Tharizdun Tharizdun was a long - forgotten interloper god originating from Oerth who sought to destroy all that is . During the Dawn War , he created the Abyss , an act for which he was imprisoned by the gods . His followers hoped to set him free . Background . A deity hungry for power found and seized a shard of pure evil . This god , Tharizdun , found his mind and spirit opened to the obyrith s trapped in their dying darkness . The link to those foul beings corrupted him in an instant , driving the deity to madness . But the obyriths ' plan to seize the celestial realms controlled by Tharizdun and his kind was met with resistance and a twist they had not anticipated . The obyriths demanded that the deity plant the seed of evil within the Astral Sea , promising him total dominion of that realm in exchange for his fealty . Even within his madness , however , Tharizdun recognized that his fellow gods would turn on him before he could fully seize the power the obyriths promised . Instead , the mad god traveled to the farthest reaches of the cosmos , planting the seed of evil in a primordial expanse of the churning Elemental Chaos , the realm of the fallen primordials , which he hoped to seize as his own . This seed eventually grew into the Abyss , and though the act gained him great power , his fellow gods temporarily put aside their differences in order to imprison him . He was trapped in another universe that had been completely subsumed by its own version of The Abyss , known only as Voidharrow . The gods left him with all of his powers intact in this realm , similar to what he wished to turn his universe into . The mad god occasionally had periods of lucidity . It was during these periods that he plotted his escape . One of his more successful plans was the creation of the persona known as the Elder Elemental Eye . In this guise , he communicated with the evil archomental s , Imix , Ogremoch , Yan - C - Bin and Olhydra , the Princes of Elemental Evil , convincing them that they were his creations , thereby gaining their allegiance . History . In 1340 DR , a cult of Tharizdun formed in western Chessenta . It hired bandits , consorted with demon s , and caused much havoc before an alliance of forces destroyed it . Some credit the fact that Tharizdun did not gain a permanent foothold on Toril to the personal intervention of the goddess Mystra . A new cult of Tharizdun was formed by the plague demon Murmur in 1479 DR after a burnt portion of its corpse was discovered by the Firestorm Cabal in Akanûl . It possessed Leheren , one of the members of the Cabal , and created a secret order within the order devoted to freeing Tharizdun and releasing him on the continent of Faerûn . At roughly the same time , the last of the Sabrak clan of dwarves discovered an intrusion of the Abyssal Plague in a temple of Ghaunadaur in the mountains south of Easting and devised a way to transform victims of the plague into plague demons with which they hoped to create an army that would fight for the Elder Elemental Eye . Around 1491 DR , several cults dedicated to the Elder Elemental Eye rose up in the Dessarain Valley tryng to summon the Princes of Elemental Evil . Dogma . Tharzidun ' s exact dogma is unknown , as the ages he was imprisoned in the Abyss along with his own growing insanity have left him unable to communicate in a meaningful manner ; even when he appeared to his followers , he only spoke to them in the form of a shrieking babble that was impossible for mortals to comprehend . The following are his assumed teachings , followed by his cults .