Lore

Innoruuk, the Prince of Hate

God of hate, vengeance, and cruelty — the carver of dark elven souls and primary patron of the Teir'Dal of Neriak.

Innoruuk is the god of hate — the Prince of Hate, the Father of the Teir'Dal, the cruel architect whose central artwork is the dark elven race itself.

Where the other evil deities of the pantheon take their portfolios from natural processes turned to bad ends — fear, plague, war — Innoruuk's portfolio is purely a stance.

Hate, in his theology, is not a corruption of any other emotion. It is its own first principle, and its expression is the only legitimate way to live.

Origins

Innoruuk's central origin myth is the one every dark elf is taught from infancy: the prince captured a council of high elven royalty, took them to a place out of time, and over what felt to the captives like a thousand years of unbroken torment, twisted their bodies and souls into the first Teir'Dal.

The dark elves emerged from that crucible already faithful to him. Other races' theological texts treat the story as approximately accurate — there is no serious counter-tradition — and they read its consequences accordingly. Every dark elf alive carries Innoruuk's work in their bones, and every dark elf is taught that the carrying is a gift.

The prince's place in the upper pantheon predates the making of the dark elves. He is one of the older deities, present from the early arrangements of the world, and his sphere of pure hate is held to be one of the foundational evil-aligned portfolios.

Conflicts and alliances

Hate's canonical opposition is love, and Innoruuk's central enmity is with Erollisi Marr — the Love-versus-Hate axis is treated by the temples as the longest-running cosmic conflict in the canon.

He stands in secondary opposition to Mithaniel Marr, whose truth-portfolio he despises, and to Tunare, whose making of the high elves he considers a personal insult. The Tunare-Innoruuk friction is older than the dark elves themselves; the making of the Teir'Dal is in some readings the Prince's direct retaliation against Tunare's earlier work.

His relationship with Cazic-Thule is a wary collaboration of evil-aligned spheres that do not quite overlap; he and Bertoxxulous have a longer mutual respect, though even that is qualified by the prince's general contempt.

His relationship with Bristlebane is the strangest in his ledger: the trickster, alone among the gods, is said to mock Innoruuk to his face and survive. The prince's response is not recorded in the texts.

Domain

Hate, vengeance, cruelty, the patient cultivation of grievance, the work of making oneself into a weapon.

His sphere also covers the secondary virtues of his theology — discipline, refusal of weakness, the refusal of forgiveness — and the dark elven civic life that organizes itself around all of these.

The Prince's theology is uncompromising on one point in particular: hate is not anger. Anger is short and disorganized; hate is patient, structural, and — in the prince's sermons — beautiful.

Followers

Dark elves are nearly universal in their worship of Innoruuk; the city of Neriak is built directly on his cult, and every Teir'Dal child is raised in his temple.

Necromancers, shadow knights, and evil clerics of every race count him as their patron of first resort when their alignment runs to active malice rather than mere disregard.

The Knights of Pain and the Crusaders of Greenmist are dark-elven martial orders organized in his name, and they have been operationally active across both Antonican coasts for centuries. For mechanical class restrictions see /wiki/deities/innoruuk.

Planar realm

The Plane of Hate is the prince's seat, and one of the older planar destinations available to mortal raiding parties.

The plane is architecturally Teir'Dal — black stone, sharp lines, unbroken hostility — and its inhabitants are sculpted hatreds in a hundred shapes: shadow knights, hate-elementals, the prince's personal court, and his throne-guard who do not move until the prince permits.

Innoruuk himself sits at the deepest end of the plane on a throne whose composition the texts decline to describe in detail. The plane has no spaces of rest; the Prince considers leisure a softness and his realm reflects the conviction without exception.

Notable myths

The making of the dark elves, the prince's central artwork — the captivity of the high elven royals and the long working of their souls into the first Teir'Dal
The founding of Neriak, in which Innoruuk personally directs the placement of the city's deepest temple
The first sermon, an apocryphal early-history text in which Innoruuk explains his portfolio to a captive audience of his peers
The compact of Greenmist, in which the prince binds the dark elven crusader-line to a centuries-long campaign against the southern good-aligned cities
The standing offer to Erollisi, said by dark-elven theologians to be a permanent challenge that the Maiden has perpetually refused