Malia

Appearance
Malia is protean in appearance.

To those who fear disease they appear to be usually male and as whatever they fear most. This is most usually Genine or Vocessa. In either case the figure appears to be covered with suppurating wounds and surrounded by flies. He is dressed in black with poisonous green trim. Others see a giant rat or other creatures commonly feared and associated with disease.

To those who regard as a regrettable but inevitable part of nature’s course Malia usually appears as a female with close ties to nature, most often a Diron or a Duvin. Her robes soften to slate grey and leafy green, which predominates depends on which race she appears as. Others see a dryad or an ent or a similar figure associated with nature.

For those rare few who see disease not as a burden but as a clearing of the weak, a culling, a strengthening of the herd, a chance for renewal and rebirth Malia appears as figure of indeterminate gender, moving fluidly and constantly between male, female and hermaphrodite. Their clothes change yet again, to mossy green patches on the grey of a weathered gravestone with spikes of verdant green, akin to fresh shoots and leaves at the hem, cuffs and collar of their robe. Others see a noble creature such as a lion or a more mystical one such as a unicorn.

Symbol
Malia's symbol is an Ouroboros, a snake eating it's own tail. In its simplest form, the snake is half black, half white and outlined green. More complex forms have that basic theme, but the form and colours are slightly more complex. The white part starts with the pallor of a corpse and shades to that of bone, then becomes skeletal. The "black" part starts with grey of an aged gravestone, becoming darker with the black of a fly's body earth before changing into the unhealthy reddish-black of a swollen buboe. The green too changes, in the lower part becoming more like lichen and then fresh growth of grass and leaves, in the upper part changing from that healthy looking green to a more toxic tone before cycling back again to the colour of lichen.

Personality
Malia considers themselves kind-hearted. They bring an end to suffering and fear, they challenge the strong, making them stronger, while sending the weak to be reborn, hopefully in a stronger body. They clear the way and change the face of the world without war, slowly and in accordance with nature. They also blunt the ambitions of the warlike ax disease can ravage the camps of soldiers far from home if care is not taken.

Malia knows that few worship them through love, rather they offer propitiation through fear. Part of them wishes it was otherwise but really Malia is content with their lot. They touch everyone’s life, directly of indirectly, and also touch most animals and many plants over the course of their lives too.

Origin
When Phiria created Yggdrasil and Life was affirmed across the Eloria, the energies from Yggdrasil and indeed those from the corpse of Shallyx were not perfectly and instantly contained. Nor were the bodies of those Shallyx had most recently slain descrated and removed from creation. The energies from Shallyx's defeated form, Yggdrasil and Phiria herself arched across the battlefield and the fallen, ripe with potential, finally coalescing with influences from all of the slain into the ever-changing body of Malia. Their influence allowed bacteria to grow and the bodies to putrefy and decay for the first time in the history of Eloria. Fungi and plants grew from the place where the bodies had fallen, beetles came to eat their flesh and Malia's place as a deity of renewal as well as disease was established.