Telshara

Telshara as depicted in a portrait in the Chapel of Our Lady of Red Shadow in Zelruun.

### Affiliation

The Church of the One (renounced), Raean Saints, Countess of the Plane of Blood.

## Physical description

### Eye color

Red in life, Varies

Telshara is the goddess of Blood. She is a moderately powerful goddess who makes her abode on the Plane of Blood. She has power over blood, as well as the physical form of living and unliving things with blood. She also has some dominion over the will of living things and the soul.

Telshara is a goddess primarily worshiped by elves, physicians, martial artists, and tribes of vampires not loyal to Viccious. Her dominion, "Blood," is a shorthand for her dominion over the fluid itself and over vitality and life-force in general. She is not technically a goddess of Life like Yalibransa, as Yalibransa concerns herself with all forms of life, but she shares some common interests. As a result she is also sometimes celebrated by those who honorthe Cycles.

### Origin

Telshara was not always a goddess. She was born on Haruach, one of the worlds far from Dorhaun where Addamar experimented with and eventually perfected his designs for humans before unleashing the finished product on Annarion. Though he stopped focusing on the planet, he kept his experiments there in progress and never truly abandoned it. Though her people are technically not of precisely the same species as Annarion and Dorhaun's primary group of humans, they are closely related enough to be considered subspecies of one another (much like a wolf and a dog or golden jackal). She was born to farmers who named her Larissia Magara, and she originally had no plans to be anything but a farmer like her parents. She enjoyed watching things grow and was content. However, when she was tested for mystical attunement by Priests of the Church of the One (the chief sect in virtually the entire world at the time, venerating Addamar as the almighty creator of all people, also called "Singulists") she was found to be highly attuned to divine energies and was drafted into the priesthood. This was during the long interregnum between the death of Annarion and the creation of Dorhaun, leaving many formerly occupied gods to wander the cosmos. This would lead to severe issues for the world of Haruach.

#### Reluctant Priestess of the One

Magara was not a devout worshiper of the One. Her family secretly worshiped spirits and a few other comparatively minor gods, though they also attended more services at the local church than required and prayed to him at his festal times. As she was trained in his priesthood she grew to hate him, however. The prayers and rituals she was forced to perform were mostly innocuous and required sacrifice of dried herbs or grain, but some had bloody and brutal requirements, including sacrifice of small animals. She despised these rites, and secretly devised rituals to bring the animals back before they could be incinerated. As most animals have simple souls which magic can rebuild these often worked, but for reasons she would not know until she encountered Dorhaun the rites often failed when used on bats, rats, and spiders. When her actions were discovered one of the Chaplains, a large woman named Helga Fau, began to beat her, until a blue flash enveloped Helga and she fell stone dead. Helga's clothes and hair were burnt away, and the skin of her back was engraved with one word: MINE. Afterward Magara was given some leeway, but never allowed to leave the hierarchy of the church, no matter how open she was about her dislike for her patron. She heeded his commands, but never without question and only because she feared what he would do to others if she left.

##### Coming of the Damned

Magara graduated as a full priestess and was assigned to move among the people, culling threats to some populations and ignoring others as "the One" demanded. Eventually she encountered a new threat while protecting a small village, a type of undead beings which drank blood and sometimes maintained their own minds and wills. After twisting the blood of the first one she encountered against itself and forcing it to flee, she communed with the One, and was granted confirmation of something she had always known: Addamar was not all-powerful. He was embroiled in a conflict with a god named Viccious and though he was stronger, Viccious was cunning and determined to make this world his own through an army of these "vhampyr," or "Damned" as Addamar sometimes called them. They had many advantages including incredible strength and supernatural control, but were forced to be nocturnal by their natures (though the sun of Haruach did not burn them at that time - though it does in the modern age due to intervention by Ruthrian), which allowed for some chance of victory. He insisted they were altogether evil and that, though they could subsist on animal blood, they would take human for sheer pleasure. She hunted down their leaders and discerned they truly were irredeemably malevolent, though they denied ever having heard of any Viccious. She exterminated this clutch. Then a war began for control of the night on Haruach, and Magara was a soldier on its front lines.

Creating the Shapeshifters and Lupalkin

Addamar held to a literal interpretation of "making" allies, which meant that Magara would eventually find help from among new types of unusual beings. The One used her to place a "blessing" on a number of warrior-priests. He imparted a ritual to Magara; the taste of it was strange and abstract in her mind but filled with nuances she could sense and mold in her core. She could feel the thrumming power and see the shape of it as the energy would use her as a channel into the world. The requirements for the rite, however, which were many and complex as well as quite bloody, confused her and she refused to perform it without an explanation of exactly what it was meant to do. Addamar at first threatened her if she refused, as only his inspiration and not an explanation was required for her to work it, but her willfulness was his favorite trait of the priestess and he answered. The blessing was based on another god's powers, which he had studied. It would grant them supernatural strength and the ability to change shape, at first merely into large wolves but with work into other forms. It would have no ill-effects, as he had fixed any issues. Or so he claimed. The result ended with Magara's arm nearly torn off and a chapel full of extremely angry beings in various stages between human and wolf reveling, fighting, and mating. Magara concealed herself and once her arm was mostly fixed she quelled their rage, but the rite was complete and irreversible. They were shapeshifters then and forever, and the power flowed in their blood to their children. They were vulnerable to silver as the lycanthropes of Annarion had been, which disappointed Addamar as he had tried to trim out that trait, but unlike others of their kind on Annarion they had greater control of their forms and were not contagious via bite. The world's single moon enhanced their transformations, depending on its phase. Priests among the vhampyr, who did serve Viccious even if the others had not, attempted to replicate the ritual using a horde of thralls bound through the power of their blood. They found it was a trap: the attempt turned them to dust. All of the blood thralls they had attempted to change did survive, but they acquired only a few wolf-like traits and could not change their forms. Eventually they would be called the Lupalkin. They also were now immune to the innate control abilities of the vhampyr and very angry. They exterminated their former captors and spread out into the world. They roam the hills and wilds to this day, and have their own villages and clans.

Recruiting the Dead and the Sorcerers

Magic (including alchemy) was normally heavily controlled and regulated by the church, and the souls of the dead were generally forced off the world and into the Astral Sea by priests given that task, but Magara was able to persuade the church elders to give amnesty to rogue magicians and departed souls who would help in the conflict. They agreed, and the armies grew. The wars raged for a decade longer, on and off, until the tipping point was reached.

##### Betrayal and Ascension

On Addamaroth, the chief festal day of the One, Magara was conducting the high service in her temple (an honor she had only received this once and accepted begrudgingly), when an army of the Damned attacked the church at noon. This should have been impossible, and in her shock many died. She rallied the defense, though her powers were diminished and other priests powerless. Almost everyone in the chapel died... and promptly rose as the Damned, despite not being turned in the proper way. She called with all her strength to Addamar, to make him show himself and explain the lack of their power and how the Damned could walk by day. Her prayer was granted. She and the other living priests were drawn onto the Plane of Blood, where Addamar waited with Viccious. They had reached a bargain, deciding to combine their efforts to create a superior species by fusing the Damned and humanity on a deeper level. Viccious himself also revealed with no little joy that, technically, Addamar had drawn him to the world to begin with by creating his own line of vhampyr who had called out to any god who might hear to ease their hunger and misery. Viccious answered, and the war began. Addamar tried to shush Magara's outraged cries and ordered her to lay down her arms and accept Viccious power into her veins as the next of his new line of experiments. She was overcome with rage, cursing him and refusing. Viccious tried to reach out to her with his mind, but Addamar struck at her in anger first and killed her body. Her soul, however, had grown too strong. She shone like a red star on the Plane of Blood, ascending in that moment to divinity, and drove back not just Addamar but Viccious as well. The Plane accepted her in a way it never had either of them, and there they were no match for her. Then she reached out and destroyed the newly modified Damned, though fully removing original and more widespead vhampyr from the world was beyond her current level of power. She would have done so later, but upon being made aware of the edicts of the Precursor regarding a primary approach of non-interference she was forced to temper her actions.

Divinity

Telshara (as she was called on Dorhaun after revealing herself to the elves there - the name means "She who Keeps the Blood") stands for the improvement of life and opposes Viccious and Addamar at all times. Occasionally she pretends peace or alliance with one or the other, but only ever commits the minimum in the way of resources and will even destroy their projects on flimsy excuses and at the slightest provocation. Sometimes her anger has led her to turn a blind eye to maltreatment of her human kin, as among the elves during the Age of Veradorianis, but she is usually among a compassionate goddess and weighs an answer to any prayer on merit rather than by prejudice. She has also, after seeing less wicked variations of them come into being on a few worlds without the aid of Viccious or Addamar, relaxed her opinion on vampires. Vampires who worship her find it easier to control their hunger and can more easily resist the attempts of their makers to control them.

Notes:

Queen of the Flame?

Telshara's priests sometimes develop power over fire, and the vampires who worship her sometimes develop greater resistance to its heat than others of their kind. Some of her more knowledgeable priests claim this is because she has received the blessing of the ancient goddess Meshvara and has been appointed her spiritual successor while the goddess maintains her distance from most mortal affairs, but no definitive statement has ever been made. She is worshiped by a few Ministers of the Flame in specific countries and regions, such as Zelruun.

Name Origin

Tel means "blood" in the vin'are language. Shar is a verb stem with several possible meanings depending on conjugation such as "keep," "hold," "become," "guard," and "master" or "exceed," With the suffix -a, it enters the noun form and applies to individuals in the feminine portion of the gender loop - detailed elvish ideas on gender are beyond the scope of this article, but the elves who first encountered Telshara believed in a curve of possible genders which were admixtures of feminine, masculine, and kramvah traits. Kramvah does not perfectly translate, but essentially means "neuter" without any negative connotations and is analogous to being agender. It is also one of the Elvish grammatical genders, of which there are six in vin'are, though none of them are used for people.

Revealing her Origins

Telshara chose to manifest as a member of whatever race she was currently dealing with if she appeared directly, and when not was tight-lipped about her origins until just after the first quarter of the Age of Sistona, when her origins were revealed and she was made a Raean saint. This lost her considerable following among the high elves, though her worship was so heavily woven into their culture that she remains a common patron, but gained her many followers among other races.