RELIGIONS ARE A LITTLE WEIRD
THE CHURCH OF OHM
OHM is the all-devourer. OHM must feed on other gods, in order to take their essence. Though it is technically only one god, it represents itself through a variety of forms, which it takes from the gods it devours. How does it devour the other gods? It has help from its paladins and clerics. They hunt down the high priest of enemy religions and capture them, then bring them to the high cathedral of Valm. It's there that an Archangel descends and devours the high priest. There's more to the devouring than that, but like an iceberg, only the portion of the ritual that dips into the world of men can be observed.
THE PALADINS OF OHM
Paladins of Valm take after their god. You can recognize them by the veils that they wear to cover their mouths. They bear the sign of OHM, a circular maw filled with endless stars. The paladins remove their veils only to feed. They aren't cannibals, though they have been suspected of it from time to time. Their meal of choice is demon flesh, freshly slaughtered. They tend to simply squat over a still steaming battlefield, lower their veils, and get to doing their lord's work. Though demon flesh is usually toxic, or far from palatable, paladins of OHM find the meat edible enough. The paladins reap special benefits for devouring demons. Typically, the warrior will absorb some of the mutagenic power within the creature's corpse, and gain an attribute or ability of the creature. A paladin cracking open the marrow of a bone demon could find long calcium spines jutting from their shoulders in the morning. Sometimes, however, the paladins are too zealous in their consumption. These paladins soon lose themselves to an endless stream of mutation, their flesh warping and changing into a mass of monstrous features. Occasionally, they can be stabilized into Eater Hounds. Most of the time, they have to be fed to an angel.
EATER HOUNDS
Paladins that lose control of the monstrous powers that they steal are sometimes transformed into these bizarre creatures. Imagine a fleshy grey creature that looks as if it should stand upright walking on all fours. Its head shaped like a man's, but split into quarters by a ghoulish mouth reminiscent of a blueberry's top. They also have long tapered tails that stretch like rubber, and can be used as a whip. Eater hounds have lost much: their minds, their bodies, their sanity, but not their devotion to OHM. In many ways, eater hounds are even more devoted than their sentient brothers and sisters. Eater hounds are often armored. Simple shoulder and hip plates to protect the joints, and a cloth veil draped over their heads to hide their mouths until it's time to eat. Eater hounds have not lost the blessing of mutation, it merely manifests in bizarre ways. For example, an eater hound's arms can split apart like a peeled banana, revealing long telescoping bone skewers. they use these skewers to cripple escaping heretics, and to stab between chinks in an enemy's shield wall.
CLERICS OF OHM
OHM needs to know. It needs to know everything about everything. That might be why it decided to eat everything that ever existed. While paladins focus on devouring monsters and demons, clerics focus on devouring books, scrolls, and minds. Clerics of OHM hunt down scholars of every kind and squeeze out every last drop of knowledge. Sometimes, tribes refuse to allow clerics to write down their oral histories. That isn't an option for OHM. Clerics of OHM, given enough time, can read minds. It's not very pleasant, as it erases everything that the cleric reads from the mind of the victim. This gets problematic when the cleric accidentally reads the part of their brain that stores the knowledge of breathing. Clerics run out of room in the folds of their brain at an alarming rate. Out of necessity, they often take to storing their knowledge externally. Books are too large, and too easily stolen. The favored method is storing the knowledge inside a quartz prism. Entirely different paragraphs can be read by simply tilting the prism by half a degree.
