The Factions of the Gods

The human habit of assigning the gods neat titles: the Goddess of Light, the Goddess of Darkness, the Goddess of Fate, the God of War, and so on, has always felt oddly small to me, as though one were trying to label the ocean with a single word. What troubles me most is that, so far as I can tell, the gods draw no power from worship itself. They do not need temples or prayers. The temples, rather, need them: institutions that discovered early that invoking a god’s name made it easier to train children born with wild vharin (“aether,” if one prefers) and so built entire doctrines around obedience and devotion to keep such power contained. Even the Goddess of Light’s own Book of Illumination reads strangely when examined closely. Why would She create a universe from nothing so that “the universe may know itself,” as the text claims? If self-knowledge is the goal, why give us genuine choice and then allow the Goddess of Fate to weave those choices into something that looks disturbingly like a pre-drawn pattern? And why, if they are so far above us, do the gods themselves appear to fracture into factions and quarrels? One can chart, even from our mortal records, at least three clear groups: those who follow the Goddess of Light and her project of sustaining and refining the world; those who side with the Goddess of Darkness and her apparent desire to unmake it, to return all things to the quiet nothing before creation; and those who claim neutrality, tending to narrower domains, War for example, without pledging openly to either side. Then there is the Goddess of Chaos, who seems to constitute a fourth camp all her own. By every sign I can find, Chaos chooses her servants with no pattern a sane mind can discern. Yet can a deity go mad, or is what we call madness in them merely a logic so alien we lack the tools to grasp it? There are also fewer gods now than there once were, according to ancient records, which suggests that even they can be diminished, altered… or destroyed.