Askarath, the Unending Field

Deity of Siege, Attrition, and the Unending Field

Askarath's Blight is a scorched badland of eternal sieges on the Concordant Tread, where the terrain rearranges itself according to acts of dominance. It is named for its god, which is unusual and tells you something: Askarath got there first and the land took its shape afterward.

The mistake everyone makes is assuming Askarath is a god of conquest. It is not. Conquest ends things — it produces a victor, and a victor produces an order, and an order is precisely what the Discordant's Will exists to prevent. Askarath wants the siege, not the fall. It wants both armies still in the field next spring, and the spring after, until neither can remember what the ground was for.

This makes it the only war-god in Iridia that actively sabotages its own favourites when they start winning.

Domains:

  • Siege: Confrontation sustained rather than resolved. Askarath's power gathers around a line that has not moved in months and drains from any battle about to be decided.
  • Attrition: Victory by grinding, which the faith holds is not victory but a shared and slower defeat that one party notices later than the other.
  • The Unending Field: Ground that has been fought over so long that the fighting has become the only reason anyone is still there.

Manifestation and Symbols:

  • Askarath is depicted as two figures locked together, neither identifiable, neither winning, rendered identically so no viewer can take a side.
  • Its sigil is a broken siege-line drawn in a closed ring — a blockade with no inside.
  • Its presence shows as wars that will not conclude. Terms are agreed and then founder on a detail. Reinforcements arrive exactly often enough. Nothing escalates; nothing ends.

Doctrine and Influence:

  • "A war that ends has produced a king. Do not end the war."
    • The founding doctrine, and the reason Askarath's priests have been executed by both sides of the same conflict.
  • "The field is the point. The banner is an excuse the field allows you."
    • The faith is genuinely indifferent to causes and says so, which is why it recruits so well among the third or fourth generation of any long conflict.

Worshippers:

  • The Ragged Goons, whose creed of "take what works, consequences be damned" makes them Askarath's most reliable congregation, and who have never once won anything permanently.
  • Mercenary companies of long standing, particularly those whose contracts renew.
  • Nobody who expects to go home, a fact the faith states plainly at recruitment.

"You asked me for victory. I gave you next year, and the year after that."