Aletheia is a fictional deity created by comic book author Tiziano Sclavi for Dylan Dog issue #374 "La Fine dell'Oscuritó" (Sergio Bonelli Editore, November 2017).
Description[]
Aletheia appears as a large loosely interconnected grouping of enormous hands in the sky, jutting out of clouds and darkness, with each hand having a large eye in the center of its palm. Untold amounts of much smaller but thick cords or threads of metallic flesh extend from the surface of its hands and fingers - the threads of Aletheia.
A thread of Aletheia will interconnect with a human victim at the base of their spine. Attempting to remove the thread - which is about as thick as the spine it attached itself to - with sufficient force will cause the entire spine of the victim to be violently pulled out, leading to an explosively gory demise.
Once connected, a being will at some point experience the call of Aletheia, approaching its summoning point, which will be engulfed in blinding light. Those not called, at Aletheia's disgression, are violently expelled with a painful, but non-lethal searing burn, which flings them back from the light.
The criteria Aletheia uses seem mysterious, but its cult interpretes this selection as rejecting those who are sane - ones who bend the truth with their own logic. Those that are instead accepted by Aletheia will either remain with the entity or return back into the world: the latter fundamentally changes the person's perception and they will lack any recollection of Aletheia that does not fit into their worldview; they will henceforth both see and interprete the world with their senses and prior beliefs: their experienced world will not only entirely conform to those beliefs, but the people within them will never begrudge them their beliefs either.
Furthermore, those affected by Aletheia can be confronted with people and visions of their past, through which it seems to be able to indirectly communicate with its victims in vague hints, though it will not adress them specifically in any conversational way itself. A cultist implies that certain affected may also be able to sense some things about one another - their current status or perhaps even how they perceive the world.
Aletheia's reach may or may not be of a global scale. It furthermore has the ability to emit highly powerful energy beams, strong and large enough to level entire cities. It may also be the case that Aletheia does not connect itself to all people, but due to its perception-warping abilities, this may not be so.
Worshippers[]
The Sons of Aletheia are a cult that was active in Westminster, London. Their only known activity was to cause a massacre in the subway system which was a mix of the wanton ritual slaughter of innocent bystanders as well as suicide by the cult members themselves, claiming a total of 233 lives. This was instrumental in calling Aletheia to earth.
The Sons of Aletheia wear formal business suits and a white featureless cloth mask that completely conceales their head, bearing a black scythe across where the face of the cultist would be.
There are furthermore a separate group (or rather, type) of people named as the sons of Aletheia, which are those directly connected to the entity via its metallic flesh threads. While these are not worshippers of the entity per se, they are under the mental control of Aletheia, directly affecting their sensory and interpretive perception of reality, as well as being subject to the call of the entity.
Furthermore there is a phonetic wordplay used to refer to both of the above groups as the sons (fili) and the threads (figli) of Aletheia.
The cult itself refers to the state of this interconnection as a womb, and the threads as umbilical cords. Participating in this feeds the affected (the meaning of this is unclear) and leaves them free of all needs.
History[]
Using a R'lyehian invocation ("Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Aletheia Z'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!") and the massacre of the 233 sacrifices, whose blood was spread by the subway system in the shape of a star surrounding the tower at which the summoning took place, the Sons of Aletheia successfully brought her to earth.
After her summoning to Westminster, the entity blasted the entirety of London - it is left unclear if this had occured in all cities all over the world - and begun the process of connecting the survivors to itself. In response to the meddling of one of its connected victims - Dylan Dog - the entity seems to have changed tracks in how it influences its victims and given itself a paradoxical global interpretation (rather than on a per individual basis):
Seemingly, the leader of the cult (not the summoner), an esper who had survived the ritual killing itself, had used the power of the massacre to create a mass hallucination that made people believe in the entity Aletheia: by killing him, Dylan Dog dispells the entity as fiction: all affected connected humans are returned to how they saw the world before the calling of Aletheia, not recalling any of the events that took place. Dylan Dog, through his interconnection with the entity is made aware of a twist however: that this is the entity's doing and that the unaware are still moved by their unseen threads (whether this is metaphor or in reference to the entity's threads is left open). The only account of these events are Dylan Dog's writings themselves, as others have begun to forget the events entirely and the summoner's fate is unknown.
Since Dylan Dog was himself affected by Aletheia, it is unclear what the actual or current status, if any, of the deity is, given its paradoxical vision of reality which Dylan Dog (and maybe only himself) believes to be the truth.
Behind the Mythos[]
Aletheia is the greek word for "truth"; etymologically it transliterates as "uncovered" or "unforgotten". The title of the story, La Fine dell'Oscuritó (The End of Darkness) furthermore plays on the useage of light in portrayals of truth in both the story and our world.