Peshet

Peshet
Titles	The Guiding Knife
Areas of concern	Medical experimentation, surgery
Typical worshipers	Doctors, surgeons, apothecaries
Domains	Knowledge, Healing, Repose (former)
Favored weapon	Scalpel (mechanically a dagger)
Symbol	Scalpel and bonesaw
Sacred animal	Sand fox
Sacred color	Scarlet and white

Peshet is a Khapeshan former hero-god who has lost her following and therefore her powers due to performing evil acts.

Description

One of the rare hero-gods to not be a native of Hellea, the tengu Peshet grew up in the Khapeshan city of Naqada. Inducted at a young age to the city’s temple of Isis as an initiate priestess, Peshet took a particular interest in the temple’s services treating the sick and injured. Despite becoming one of the temple’s foremost healers, using both magical and mundane means, she chafed under the clerical leadership. While they did not deny her skills, the high priestesses of Isis thought Peshet paid too much attention to her medical training to the detriment of her role in religious services. In addition, the high priestesses disapproved of how Peshet’s methods of healing often tended towards experimental methods - while the patients almost always quickly returned to good health, the temple leadership thought that she jeopardized their safety unnecessarily in the process. Eventually Peshet viewed this environment as too stifling to her talents, left the temple, and set sail for Hellea.

It was in Hellea that Peshet achieved the status of a hero-goddess. The process by which she did so is unknown, at least to the broader world.

In Hellea Peshet quickly attracted a following as a new hero-goddess of surgery and medical experimentation. Her worshippers included a great number of practitioners of both magical and mundane healing. Both Peshet and her higher clerics incorporated medical experimentation into their religious services, often including dissections or demonstrations of new discoveries and practices. At this point Peshet had a fairly wide but not large following - her tenets interested few outside of those working in the medical realm.

As her following grew, Peshet continued her practice, gradually performing more elaborate experiments. Coupled with her own fear of mortality as she grew older, this caused her to turn to more questionable and unethical studies as she searched for biological methods of prolonging her lifespan indefinitely, avoiding undeath and other means she considered repulsive. Eventually this culminated in a set of experiments in which she kidnapped a large number of people from the Metryan city of Taretus to be vivisected. When she asked her head clerics for assistance, one spread the news of this development to her followers. Disgusted at what the hero-goddess they had worshiped had turned to, her followers abandoned her faith in droves.

Since then, Peshet has reverted to the status of a latent hero-goddess as she struggles to find enough people willing to worship her current self. She is believed to have continued her evil experimentation in the meantime.

Location of worship

Peshet was formerly worshiped across Hellea as well as the coastal cities of Khapesh, but currently only has a very few scattered followers across these areas. Her location of residence is unknown, but she has recently been sighted in Talmis.

Unholy text

Peshet’s former unholy text is The Lancet, a hefty set of five books containing anatomical drawings, case notes, and the results of autopsies and experiments.

Latent hero-godhood

Due to losing her worshipers, Peshet is no longer an active hero-god. If she were to regain a significant following, she would possess the Knowledge, Healing, and Death domains, with the Medicine, Education, and Murder subdomains. Template:HeroGods