Maalthk

Overview
A gaunt figure representing the decay of living thing, Maalthk and her innumerable flesh-eating servants devour the bodies of the living so that their souls can be freed by digestion and carried on to the afterlife.

Appearance
Incredible amounts of oxidation have turned her copper scales a sickly shade of green, and acid drips constantly from her limp-hanging jaws. Long and lean and consumed by an endless hunger for rotting flesh, Maalthk takes a certain grim pride in her work.

Divine Mission
Maalthk exists to eat corpses and return the scoured souls to the afterlife. She consumes the bodies of the dead, freeing the world of disease and corpses from desecration, in the midst of the night, returning the Limbo as dawn breaks to vomit up the souls, cleaned of their mortal trappings by her powerful stomach acids. While weakened over the centuries, she operates indirectly through, birds, wyverns, and other carrion-eaters, which are said to bring her fragments of dragonborn souls to eat, which reform in her belly to be vomited up as immortal souls.

Typical Followers
Maalthk demands no worship, and would prefer to go about her business alone. However, a she has curried a small following among the dragonborn who comfort the deceased loved ones and prepare the bodies for burial. During their time in bondage under the dwarves, sky burials were banned outright, seen as unclean and unsightly. Traditional burials became an act of rebellion, and eventually the burial scaffolds became associated with early rebellion.

Afterlife
Maalthk rules no afterlife, and prefers it that way.

Religion
A proper dragonborn burial strips the corpse to the waist and places them upon a simple scaffold; a horizontal board beneath the body and two converging poles supporting each side. The body and scaffold are laid in an area open to the air where birds, carrion-eaters, or Maalthk herself might consume the body and carry the soul on to the afterlife.

Magic Properties
A floating cloud of miasmic-like patina forms the magic of Maalthk's few clerics, chosen for their association with or ability to control the dead and undead. Those who raise corpses as tools are expected to eventually return them to the air and allow them to rot naturally, but are useful tools in the meantime.

Clerics of Maalthk are often shunned for denying that necromancy is evil, or claiming that, because Maalthk has not yet consumed the body of an undead, that raising a corpse does not harm the soul and is not an evil act.