Hashut

Hashut's History

Hashut, called the "Father of Darkness," is the god of fire, greed and tyranny, the patron deity of the Chaos Dwarfs. A grim and malignant being, often represented as a great, blazing bull wreathed in smoke and shadow, Hashut is most often believed to be a minor Chaos God; some scholars of the arcane would, however, label him as an Archdaemon rather than a Dark God, and others insist he is some other foul entity let loose upon the mortal world during the coming of Chaos in the Great Catastrophe. Whatever the case may be, Hashut is closely associated with tyranny, greed, fire, and hatred, and is a being whose gift of power comes at a terrible price.

As with much of their origins, just how the Dwarfs of the Far East came to seal their pact with Hashut remains shrouded in the dark times of the great sundering of the world by Chaos, and in truth the Chaos Dwarfs themselves may have only a dim and warped understanding of how they became bound to their nightmarish god.

The twisted runic cartouches that adorn their fire-temples do however speak of the abandonment of the Dwarfs of Zorn Uzkul by their Ancestor Gods during the Great Catastrophe, their finding of salvation and succour with their new god, and the thirst of Hashut for sacrifice and subjugation in return for his divine patronage. Through the Chaos Dwarfs' bloody devotion, he would ward them from mutation and suffering.

Over the centuries, in return for flesh and blood, homage and devotion, Hashut has gifted the Chaos Dwarfs with malign secrets and powerful sorcery that merged with their innate mastery of industry and forgecraft to create many Daemon-fused machineries and monstrous engines of war, dominion over the fires of the earth and arcane and malevolent lore that has brutalised their sanity and souls.

The pact between the Chaos Dwarfs and their dark god has only deepened over time and grown to the point where the tendrils of Hashut's malevolence and the Chaos Dwarfs' own bitter souls have become one.