Cazic-Thule, the Faceless

The Amygamalion

Before the land was full of thought and feeling, the in-game myth The Amygamalion – The Form begins, only a few beings could feel at all. The greatest of them, the Source of Amyg, waited to see what forms the lesser emotions would take, so that he might take a greater one.

The emotion of earth told him to be more solid than anything, and he became stone. Fire told him to be quick and all-consuming, and he became lava. Air could never make up its mind. Water told him to ebb and flow, so he let his lava pour out across the land, and he was nearly lost, everywhere at once and nowhere at all. That transgression, the myth ends, would never be forgotten.

Ruled by fear

His faithful believe that only by terrifying others can they escape his wrath, and pain, torture and living sacrifice are their tools. In the second pact of the Elder Age he went down into the swamps and jungles of Norrath and made the green-skinned trolls, and with them the lizard folk, called lizard men in some tellings and iksar in others. Rallos Zek and Innoruuk became his allies, and the Marr twins his enemies.

The Faceless

He is the god of fear, neutral evil, and he keeps no favoured weapon. Those who describe him speak of an enormous hulking shape, “a walking mountain,” with a bulbous swelling where a head should be and no face or sense organs at all. Two huge arms can crush giants; two smaller ones hold weapons or a shield. He rarely walks the world himself, and when he must act he sends his Avatar of Fear.

The captive god

His cruellest triumph was over another god. In the paladin tale From Pond to Paladin, his servants lured Mithaniel Marr into the swamps, overwhelmed him with trolls and lizard folk, and bound him in their master’s magic. When the tortured god finally slept, Cazic-Thule sent his daughter Terris-Thule into his dreams, first to deceive him and steal the gift of life from his body, then to fill his sleep with nightmares.

The Plane of Fear

At the centre of the Plane of Fear he broods over his growing empire, surrounded by thousands of dread minions, among them three gargantuan golems named Dread, Fright and Terror. Armies of heroes occasionally break through to his plane on short missions, and “all but a few of these quests end in doom.” Classic players learned that warning the hard way in the raid zone. Some mortals faced him alone: the iksar book Creation of the Swifttails tells of Master Zan Fi, who went to the Plane of Fear by himself, fought Cazic-Thule for days and weakened him, but was defeated.

The Brood, the Heretics and the trolls

His worshippers come from many races. Young iksar in Cabilis receive notes in the voice of their order: “The will of Cazic-Thule is strong. The route to Cazic-Thule is through the strength of the Brood,” and a disgraced acolyte is warned that his ground bones will feed the soil at the god’s feet. Across the sea, Paineel is “the city of the Cazicites,” built by necromancers cast out of Erudin for their interest in the dark arts. Among the trolls, an in-game book tells of the Warlord Grimgash, who after the victory over Innothule Swamp sat three days without food or drink in a chamber called The Eyes of Cazic, until a vision came.

Children and rivals

His “ghastly daughter” Terris-Thule became a master of the subconscious, opposed by her twin brother Morell-Thule, Lord of Dreams. In 2009 the Lost Temple of Cazic-Thule grew “as deadly as the Plane of Fear itself” after an infestation of his minions, and in EverQuest Online Adventures his statue on the Isle of Dread stood as “a foothold on Tunaria from the Plane of Fear.”

The fall of a god

Then House of Thule, in 2010, did something EverQuest had never done. The preview zone Fear Itself showed him “quite enjoying his dream,” but players went on to defeat Cazic-Thule permanently, the first time mortals truly gained the upper hand over a god. As his power was swept away, a continent the dragons had hidden was revealed: Alaris.