Pestocali first came into existence with life, a primordial god born of the concept of fertility. He existed, he maintained his concept, but that was all. He granted beasts and men the ability to copulate, he oversaw the expansion of population, he blessed the harvests and ensured that crops were bountiful. There was no will, there was merely action, the vague motions of a machine being.
There was no soul, no true will, but he was happy. There was nothing lacking in his life.
But, sometimes, there was something else. Sometimes there was a feeling that rose up. In those moments, he felt his existence grow weak, the world spinning around him for the briefest moments. Then, it all returned to normal.
Then, one day, man brought fire and food together, and something utterly new was born. A new practice, a new science, a new world. That fledgeling field of cooking was inducted into that empty god, the most suitable to receive that nature, and so everything changed.
In those early days, medicine and culinary knowledge was barely distinguished. Even in the current time, what is called medicine is mostly nutrition. And so, restoration came with the culinary arts.
Digestion is, indeed, a miracle. Through digestion hay could turn into horses, rats into cats, and food into humans. Life needed restoratives, restaurants. Meat that boiled for hours, compressing all their restorative potential into bullion. This bullion would then be consumed as a soup. Built around this product and on the concept that every patient had their own medicine, restaurants were built.
Menus served as a guides letting each patient know what restoratives were on offer, separate tables were prepared for each person so they would be undisturbed in their treatment, and most important the freedom of choosing one’s own dish for you knew best of what would cure you.
And so, he knew glee. He knew happiness. He knew purpose. For the first time, he had something to aspire towards, something to work after, something to seek. He knew happiness, and so too did he know sorrow and anger. A life snuffed out, a life without joy, a life without cuisine, these things were tragic. For those races who knew not of the culinary arts, he sought to enlighten them. For those races who rejected his guiding word, whether due to their own will or their mere biology, he resigned himself to opposition.
Among those, one race took precedence as an enemy. Beings who knew not sustenance, sunlight, or slumber, not merely those who had once drank of bullion and had lost those bodies, but those who had never once tasted. Beings who, themselves, fell from the standing of 'lifeforms' to 'ingredients' in his eyes. These were, of course, the Collective, being who knew no cuisine and who were the design of a god of rot.
When the wars between gods broke out, he was initially indifferent, but before long, that burgeoning disdain came to a peak, and so the rising god took up arms with Azahiel not due to any view of his own ideals, but simply to combat Lravitus and the Collective that followed him, the antithesis to his art.
The impact he generated within that war was ultimately the splash of a stone in a pond, however, as one would expect. While the foremost 'healer' among the gods, it was a side role that kept the false king from death, rather than a main role that took some glorious victory.
And so...