God Hand

The God Hand is a council of five demon sovereigns who enact the desires of the Idea of Evil, desires woven so deeply into that entity that the two prove inseparable. Standing above all apostles as their masters, the five oversee the sacrificial rites that carry beherit bearers into demonhood, and they have steered many of the pivotal events that shaped humanity and the wider universe. Every member was once human, a former holder of a Crimson Beherit destined to rise as one of the sovereigns during the eclipse that recurs every 216 years, their mortal bodies crumbling as evil floods their hearts.

Long ago Void appeared at a temporal junction beside four beings unlike his present kin, glimpsed by a stranger clad in the Berserker Armor. Over the ages he gathered apostles and future sovereigns while the Skull Knight opposed him. The council reaches five when Griffith, sacrificing the Band of the Falcon during his eclipse, is reborn as Femto and violates Casca before Guts' eyes. Roughly two years later the God Hand exploits the millennial Incarnation Ceremony at Albion, where a tide of malice born from countless dead lets Femto merge with the Demon Child inside the Egg of the Perfect World and take corporeal shape as Griffith once more. Ruling the Physical World unopposed, Femto later uses the Skull Knight's blade against the reincarnated Ganishka to unleash the Great Wave of the Astral World, raising the World Tree and ushering in the age of Fantasia.

The five are Void, Slan, Ubik, Conrad, and Femto, arranged as the digits of a right hand with Void at the thumb and the others down to Conrad at the little finger. They wield reality-warping powers spanning space, matter, and metaphysics, and though keenly aware of causality they are not all-knowing. Formed from swells of collective human despair, they cannot touch the Physical World directly and must project crude avatars unless a once-in-a-millennium Incarnation Ceremony grants a true body. Each of the four elder members shares a name with a science fiction novel, from Herbert's Void to Zelazny's Conrad.