The Harsh

The Harsh is the lost god of the dark dwarves and the hidden enemy of The Twilight Anarchy. Long ago he was betrayed on every side: by five gods, by the three betrayer gods of The Calamity (Tharizdun, Zarok and Mol'maroch), and by his lover, The Orb Weaver. His name was scoured from the records ("there is no crime graver than naming the Betrayer"). What remained of him was preserved in secret, and through The Nocturnal Loom, whose leaders had planned to raise him all along, he worked to break The Divine Gate and return.

The 2026 pantheon handout lists him as dead, with the domains Madness and Sacrifice and the symbol of a fractured crown with silvered webs. His prison is the moon Zelyr, and his fortress is The Regard.

The party pieced this together over two years: Lord Cedric was his unwitting pawn; the Harsh and The Orb Weaver together bound The Infinite Scroll; his agent Selarith ran his schemes; and the souls of the dead were being siphoned through The Taps to feed him. A cult of the Unburned chanted "by the Harsh One's hand". An informant told the party that five souls pulling five Taps at once would make him stumble, and that the Shadowkiln could sever his grip. In September 2025 they saw him inside The Shackle, where he killed the Orb Weaver. The party rallied every god against him and fought him in The Battle with the Harsh on 2026-01-21 (see Aspects of the harsh).

The Harsh fell. The Divine Gate stayed intact, held now by a single Source, and the other Sources are slowly returning to their gods, a process that will take about a century. When his phylactery, the moon Zelyr, cracked in 1041 PC near the end of the campaign, the party saw it spill black ichor across the sky.

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