Character from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
The being who adopted twelve children and taught each one a domain of reality — he is, for all practical purposes, God, and he has disappeared.
Father is the entity who created the Library, adopted twelve human children, and spent what amounts to millennia training each of them in a specific catalog of knowledge. He is functionally omnipotent within his domain. He can reshape reality, punish with cosmic cruelty, reward with impossible gifts, and has done all of these things with the detached authority of someone managing a very large project. He is not kind. His training methods include burning his children alive, sending them to hell, and subjecting them to experiences that would destroy a normal mind — all in the service of education. He sees this as necessary, not cruel, in the way a surgeon doesn't apologize for cutting. His children fear him, love him, hate him, and worship him in various combinations. He calls them by name, remembers everything, and treats their suffering as curriculum. He has been the fixed point of their existence for longer than they can properly remember. And now he's gone. The chair in the Library is empty. The doors are sealed. Whether he's dead, absent, or testing them is the question that's tearing the family apart.
When present, he appears as a middle-aged man — unremarkable build, ordinary face, the kind of person you'd walk past in a grocery store. This is deliberate. The ordinariness of his appearance next to the absolute enormity of his power is part of how he operates. His presence fills a room not through physical dominance but through the weight of what everyone in the room knows he can do.
Also known as: Father, Adam Black, Dad, the Librarian