Ancardian Pantheon Series--Esthrax
I need to flesh out the pantheon in my homebrewish, ADOM-based, Ancardia setting. I'm not even 100% sure where that name "Ancardia" came from for the setting, since I'm sure it's not an original thing to ADOM (because what is! XD).
One of the Night Sphere of the Divines, Esthrax is the Goddess of Pride, Battle, and Fury and is very broadly respected, even within cultures where the reverence of darker deities is taboo. Perhaps the best known worshippers of Esthrax and her tenets is the Orcish culture, whose origin legends speak of an Avatar of Esthrax herself being responsible for teaching the first Orcish heroes their combat techniques and discipline. In most Underground cultures some form of Esthrax worship is undertaken and it is not uncommon to find her shrines conveniently located abeam of training grounds and martial arts dojos/complexes, and on the Surface secretive veneration occurs even among the Aynaul and the Empire (where shrines are more likely to be hidden in surface caves where warriors steal away to so their Empire's agents don't catch them mid-ritual). Her form is a behemoth of muscle, armor, claw and scale, a bipedal beast with a head much like a monstrous snapping turtle, standing head and shoulders above the average troll or ogre even. She is very well-known for wielding a massive glaive-like armament (sometimes depicted in art more like a warscythe, or a swordstaff, or occasionally a two-handed axe), and she primarily accepts sacrifices of weaponry which are said to reappear in the hands of her army of Divine beings. Her symbols are the crossed swords, the clenched fist, and the tortoise/turtle.