Thalassa - The Chained Goddess of the Sea
Background
During the dawn of the Ascension Wars, Thalassa was a primordial force of nature, a deity who did not merely rule the sea but was the sea, viewing the land conflict as a petty and pathetic squabble among "dry-landers." To her ancient eyes, the pursuit of immortality through Nalar’s Ascension or Ulthos’s Necromancy was a cosmic sickness, a refusal of the land-dwellers to accept the natural, cleansing cycle of death and the deep. As the wars escalated and the Purge began, Thalassa’s indifference curdled into a cold, divine fury. She looked upon the Alliance of Nokadran and saw not heroes, but hypocrites who continued to poison her tides with the alchemical waste of war and the rot of the unliving while claiming to fight for the "good" of the world. Refusing to join their cause, she declared a war of her own, transforming into a "Third Evil" that sought to save Nokadran by reclaiming it entirely. She initiated the Great Cleansing, shifting tectonic plates and calling forth tidal waves to pull the coastal regions into the abyss, believing that only a world returned to a silent, underwater purity could be truly sanitized of the infection of unending life.
This radical crusade made Thalassa a direct enemy of every god and race on the continent, forcing an unprecedented and desperate unity between the Alliance and the primal beast-gods of the wilds. Recognizing that her command of the tides was tied to the vibration of her divine voice, Oteus, the Ever-Knowing, provided the blueprint for a trap that could silence a goddess. While the armies fought the mindless hordes on land, a cabal of the world’s greatest mages and shamans diverted their power to intercept Thalassa in the shallows of Elding Bay, while she was distracted by Neltuna. They hammered "God-Chains" into her very essence, anchoring her to the seabed and stripping her of her voice before the Convention of Eldingborg was ever signed. This ritual created a permanent "blind spot" in the world’s magic, the Silent Reefs, where the friction between her muffled rage and the binding anchors generates a mysterious, sound-dampening aura that blocks all scrying. Bound and forgotten by the mainland, she has become a myth to the nations of Nokadran, who believe the Great Cleansing was merely a natural disaster of a bygone age.
Today, Thalassa remains shackled in the dark, her divine "Ichor" leaking from her wounds to power a rogue nation of outcasts known as the Sovereignty of Thalassa. These "Thalassians," composed of descendants of war-refugees and radicals who reject the convention of Eldingborg, serve as the goddess’s silent antibodies. They navigate the treacherous, shifting reefs using the glowing blue blood of their muted mother to power their "Silence-Engines" and iron-wood ships. Within this lawless archipelago, they maintain the ancient crusade, hunting the merchant fleets of the Nokari Coasts and the undead of Ulthos to sink them into the crushing pressure of the deep. To The Sovereignty of Thalassa, the peace of the mainland is a fragile lie built upon the back of a shackled queen, and they wait in the mist for the day the chains of Oteus finally rust away, allowing the Empress of the Quiet Deep to finish the work she started centuries ago.
Her symbol is a Crashing Reef (or The Maw of the Tide), a reference to the "Great Cleansing". A big maw representing a tidal wave, with teeth formed with corals and rocks.
