Religion — Alendria, Hesa, Veloria, Thelidor, & Arinn
Summary
Western Skybride: The Divine is a distant, immutable harmony of transcendent principles, veiled behind the celestial spheres and experienced by mortals through the perfect, mathematical resonance of the cosmos.
Hesa: The world is a cooling fortress-tomb carved from the corpses of soldier-gods, where the imperial elite enforce order through the blade while commoners appease the hungry, lingering spirits that haunt the earth's unhealed wounds.
The Verdant Pact: Earth is the close intimate bride of the sky, binding the fallen celestial fire of the orcs and the deep ancestral roots of the elves to a landscape inhabited by colossal living myths and mercurial fae neighbors.
The Eremic Cultures: Alendria, Veloria, Thelidor & Arinn
The Gods: First Causes
To understand the Gods is to understand that they are the "First Causes." Politics, war, and trade belong to us; the silence of the Heavens is merely the space they have graciously left for us to inhabit.
You ask of the Heavens? A common curiosity. In our age, the Gods are not the meddling neighbors of the ancient epics; they are the Transcendent Principles, veiled behind the shimmering firmament, distant as the stars and twice as silent. They do not walk; they radiate. We live in the echoes of their sovereignty, governed by the laws they etched upon the world’s foundation before retreating behind the celestial curtain to let the drama of Man unfold.
Observe the horizon, the Middle Sea , where the salt-spray meets the blue. There dwells Stella Maris, not a mere woman with a trident, but as the crushing, rhythmic necessity of the deep—the guide of the lost and the cold mistress of the tides. When the hearth-fire flickers in the grate, you feel the warmth of Halion the Bound, the Living Flame, who is less a person and more the sacred spark of civilization and the purifying light of the mind. They are the archetypes of our existence, distant and immutable.
As for the Great Governors of the All, we look to Ouranos and Fortuna. Ouranos is the Boundless Vault, the Unmoved Mover who provides the theater of the universe; he is the stern Order that keeps the spheres in their tracks. Opposing and yet completing him is Fortuna, the Veiled Empress of the Turning Wheel. She is the caprice of the moment, the sudden windfall, and the unexpected ruin. We do not pray to them to change their minds—for the Divine Mind is perfect and unchanging—but rather, we pray that our own souls might be tuned to the frequency of their celestial music.
The Spheres: Creation
Ah, you have heard the verses of the Aioniotita? You possess a finer ear than most who tread the Alendrian coast. It is as the poet Eremos whispered: we do not inhabit a chaotic heap of dust, but a Grand Symphony. To the common laborer, the world is merely dirt and toil, but to the initiate, the universe is a series of nested crystalline shells—the Spheres of Resonance. They are the geometry of the Divine, the physical manifestation of that First Note which shattered the primordial silence. We move within these layers like pearls trapped in a celestial clockwork, each sphere vibrating at a frequency that sustains a different essence of reality.
Look upward, beyond the clouds. The scholars of Alendria teach us that the outermost ring is the Sphere of Flame and Thought, where the intellect of Halion burns purest. Beneath it, the Water’s Ring and the Silver Tune of Air filter the raw power of the heavens, tempering the divine fire so that it does not consume our fragile mortality. It is a sacred geometry; the distance between the stars is not a void, but a mathematical interval. If our ears were not so dulled by the din of the marketplace and the clatter of steel, we might hear the "Music of the Spheres"—the eternal hum of the universe spinning in its tracks.
But mark well the center of Eremos’s song. At the very heart of these concentric rungs of power, where the vibrations settle into a profound stillness, lies the Final Sphere. This is our world, the Skybride, the "Garden in Quiet Peace." We are the point of rest at the center of the storm. Yet, the poet speaks of the Man of Dawn and the Woman of Dusk—the first witnesses to the harmony. Their dance is the archetype of all man's striving. We are the only creatures in the Spheres gifted with the spark of the outer fires and the weight of the inner earth; we are the crossroads where the song finally finds its voice.
The Order of the Resonant Spheres
According to the Aioniotita, the universe is layered from the most ethereal to the most material:
The Empyrean (Sphere of Flame and Thought): The seat of pure intellect and the origin of the First Note.
The Celestial Rings (Water & Air): The mediating layers that govern the weather, the tides, and the breath of life.
The Terrestrial Heart (The Final Sphere): Our world, where the music of the outer rings harmonizes into physical form.
The Silent Center: The mythical Garden where the first souls danced, representing the point of perfect equilibrium.
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. The Imperial Decree is absolute: the Gods are dead. 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 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. Civilization is 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 more suffocating truth. Among the common folk the Gods have never felt more alive—or more ravenous. These 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.
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.
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. 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..
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.