Hesa — Religion
Hesa and the Mandate of Gespaltener
Turn your gaze now to the East, traveler, where the air grows thin and the wind carries the scent of iron and frost. There lies Hesa, a land of the great split-peaked mountain Gespaltener and iron-willed legions that stands in stark, dissonant contrast to the west. In the great granite halls of the capital, the Imperial Decree is absolute: the Gods are dead. To them, the firmament is the cooling corpse of a primordial army. They believe the world was hacked from the void by divine soldiers who bled the stars into existence and carved the valleys with the edges of their blades.
For the Hesan Aristocracy, this "Great Death" is their mandate. If the Gods are fallen, then Man—specifically the Emperor, who reigns as a Living Divinity—must take up the blade. Theirs is a philosophy of the "Eternal Carving." To build a city, to hold a border, to subjugate a neighbor is the sacred act of maintaining order in a universe that naturally tilts toward the chaos of the grave. They view civilization as a fortress requiring constant defense and the cold discipline of the bloodline to keep the dark at bay.
Yet, step off the Imperial Road and into the fog-choked hamlets of the countryside, and you will find a different, more suffocating truth. Among the common folk, who wear mourning veils as a second skin, the Gods have never felt more alive—or more ravenous. These are not the distant principles of our West, nor the dead soldiers of the Emperor’s creed. They are the Nachbleibenden, the Lingerers, the spirits of the wounded earth who dwell in the rot of the winter wells and the shadow of the gallows-tree. In Hesa, the veil is a thin, blood-stained shroud. The folk offer hushed lullabies to the spirits of the dead and the hungry things in the thickets, hoping merely to be overlooked. It is a land where the world itself is perceived as a slow-healing bruise, and every shadow contains a presence that remembers the taste of the first war.
The Hesan Dichotomy
The Imperial Creed (The High)
“The Gods are the stone beneath our boots; the Emperor is the hand that carves it.”
The Dead Gods: Divine corpses that form the material world.
The Emperor: The sole living conduit of order and divinity.
The Blade: Order through conquest and lineage.
The Folk Tradition (The Low)
“The world is a bruise that never heals; speak softly, lest the soil hears your name.”
The Wounded Spirits "Nachbleibenden": Predatory entities lurking in wells and shadows.
The Ancestors: The restless dead who demand the "hush of winter."
The Veil: Survival through mourning and fearful ritual.
The High Götterschlacht: The divine corpses of the first gods
Attend closely, traveler, for when the Hesan lords gather beneath the iron sword in Konigsheim, they proclaim. Their high epic, the Götterschlacht, is a thunderous account of cosmic regicide. It tells of a time when the universe was a screaming void of unformed matter, until the First Gods—the Urbereiter—descended with the cold, gleaming intent of the conqueror. These divine warriors shattering the primal night with the rhythm of their blades.
The climax of their saga is a crescendo of iron and blood. It describes the Great Exhaustion, where the Gods, having hewn the mountains and diked the seas, turned their blades upon the final chaos until their very essence was spent. As they fell, their armor became our crust, their blood our rivers, and their final, jagged breaths the wind that howls through the crags. They died so that Ordnung (Order) might exist.
Excerpt from the Götterschlacht
"Then fell the Hammer upon the Brow of Night, And from the wound, the Sun bled golden light. No peace was sought, no mercy in the blade, For in the slaughter, all the world was made. The Gods are cold, their iron spirits fled, The stars are but the sparks they left for dead!"
The Low Nachbleibenden: A selection of gods of the Hesan Wilds
Die Regenfrau (The Weeping Mist): The spirit of the gray vapors that drown the lowlands of Rochefort and Kesslemark. She is the personification of the world's first Klage—the lamentation—when the gods fell. She does not nourish the grain; she brings the Brand, the rot that follows the flood. Peasantry leave a bowl of salt upon the threshold during the autumn gales—a tithe of "dried sorrow" to keep her from pressing her face against the windowpane.
Der Tiefenwächter (The Guardian of the Iron Well): A god of the Urtiefe, the primordial deep. He dwells in any water that has remained unkissed by the sun. He is the master of the Stille—the heavy silence of the drowned. In Hesa, if a traveler vanishes, it is said he has been "invited to the Wächter's table." Children are forbidden from casting stones into deep water, lest the ripples wake the one who counts the heartbeats of the earth.
Der Astkönig (The King of Knots): A tattered, antlered shadow that haunts the sites of forgotten massacres. He is the patron of the Verwundete Welt—the Wounded World—embodying the predatory hunger of a land birthed from slaughter. Hesan woodcutters will never strike a tree that grows crookedly over a cairn; to do so is to invite the Astkönig to come and harvest the timber of one's own ribcage.
Die Bleiche Hebamme (The Pale Midwife): A terrifyingly intimate deity who stands at the Scheideweg, the crossroads of breath and expiration. Folk-belief holds that she is the "Stitcher," who sews the veil over a newborn's eyes so they do not see the corpses of the gods beneath the soil. She is honored with the Schweigelied—the Silent Lullaby—for to speak her true name is to invite her to finish the shroud she has been sewing for you since your first cry.
See also: Hesan Folklore and Ghost Stories