corrupting powers of decay.
Material Blessings
In the mortal realm, the cult of Calquetzui invokes the Great Architect's blessing upon construction projects, with the result that accidents are prevented through sudden insights and all things seem to go more smoothly. Great stones seem almost to pull themselves into exact alignment, requiring only the roughest placement by the muscle of the kroxigor. Field fortifications can positively leap up out of the ground into the hands of the cult when they labor to prepare such things on the field of battle. The soil flies at their touch to transform the land into precisely laid out earthworks and entrenchments that shelter the lizardmen from the enemy's insolent bombardment, and allow them to direct the wrath of their own weapons onto the foe in safety.
In the most extreme terrors of battle, the cult can invoke Calquetzui's remarkable and tangible blessings. Some of the most zealous of His followers may inscribe sigils sacred to the Builder-in-Shadows upon their bodies. In so doing, his followers become 'undying,' their souls continuing to fight and labor on, remaining in contact with their bodies for the duration of a single battle, no matter what grievous wounds they may take. Should they be reduced to bloody, charred bones, then those bloody, charred bones will go on to fight. But after the time of the undying sigils expires, their dissipating energies will ferry the souls of the cultists to parade in triumph on the backs of His chelonians, there to come to places of honor and trust in Calquetzui's great city in the afterlife, no matter what healing powers or bindings are placed upon them.
Should even this prove insufficient, Calquetzui's resources may be called upon still more directly, as the souls of the dead are granted time in the Materium to avert disaster. The Great Architect's labor battalions can re-arm themselves for physical warfare. Some of these battalions sally forth from the hereafter as beings of pure warp energy, who can barely be seen in their wraith-like substanceless nature, but whose weapons slice through obsinite as obsinite slices through wood. Great, ghostly tortoises march with them, standing over and protectively around the bodies of the living like swirling clouds of fog in the shape of beasts- and though their flesh is intangible, their shells are hard like enchanted bronze, repelling the fire of enemy weapons and shielding the warriors from harm.
Other servants of Calquetzui reform in the tombs of the fallen, warriors of bone that carry the armaments they were buried with, wielding them with the skill they enjoyed in life. Even those slain bare moments earlier can rise again, ignoring wounds be they ever so dire for the sake of absolute and perfect adherence to the Grand Design as protected and implemented by the Builder-in-Shadows' divine power.
