Dios

Dios
Dios, as drawn by Matt Smith
Name	Dios
Race	Human
Age
Occupation	High Priest of Djel
Physical appearance	old, bald, imposing
Residence	Djelibeybi
Death
Parents
Relatives
Children
Marital Status
Appearances
Books	Pyramids
Cameos

Dios is the slightly insane High Priest of Djelibeybi who never ages. He lives in a Valley which he rules over with the same laws he began with, 7000 years previously. Kings come and go, but Dios remains, and interprets everything for them so that nothing changes. His agelessness is explained by his visits to the Necropolis (see Pyramids).

Perhaps the most unlikeable yet simultaneously tragic character in the entire Discworld canon, Dios advises the kings, and then overrules them if he sees fit. He explains this away as "interpreting" what they meant. He is held in such awe by the monarchy, the priesthood and the people that he is believed capable of anything. His own motivation appears to be a complete devotion to constancy; change is death and therefore intolerable.

Thanks to his tampering with the space-time continuum by building a pyramid that flares off time, he creates a bubble wherein although people are born, age and die, and there was a yesterday and will be a tomorrow, the days are the same twenty-four hours, lived through again and again (a bit like Groundhog Day), which is why nothing has changed for 7000 years and 1398 kings.

While he seemingly dies at the end of the book when he is caught in the implosion of a dimension-warping super-pyramid, he actually reappears at the beginning of the 7000 years again. With only his tattered robes and his staff (which features an Ouroboros emblem) it is his sorry fate to make all the same mistakes again--Possibly as some sort of punishment placed upon him by the temporally-empowered History Monks...

It is heavily implied in Pyramids that his mind has gone through the same routines for so long that it has, figuratively or literally, crystallized and rendered him incapable of accepting change; Teppic considered that Dios was truly mad with the rare kind of madness caused by being yourself for so long that habits of sanity etched themselves into the brain. One is reminded of a similar case where a daily routine has been followed for so long, the character in question is incapable of accepting the slightest change.

Annotation

In Spanish, Dios means "God," being derived from the Latin "deus" and the Greek "theos."