Pantheon Grows

In The Beginning

there was nothing. There was The Creator, Origin. Floating in the vast nothingness there came a Thought. A Story was to be told. All the forces of Heaven were born around a whale fall of perpetual life, churning void into material like a loom spinning thread from air. Heaven was first. Heaven was built by a thousand thousand craftsmen, angels of chisel, mortar, architecture, artifice. The Halls of Heaven were adorned with images of all things to come, all spoken of by Origin in their Infinite Understanding. When Heaven was built there arose a cry from the angels, firstborn of Origin’s children, a shout of jubilation at the completion of a divine work. Forming a lattice in the void, a million Celestial Engines of Creation churned and the cacophony that followed was a million harmonies joined into a song to fill the void.

And the world flashed into existence. Infant. Green. Growing. Upon the surface of that world Beasts were made. They were designed and molded to make immortal dioramas spanning entire continents and fill oceans with life. _Origin _became Parent. From these creatures some were named Shepherds, the Primal Spirits to serve as exemplars of their species, and leaders of their future, though only the spirits would ever meet.

The Spirits came together to ask Parent to count Time, for no **** had ever graced that land. Parent warned the Spirits of what Time would mean, that **** would find them, and they would forever be in conflict with each other. There would be no overabundance, and they would need to fight to survive. Despite the doom this would spell, the Spirits knew to counter Parent with their reality. Their children did not grow, their ecosystem did not expand, they were like a thousand points of light in the expanse, doomed to never meet save as Spirits. Yes, they begged Parent, let us have Time. So Parent placed a silver disk in the sky, opposite the golden sphere, and the world began to turn with them.

And **** became real. Their children grew old and died, their lands expanded, and soon animal met animal and their natures changed to accommodate the Truth of their world. So the Spirits, by Time becoming counted, could die and pass their duties to their offspring. They could rest.

So for time beyond knowledge the world turned, as generations of animals passed. Predator and prey found their places in the world, while plants and insects spread across the land. The world was verdant in that age, an uncontrolled Age of Shepardom. Within were told countless stories of cunning foxes, loyal packs of hounds, mother bears protecting their charges, serpents and venom, and the strength of bulls and elephants.

Parent longed to create more. A new animal was made, and its mind was opened to the stars and the planar disks. It learned to understand the plants and animals, and how to survive. Humans stumbled into life before language graced the world and before tools were set by dexterous hands. They had no guidance from Parent, following only their whims. Communities of humans met in their primitive state, and had no one single reaction to another band. Some met others and attacked them, and yet some groups came together and stayed as one. These gatherings of humans found better success than the humans who met all others with ****, and their communities grew with the land around them.

Time ticked on, uncounted by the **** humans below, every day simply another attempt to secure their future. After a long Age of **** Survival, Parent revealed themselves to humanity. There was little choice in the minds of humanity but to accept the power that had shown itself to be a god. So it was that _Parent _became Ruler. It ruled through the Seers, who Ruler granted powers beyond nature from young ages to proclaim Ruler’s Will.

A new Age of Mastery came to humanity by the Seers, and they usurped many Spirit Shepherds of their command over their charges. Then the Earth itself was mastered, and by the Seers it became known how to call plants from their smallest parts into flowering fields. From this agricultural understanding humanity found new power in settlement, and cities began to form. Primitive in their time, previously uncounted humans began to work in tandem for the betterment of a civilization of thousands, then tens of thousands, until land and animal were mastered or defeated. This age was given to Humanity by Ruler through its Seers, until the day Ruler declared no more guidance would come. Humans would have to continue on their own.

So they did. By the **** of humanity, by the work of thousands, they found they could change the course of rivers and gut mountains for materials that were swiftly becoming more and more important. Ruler was no longer Ruler, but was now Creator. Without a Ruler for all humanity, many Seers became rulers themselves for their previous affiliation with the divine. Other communities were ruled by humans who proved themselves the most dangerous, and thus the most prepared to protect their people. Still others followed leaders who spoke with such command and grace that they could convince someone of any falsehood they wished.

In the Age of Actualization, humans no longer had a central divine leader. They were now led by a dozen powerful people across the world, and in time they lost much contact with each other. Instead of the understanding of unity under Ruler, humans meeting strangers had no trust for their neighbor. City-states were built on agriculture and animal husbandry, and now they were defended from other city-states by warriors who bled for their leaders and their families. Some began to raid other civilizations to supplement their own existence, and in return they would be attacked. War was born in the Age of Actualization, and the age ended it as soon as War drew breath.

What came after was the Age of Empires, when city-states gained power over the lesser cities around them, and kept growing. These first empires were born from population growth and defended by blade and by a growing perversion of divinity, sorcery. This new practice combined the rules of the past Seers with new understandings of the world’s logic. Some of these understandings came at high cost. In a few hundred years, three Empires ruled over the world’s people, and were locked in a centuries long stalemate of **** and hatred. The carnage was only accelerated by Shards of Divinity raining down from above, crashing like meteors into the dirt.

The Empire of the Burning Sun worshiped their Emperor as the Sun, for he was golden of word and shone by sorcery. Temples were erected in his name and enemies and prisoners were burned alive in open sacrifice to their beloved Sun, and each second of their lives passed to Him to have. His warriors burned armies and torched cities in his name, and His sorcerers made Sunfire to blight the lands or advance His field’s production. His lands once spanned most of the Eastern Continent, called Easland.

The Republic of the Mechanist rose from the revolting nation-states of the Empire of the Burning Sun, breaking from their tyranny. Stolen sorcery was altered by inventive minds, and to protect themselves from the Empire they built constructs that rivaled the trees themselves in size. Their warriors were enclosed in suits of metal and sorcery to battle the numerous armies of the Sun Emperor, while towering constructs stomped across battlefields, leaving scars in the earth from their struggles. They built warriors of metal to replace their dead, from hidden jungle factories. To battle a god, they made one, forged of stolen divine energies from fallen stars and the souls of their slaughtered countrymen. Their war was lost until the Divine Colossus stepped into battle, and by arcane hatred and metal ****, brought the Empire to a halt.

Across the Sea, the Council of Unseen Blades owned the Hundred Hearths across most of the Western Continent, who ruled millions from the shadows. They used their influence to bring their many charges to war with both the Republic and the Empire, and by sorcery they opened The Night Roads, which allowed them to place an army anywhere in the world, as long as there was a Night Gate at the end of the Road. Despite their penchant for ****, shadow legions striking where it was least expected, and gaining much from this three-way war, the Republic and the Empire learned to combat their new enemy.

With each new device of destruction formed by the **** empires, came new levels of destruction. There remain still places where things will never grow the same again, and tears in the earth where the Sun Legions faced Machine Soldiers in battle. There are small pinpricks of dirt and stone where an Unseen Blade killed a target, and no sun will ever light it again.

In the face of so much ****, The Sun Emperor spoke to his enemies and proposed they fight not each other, but their true enemy. The armies of Humanity had a new target: The Halls of Heaven. If they could bring down the Creator, and replace Them, each would gain what they want. No more fighting, only all the power they could ever need. So there was peace for a year. New mechanical soldiers were made, and more Colossi were designed by the Mechanists. The Sun Legions reached their zenith, each warrior capable of flight and Fire, while the Unseen Blades navigated the Night Roads until they found the Halls of Heaven.

At the end of the Age of Empires, humanity attacked Heaven. They poured from the Night Roads into an unsuspecting angelic populace and they proved angels were mortal. They slaughtered the confused angels as they rushed towards the Palace of The Creator. Thousands of angels were killed by humans, for angels were not made for war and combat. Rapidly, in defense of themselves the angels changed, fighting back against the invaders. Tens of thousands of humans died as they pressed on, but the angels could not stop them from breaching the Palace to face The Creator.

And they found nothing. A long hallway and a single empty throne. There was no one to kill. No one to usurp. Shock turned to ambition, then, as the leaders of humanity rushed to claim the throne that had been abandoned. Humanity fought each other in the Palace of Heaven, staining it with blood forever where blood had never once fallen, betraying each other to become God Over Humanity.

The Angels regrouped into the Angelic Legion, and began their counterattack with inhuman ferocity. The gods of Humanity had struck one another down or were killed by freshly forged Celestial Blade, and Human and Angel alike slaughtered with impunity, a battle in Heaven that shattered it outright. Angels who chose peace were the first to die. The songwriters, the craftsfolk, those who loved only beauty were murdered by the invading humans. All that remained were angels who had no more love in their hearts for their charges. Humanity was driven from Heaven, and cast down to the world below. Their God-Kings were dead, their Divine Colossi broken into pieces that rained down onto the survivors. Their nations were shattered, many still fighting their old enemies or their former brethren. In the decades after the Fall of Humanity, the new world was designed by bloodlines and borders in the dirt.

In the thousand years since, the world has had **** but to continue turning. Humanity lost much of what it had, sorceries forgotten for their practitioners had been killed, glories lost as stories were left behind or changed until they were unrecognizable from their origin.

What was the Council of Unseen Blades became the smattering of nations on the Western Continent, Ogomia and Ata throwing off their masters and forging destinies anew, while the Veshtadt kingdom was inherited by different principalities.

The Republic was shattered, their machines destroyed, a thousand city-states and theotechnocults rising and falling in a centuries long civil war that only ended when a mysterious **** proclaimed itself a god. One cult mastered the communities around it, and the Theocracy reigned supreme.

The Empire was lost, their Burning Sun killed in Heaven, and a thousand years of strife began. The Empire of the Burning Sun was destroyed and rebuilt a dozen times. Some iterations fell to infighting, others betrayal, some were not Empires at all until a new experiment failed and it became an Empire again. The modern Empire is no match for the myth it was born from. What once claimed two-thirds of the Eastern Continent, fractured and became rebellious nations. The Kingdom of Nansharma broke from the Lympshamian Empire, and could not be regained. It then fractured twice itself, losing the frozen north to the Watch, and Kiria to Ata over the sea.

No ancient empire remains.

Welcome, my beloveds, to Chadonda.