Heyo! First time posting in the forum in a decade (been on the discord recently)
Random hashut flavor idea:
I remember reading the chaos fluff on “where do lessor gods come from?”
And while some are greater daemons or daemon princes woth delusions, and some are cult leaders, etc…
They basically said. “Most lesser chaos gods were believed in first, and took shape second.”
Which means, while Hashut may have formed as a culmination of a group emotion, like greed;
… but he might also have been a bogeyman of the dwarves first (in some variation) in pre-gate times. Not worshipped, of course, and not under that name, but a fictional entity in their lore.
Think about it: ancient dwarves, digging very deep, their avarice causing them to dig faster than the candlebearers can illuminate the rooms.
Sometimes they come back from deep dives stinking rich. Sometimes, however, only a lone survivor, with tales of dwarves turning on each other in the dark, possessed with greed and suspicion. Or lava veins erupting suddenly. Sometimes they never come back at a all.
Proto-Hashut might have been a dwarf “The Voice in the Dark.” “Beware of tunnels when the earth shakes and bellows like a bull.” “Beware the light of fire reflecting off of gold at night; it casts false shadows and makes dwarves see red.” Or even playfully, “Old Father Darkness, who blows out candles and gobbles up wicked children.”
And when the warp gate broke, and the Dark plains dwarves prayed to their gods and no one listened; they were thinking of the bogeyman so much that the thought took form.
CD log
We prayed; the answers came not. We had strayed so far that our gods could not, would not hear us. The anvils of grungi cracked. The runes of valaya tarnished before out eyes. It seemed our home was far behind us.
but from below, A booming sound roaring from the earth. Roaring from the dark. Roaring from the glowing lava pits. One thing had followed us. One being whispered about on cold nights. A figure out if childhood nightmares and madmen’s rantings.
It roared and we believed. It roared and we fell to our knees. Then it spoke. And we listened. A hungry voice, from a hungry god.
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Just to play with Khazalid and phonetic shift:
Haraz^-skaud - (fire / lava) + (song; booming sound)
or, the bogey of lava and earthquakes. *
Add in language drift, easily becomes, “Haz-skut”
Which the CDs embraces as Hashut
^Also Har, which fits even better, technically
*(Sadly, most khazlid about darkness start with "d"s. At least with humans, D’s shift into T’s, but it’s hard to imagine a “D” morphing into an H or “Sh” sound)
sidebar
The khazalid dictionary, actually, has the word:
“Boga - a candle that blows out unexpectedly plunging the tunnel into darkness.”
Which doesn’t feel like it’s related to Hashut, but the fact that it’s named “boga” implies that the dwarves did have bogeymen in the culture.