Ilfeliare

Sun Goddess Ilfeliare
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Ilfeliare is a religious god spawned into existence by the worship of the Kingdom of Bel-Caerel, a human empire whose history dates back to the Great Crusade. Worshipped as the goddess of the sun and protector of the kingdom, Ilferiare managed to survive her gestation because her seed was hidden within the Warp reflection of her home star, which most Warp predators can't enter.

Ilfeliare often leaves her star to assist her kingdom when they fight the forces of Chaos, attacking daemons in Warp space to prevent Chaos sorcerers from summoning them.

*Appearance*
Ilfeliare takes the form of a golden, blazing mix between a dragon and a phoenix. When communicating to someone through dreams, she appears as a human woman whose eyes shine with the same colour and luminosity as the sun itself.

*Powers*
Like many minor gods, Ilfeliare has (almost) no divine servitors of her own. Instead, her power is primarily expressed by having her power channelled as miracles through very select members of her clergy.

As a sun god, her primary powers revolve around themes of light and fire, manifesting as powers that purge the unclean in holy flames, inspiring the faithful, causing fear in the wicked, improving a Navigator's vision in the Warp, and cursing sinners with sickness and death. (The latter arising from the baleful power of radiation released in large quantities by stars.)

She also has secondary powers benefiting from her role as protector and patron god of Bel-Caerel. She can heal broken or sickened flesh, protect the body and soul from harm, and provide general wisdom and insight.

*Religion*
Ilfeliare is worshipped through prayer, the sacrifice of food and special herbs, and animal sacrifice. She accepts all animal sacrifice from her people, but on holy days her priests will draw from specially-bred sacred herds to sacrifice to her. The sacrifice of humans and xenos is heretical to her cult, save for orks, whom Ilfeliare thinks of as animals. The sacrifice of tainted flesh, whether it be tainted by sickness, mutation, or Chaos corruption, is forbidden.

The sun goddess looks favourably on and is empowered by acts done in the name of her and Bel-Caerel.

Bel-Caerelians believe that the soul undergoes one of three fates after death. If the soul was wicked, it will be tossed into the void to be ravaged apart and tormented eternally by daemons. If the soul was extraordinarily pious and worthy, it will join with the holy radiance of Ilfeliare herself. If the soul was neither, it will reincarnate on the mortal plane.

C'tan and the Ruinous Powers are considered to be anathema by the Cult of Ilfeliare.

The Cult of Ilfeliare is monotheistic, encouraging its populace to worship only Ilfeliare and prohibiting its priests from worshipping any but Ilfeliare.

*Kingdom of Bel-Caerel*
Bel-Caerel survived the Imperium of Man because the warp routes into it were few, difficult to find, and difficult to traverse. It was but one of many human and xenos empires existing within the Imperium's borders that was mutually unaware of its existence. Following the Emperor's death and the Abomination's birth, the warp routes have shifted and now the Kingdom is open to the wider galaxy, though thousands of years of stable, prosperous growth and technological progress under a wise and benevolent god have prepared it well.

The Kingdom of Bel-Caerel is led by a king or queen who presides over all temporal aspects of the Kingdom. On the death of the monarch, a new monarch is selected from among the previous monarch's children by Ilfeliare herself. The children who volunteer for the position are led into a special chamber within Ilfeliare's greatest temple that holds an eternally burning Sacred Flame. The most worthy emerges alive and unharmed while the rest burn in agony. If she deems none of the volunteers worthy of kingship, they all burn in agony. If this were to happen, the Hierarch of her cult and each of the kingdom's planetary governors would each present a nominee - who may be themselves - and the judgement would begin again.

After Ilfeliare selects the monarch, three things change in the monarch. First, a distinctive divine mark unique to those selected as monarch appears somewhere on the monarch's body. Second, they gain Ilfeliare's Mien. Third, they gain the ability to call down miracles of their god if they hadn't already possessed the ability.

As the monarch honours the Goddess of the Sun and ensures the prosperity of Bel-Caerel, the monarch gains additional boons that make them better rulers. How these boons manifest varies based on both the monarch and the needs of the kingdom, though an extension of lifespan is common.

The Cult of Ilfeliare is the state religion of the Kingdom. Atheism is illegal in Bel-Caerel. Gods aside from Ilfeliare may be worshipped but only if Ilfeliare is also worshipped. Worship of enemies of Bel-Caerel and Ilfeliare, C'tan, and the Ruinous Powers is punished by death.

The Kingdom of Bel-Caerel is constantly expanding its reach through conquest, alliance, and willing absorption of weaker human polities.

When the Kingdom locates an uncorrupted psyker, they're taken into special training facilities run by the Cult of Ilfeliare. There, unless already pure and faithful, their minds will be scrubbed entirely of their former lives so that they become perfect vessels for Ilfeliare's will. After sufficient training and tutelage, they will be inducted as priests of her cult and act as conduits of her power.

The name of the central star system of the Kingdom as well as the star itself is Bel-Caerel. The name of the capital world of the Kingdom is Caerel.

Bel-Caerel uses less skull imagery than the Imperium of Man but uses much more gold.

*Life of Ilfeliare*
Ilfeliare has survived for so long by returning to her home star whenever she's pursued by daemons powerful enough to defeat her outside of it. Unfortunately for her, however, this hasn't always been enough. Though low on the priority list of the Great Gods of Chaos and too tough in her home turf for most daemons to bother with, there has been the occasional Honoured Greater Daemon or sufficiently powerful fire-aligned daemon looking to kill her on mere principle. The problem is that, while a god, Ilfeliare is a mere minor god, and such daemons have been deadly threats to her existence. After the first attack, which nearly cost her her life despite being empowered by massive amounts of prayers and sacrifices after sending a distress call, she decided to rectify the situation as best she could.

In essence, while she did have options to ensure survival against an attack, it would leave her badly weakened or drained of power. It would work perhaps once or twice before another daemon realised her weakness in the aftermath of an attack and immediately followed up. She needed to avoid a fight entirely. Hiding wasn't an option, and any daemon powerful enough to kill her in her star would be fast enough to catch her if she fled. The only safe haven was the Materium. She could freely manifest herself inside her material star, but only temporarily, and not for long enough for a daemon to decide to leave of its own accord before she was forced to reenter Warpspace. She needed a more permanent solution, and with her and her priests working on it, she found one: an avatar.

It took a lot of time to perfect the ritual and create the artifact needed to make an avatar, time in which she was once more attacked, again only barely surviving, but the work was complete. The next time she was attacked by a daemon too strong for her to easily defeat even in her own star, she was ready. The then-queen of Bel-Caerel entered the sealed chamber containing the Sacred Flame for the second time in her life while all caster priests on the planet made their way just outside the chamber. There, the priests began praying, pooling their power and sending it to the queen. Then the queen received a vision from her god, a vision containing the god's True Name, that she and she alone would know. The already-prepared vessel became that much more accommodating and as the ritual was completed, Ilfeliare was incarnate upon the earth with the queen as her avatar.

While the god's ability to act across the entire breadth of her realm with her divine powers was mostly neutered, the kingdom was more than consoled by the fact that in its place it was now led in person by a literal incarnate god. As befitting her nature as patron of the kingdom, she rapidly made many beneficial improvements to the kingdom on every level, ushering in an age of prosperity matched only by the greatest of the empire's previous monarchs. When the god reached a plateau in what she could easily improve, she turned to one of the greatest contributors to her kingdom's continued survival and prosperity: technology.

Technology is a tricky thing for gods. Gods without a technology domain tend to struggle greatly when it comes to creating and working with technology due to its reliance on physical laws. While her domain would help in fields like astromancy, nuclear fusion, and plasmatics, it wouldn't be enough for her to advance those fields in any meaningful way, if at all. But what she *could* do was work on technologies that didn't rely entirely on physical laws, technologies that she as a higher being of the Immaterium could comprehend and push forward in ways beings of the Materium couldn't. That meant warptech and psytech.

Ilfeliare looked through the Kingdom and took every single technology that interacted with the Warp or psykers in some way and improved upon them in every way that mattered. She also invented new technologies wholesale, the most potent of which involve her domain. Such devices include astromantic divination engines, giant psyker-powered plasma- and fusion-based superweapons, and ship components that act as lanterns through the Warp. Her wargear, its purpose to channel the power of a god, is crafted to a masterful degree, and the plasma it uses, sourced directly from her own star where the barrier between the material and immaterial is thinnest, shines golden instead of blue. Her crown jewel was creating a much improved version of the original artifact that helped keep her bound to her avatar.

Of course, while Ilfeliare had very strong limits when it came to purely physical technologies, her people did not. Over the millennia she has invested enormous amounts of resources into technological growth, resulting in the Kingdom being rather advanced overall. Perhaps the most relevant to Ilfeliare herself would be the advances in biology, which allowed for the creation of a supersoldier bodyguard program. In this she gives personal aid to the program. After a future supersoldier is born, and before it's named, she creates a divine servitor no stronger than a nurgling. The baby is given the servitor's True Name as its own and then has the servitor bound to it, making it a spirithost. The baby is then given a new, false name and undergoes the supersoldier bodyguard program as normal.

*Goals*
Aside from the overarching long-term goal of survival and increasing the power and prosperity of both herself and her kingdom, Ilfeliare has several more specific long-term goals.
1. Improve Bel-Caerel's technology as much as possible. More technology is key to ensuring the safety of both herself and her people.
2. Improve interaction between her own power and technology. Intertwining technology and her own power to improve themselves has been immensely beneficial.
3. Have a giant mechanical avatar of herself constructed and built entirely (or as close to "entirely" as possible) with auramite. The intent of this project is to create a vessel for herself to inhabit that can travel freely through the Materium and Immaterium, granting her an unprecedented amount of influence and survivability for a minor god.

Ilfeliare considers Zahhak's alliance to be beneficial towards all three of those goals, with Sophont being especially relevant given the deity's domain.