NPC - Neith - The Smoke from their Wings

The Smoke from their Wings

 Zeif, Old Zeif, is long dead and buried beneath the western sands. The Zeif of today is a fragment, a few seaports of the vast empire that was ancient when the Bakluni were unlettered nomads and the Suel wore skins and chipped flint knives and spear-heads for weapons. It was not the Invoked Devastation which brought about the end of Mighty Zeif but the relentless sands. 

The Gods of Zeif were not the Gods of the Bakluni or the God-King who rose from Zeif and left Zeif to first teach those same Bakluni and then to rule them. Those old Gods perished in the wars they fought among themselves, the war against Sutek who first brought the sands that swallowed cities, and the wars that followed till only a handful of the Old Gods of Zeif remained.

The goddess Neith, the Queen of Water, was slain by Sutek at beginning of the God War long ago, but the Immortal Queen could never really die and even today her priestesses can summon the ghost of their Goddess. When summoned during the Feast of Lamps at her temple in the forgotten and half-buried city of Ta-senet she appears as a creature of smoke with the wings of the holy Ibis.

The inner sanctum of the temple is set over an eternal burning fire that is said to come from the center of the Oerth and whose smoke opens The Way of Eternity that only the priestesses can breathe and survive. It is said that the path opened leads to the desolation of the west, a place worse than the empty deserts. 

The priestesses of Neith make the journey across this desolation on the Boat of Years that visits the city of Ta-senet once a year from the plane of Dreamland drawn by the great servants of the Cat-Goddess who is daughter to Neith.

Neith is also said to be mother of the Immortal God-King Sobek, first ruler of the Bakluni whose Necropolis is said to rise at night from the deep sands of the west. The two have been at war for as long as the memory of man. 

There is an inscription said to be in the sanctum of her temple purportedly saying;

"I am the things that are, that will be, and that have been. No one has ever laid open the garment by which I am concealed. The fruit which I brought forth was the sun."