Name: Nantli'atl
Symbols: White crocodile, fog/mist (SV uses a weird emoji for 🌫 - just go with
the wavy-lines Microsoft version or the cloud-above-wavy-lines LG version)
Category: Death
Variety: Protector/Psychopomp/Reverse-psychopomp
Domain: Fog/mist
Methods of worship:
- Praying into steam
- Anointing the dead or soon to die with precipitated water - dew is best, rain is okay if no dew is available, artificially distilled water is technically acceptable but should preferably have some dew or rain mixed in
- Ritual suicide to strengthen Natli'atl's influence in the area (mostly the nearby warp, but there are signs of it in the materium) around your ritually-preserved corpse - if you are faithful and dead, then you are with her; if something is linking you here despite that, then logically she is also here; this is a sacrifice because you're choosing to stick around and help guard an area/hold ground in the warp instead of being reincarnated; if your corpse starts to decay, then others know you've reincarnated and it's someone else's turn
Favored Foes: Necromancers, thieves/predators/corruptors of souls
Blessing Thematics: fog/mist, ghosts, tranquility, custody, restoration (as in the purification and rebirth of the dead, not the healing of the living)
Incorporates the Seed of Fog - 1/3 default, can be interpreted up to 3/3 if voters desire
- Incorporates Fog directly as a domain
- Can incorporate Slumber if desired due to the fluff - "Other species might describe what the dead in her care experience as rest."
- Can incorporate Numb if desired due to the fluff - her mist is cold and might therefor be numbing.
Constructed from the god-seed made from the megadaemon responsible for the mind-fog affliction once laid upon the Slaan, Nantli'atl is the first god deliberately created by the Lizardmen. She is the dark, cool, endless fog of Death, and she is a vast, bone-white crocodile with Shyish-purple eyes swimming silently within that fog.
The afterlife and its guardian, Nantli'atl carries the souls of the dead safely away into the cold fog that is her self, and she carries them back to the waters of birth when it is time for them to precipitate back into life. She is a gentle, tranquil god, preferring to protect the souls in her care passively with the concealment and intangeability of fog, but if pressed she can drag threats into the cold depths of her being with the crushing grip of a crocodile's jaws and thus protect her charges by imprisoning/drowning/consuming that which might endanger them.
Other species might describe Nantli'atl as a mother figure. Lizardmen do not, but that is simply because they do not have mothers - they acknowledge the similarity in roles if it is pointed out, and the sheer narrative weight in the warp of mother-related archetypes is something the Slaan mage-priests could certainly observe and exploit to strengthen their creation. That mother crocodiles are attentive guardians of their young and carry them to the water in their jaws is another useful thematic resonance.
Other species might describe what the dead in her care experience as rest. Lizardmen do not, but that is because the closest thing to rest that they experience in life is guard duty. Certainly, the dead wait in stillness as the mists of Nantli'atl's being wash away any hurts, fatigue, or corruption left over from life - whether this is
rest or a mutually-reinforcing system of guarding and being guarded is relative.
Other species might wonder if Nantli'atl might care for the merely unconscious as well as the dead, or if her realm of death might also be a realm of dreams, were they to worship her as well. The Lizardmen, who never sleep or dream, do not yet have an answer - but if the sea of calm fog, of the uncorrupted souls of the dead, that grows in the Warp as the influence of their afterlife expands, might also be a Sea of Dreams... well, the servants of the Old Ones would certainly not object to putting things back to the way they
ought to be. And time is a funny thing in the Warp - if Nantli'atl is much older than the years since her creation, that just makes her story stronger, doesn't it? Or perhaps it's the other way around?
Chaos knew not what it did when it tried to make a trap of fog for the children of the Old Ones...
Where the servants of Sotek are vicious fighters, the servents of Nantli'atl are peaceful, quiet, unobtrusive - and, when necessary, inexorable and inescapable. They normally operate within the infrastructure of Lizardmen cities, but when fights come to them, the violence is ended less with defeat than with
cessation as the flowing mists of the Death Goddess, and if necessary the ghostly guards within them, either remove the faithful from harm or
swallow up the harm. If the priests themselves are forced to fight, their enemies find that no obstacle or attack will disturb their calm pursuit and no trick or struggle will let a target escape their custody at the end of said pursuit.
OOC: This concept accomplishes several things:
- Uses at least one harmonic concept from the Seed of Fog (namely the fog) and could easily be stretched to use one or both of the others depending on how much voters want to trade cost for vulnerability,
- Prepares for resurrection of the dead - even if Slann don't quite have the same relationship to gods that other Lizardmen do, divine aid certainly can't hurt,
- Has great potential for expansion when we meet other races in the future (planning ahead!), and
- Provides a possible means of undoing the current Chaotic state of the Immaterium - not through violence, but through inexorable tranquility.
That last one is a very much a
stretch goal, but an appropriate one given the origin of the seed - with the right story-telling, Nantli'atl and how she came to be as she is could end up as sort of a cosmic-scale Briar Patching incident. The Old Ones made many things by harnessing the Sea of Dreams - perhaps the part of the Warp that remembered being a dreamy, tranquil place also remembered the children it bore them? What might a mother do, to protect her young?
She doesn't have swarms of crocodiles like Sotek has swarms of snakes - she's got cold mist for the environmental SFX and the not-yet-reincarnated in her care for swarming tactics. If a crocodile comes out of all that mist, it's one big one and it's an avatar of Nanti'atl herself (because the enemy has Done F*cked Up Now with her faithful). She's more a No-More-Combat deity than a Combat deity, though, so it's mostly just the mist that shows up.
Another thing to note is that Nantli'atl's mists aren't just her realm, they're also
her. Like how Yog-Sothoth not only Knows The Gate and Is The Gate but also Is The Key And Guardian Of The Gate. When a soul is just standing around in the mist waiting for rebirth, or occasionally assisting priests when the mist is summoned, they are still being carried by Nantli'atl. It's like if Charon's (heavily armed) boat was also the river it crossed, and the people he was ferrying were also swimming (in the river, which was also his boat), and also Charon
was his boat (and the river it crossed), and he didn't just drop his passengers off on the other side of the Styx but kept going somehow to the Lethe and only then let them off
to reincarnate; except instead of a boatman and his boat and the river(s) it traveled, it was a giant white crocodile swimming in an endless realm of mist (which was also the crocodile) - look, it makes perfect sense to the super-intelligent frog mages who constructed Nantli'atl's narrative, okay?
Name origin: Nantli (Nahuatl word for mother) + atl (Nahuatl word for water).
Also has sound similarities to "natal" (added rebirth association) and "Nana" or "Auntie" (just slightly removed from Mother, if that relationship is too close to work).
Question: Is she a mother of water (because fog precipitates into water), or a mother made of water (because Lizardmen are born from water and fog is a form of water)?
Answer: 🐸 Yes.
Idea for first prophet: Leucistic (because full albino is a cliche), probably a Kroxigor because of the Krox/Croc sound similarity but could be a Saurus because more of them are going to be in mortal peril soon. Remembers their previous life and death, being taken away to the afterlife of Nantli'atl, and being returned the spawning pool to be born into their current life. Either the leucism or the past-life/afterlife memories may end up being a distinguishing characteristic for all her priests. Name should be some kind of ghost-related reference or pun - my first thought is Kasp'r, but I'm sure there are better ideas out there.
