Hashut

Hashut, the Father of Darkness, is the Chaos Dwarfs patron god. A grim and malignant being, often represented as a great blazing bull wreathed in smoke and shadow, Hashut is a Chaos God (although some scholars of the arcane would label him as an Arch-daemon rather than a Dark God, while others insist it is some other foul entity let loose upon the world during the Great Catastrophe). Hashut is closely associated with tyranny, greed, fire and hatred, and it is a being whose gift of power comes at a terrible price.

As with much of their origins, just how the Dwarfs of the East came to seal their pact with Hashut remains shrouded in the dark times of the great sundering of the world by Chaos, and in truth the Chaos Dwarfs themselves may have only a dim and warped understanding of how they became bounded up with their nightmarish god. The twisted runic cartouches that adorn their fire-temples do however speak of the abandonment of the Dwarfs of Zorn Uzkul by their Ancestor Gods during the Great Cataclysm, their finding of salvation and succour with their new god, and the thirst of Hashut for sacrifice and subjugation in return for his patronage.

Over the centuries, in return for flesh and blood, homage and devotion, Hashut has gifted the Chaos Dwarfs with malign secrets and powerful sorcery that fused with their mastery of industry and forgecraft to create many Daemon-fused machineries and monstrous engines of war, dominion over the fires of the earth and arcane and malevolent lore that has brutalised their sanity and souls. The pact between the Chaos Dwarfs and their dark god has only deepened over time and grown to the point where the tendrils of Hashut's malevolence and the Chaos Dwarfs' own bitter souls have become one.

The Temple of Hashut in Zharr-Naggrund
At the pinnacle of the City of Fire and Desolation is the Temple of Hashut, the bull-shaped god of the Chaos Dwarfs, who they call the Father of Darkness. His temple is guarded by Bull Centaurs, creatures mutated from Chaos Dwarfs long ago. They have the body of a bull but the torso of a Chaos Dwarf, with long snaggly tusks and exotically curled beards. Inside the temple its guardians perform bloodthirsty rites, throwing captives into cauldrons of molten metal to the echoing laughter of the assembled Chaos Dwarf Sorcerers. On top of the temple stands the iron statue of Hashut. Its hollow iron belly contains a furnace heated by coals so that the statue glows red hot and anyone who touches its surface suffers searing wounds. The god is the embodiment of the city, its deity and its master, whose power flows through the Chaos Dwarf Sorcerers, and for whom thousands of slaves are sacrificed by fire and furnace.