Divine magic in the Meridian Lands isn't understood as gods personally granting favors on request — it's closer to the idea that each god represents a current running through the world, and clergy who align themselves closely enough with that current can draw on it. This distinction matters culturally: a cleric who fails to heal someone isn't understood to have been denied by an angry god, but simply to have not aligned well enough with the current in that moment. This keeps faith in the Meridian Lands relatively guilt-light compared to some traditions — failure is a skill problem, not a moral one, in most public teaching. Mournspire's Kaldrath-doctrine is the notable exception; there, failure to secure a desired divine outcome is sometimes read as evidence of insufficient discipline, which fits the city's broader character.
THE CREATION MYTH — "The First Dawn"
(Meri's clergy's telling — the most widespread version, though not universally accepted)
Before the world had shape, there was only the Hollow — not evil, not empty, simply unmade. The gods did not descend into it or create it; they woke within it, the way a person wakes from dreamless sleep with no memory of falling asleep at all. Meri woke first, or claims to have, and her first act was light — not the sun exactly, but the idea of a sun, enough to see shapes moving in the dark around her.
Korvath woke already holding stone, halfway through shaping it before he'd fully opened his eyes, as though the act of creation had started before the creator had. Sevanna woke laughing at something no one else in the Hollow understood, and by most tellings has never explained the joke since. Vesk woke last of the widely-agreed-upon gods, calmly, without surprise, as if he'd simply been waiting his turn and saw no reason to rush it.
Mournspire's clergy dispute this order entirely. Their telling holds that Kaldrath woke second, immediately after Meri, and that his first act — not hers — was the more important one: declaring that any god waking into shape owed a debt to the Hollow they emerged from, a debt that could never fully be repaid, only serviced through order and discipline. Most other faiths consider this self-serving revisionism, dismissing it as exactly the kind of myth a city built on strict law would invent about itself. Mournspire, for its part, considers the wider disagreement further proof that other faiths simply haven't reckoned with what waking into existence actually costs.
The one point every version agrees on, without exception: something existed in the Hollow before any god woke there. The Hollow did not vanish once the world took shape around it — it simply went quiet, the way a held breath isn't gone, just paused. Scholars who've studied the Cult of Hunger's tooth-ringed mouth symbol have, in hushed and mostly unpublished speculation, wondered whether that quiet is still entirely quiet. This connection should never be confirmed, denied, or elaborated on within actual play — it exists here only as a seed for a GM to develop far later, if ever.
THE SECOND MYTH — "Why Mortals Walk"
A less universally known but doctrinally important myth, told differently by nearly every faith, concerning why mortal life exists at all if the gods were sufficient unto themselves.
Meri's version: mortals were not made by any single god, but emerged in the space between the gods' domains — the warmth between Meri's light and Korvath's stone, the noise between Sevanna's tide and Vesk's silence. Mortality, in this telling, is not a flaw or a punishment but a kind of overflow — proof the gods' domains touched each other closely enough to produce something new.
Kaldrath's version, taught in Mournspire: mortals were deliberately created as a means of servicing the Hollow-debt no single god could pay alone. Every mortal life, well-lived and well-ordered, chips a small amount off a debt too large for any one being to settle. This framing gives Mournspire's harsh legal culture a genuine cosmological weight in the minds of its citizens — a poorly-lived life isn't just a civic failure there, it's a missed installment on something ancient.
Neither version is presented as objectively correct anywhere in this document. Different regions genuinely believe different things, and that disagreement is itself worth roleplaying.