As you can imagine, as soon as the myths and legends were confirmed to be real, they became quite the hot topic.
Facts were slow to come in those early days, but bit by bit knowledge was gained, proven, and made known as inch by inch a clearer picture began to form.
The first thing that we have to understand is that all the gods, angels, demons, and more powerful beings, such as the immortals, Fey royalty, or giants, share certain aspects. The most basic of these is that they exist upon multiple planes of existence at the same time. Humans, or mortals as many of the divine beings call us, are single-plane beings in that the totality of our lives is confined to our world.
The gods and other supernatural beings are not so limited, and that is in part the secret to their immortality. Through the efforts of some rather reckless and imaginative journalists, the details had been teased out of some of the friendlier gods.
We discovered that in their home planes, the gods are immensely powerful, but far more ‘diffuse’. They still had bodies that could experience the pleasures of the flesh, but they were huge spread-out existences that diluted those experiences by nature of their very scale. Also, in their realms their whims could be fulfilled easily. It was too comfortable an existence, that could become bland, lacking in stimulation or challenge.
That was why gods craved life on the mortal plane because it was there that they could experience some form of adversity. More than that, while living in the world of mortals their existence was more concentrated, they could experience things more keenly, both for good and ill. That was why the gods sought to live upon the plane humanity called home.
Because of their nature gods could only come to our world by creating avatars, bodies that are real but not the gods themselves in their entirety. These bodies were composed of physical matter, and even possessed something similar to our biology. Divinities bled, but they didn’t bleed blood. They breathed, but they didn’t need air to live. They ate, but they never digested the food. We even learnt that some of their ‘blood’, collected in the wake of a fight, had been taken to an official lab for analysis. Biologists, chemists and even physicists had studied it, but all their efforts had only raised more questions and led to a couple of nervous breakdowns.
One such researcher famously screamed; ‘cells don’t work that way!’ before running out of the lab screaming and tearing at his hair the whole time. The man later recovered, but the image of him became a trope on the internet, one to exemplify the baffling nature of the divinities.
Of course, that didn’t change mankind’s need to classify and quantify. Sure, many looked at the gods and threw up their hands in despair at trying to understand them. When asked to explain how they could defy physics or the laws of conservation by producing matter or energy seemingly out of nowhere the general answer was: ‘its magic’, as that seemed to be the only way to explain it. However, there were others, those that felt that if science could not explain the Myths then science simply had to claw its way through until it could square the circle. As these efforts began, many tried to ride the waves of curiosity, fear, and bewilderment to fame and fortune. But they tended to rise only to crash down when holes were punched through their theory.
Doctor Julian Crawford rose to fame by not only creating the scientific definition for the various myths, Multi-Planar Pan Psychovores, but also by formalising the multi-planar theory. He stated that ultimately mortals can’t kill a god. The avatar bodies they use are extremely durable, even the most fragile being able to take a shotgun blast and suffer only minor bruises. The stronger gods, the more warlike ones, could withstand being struck by bunker breaker missiles and suffer only superficial harm. That said, these avatars could die, be it at the hands of another god, or the fangs and claws of a monster, but such deaths were far less final than they would be for a mortal.
According to his research gods, angels, demons, and just about every other legendary being were creatures that didn’t just exist in one reality, like humans did, but were instead spread out over at least three. That was the secret of their apparent immortality, one of the dimensions they existed in didn’t have time as ours did, so they wouldn’t age, and as long as ‘more’ of them existed in other dimensions than it did in our one there wasn’t ‘enough’ of them here to be dealt a fatal blow. Likewise, their abilities to do things that defied the understood laws of physics were also explained by this extradimensional nature, such things as being able to draw energy from higher planes or taking the laws of another dimension and imposing them upon this one.
He was even able to explain why such beings might be so similar to humanity, in the way that they thought and acted. By his reckoning, the Legends were beings that subsisted not simply upon other-dimensional energy, but also upon what he defined as ‘psycho-etheric’ energy, his definition for the natural magic, or mana, that people exude simply by living. This energy was charged by a person’s thoughts, their beliefs, dreams, fears, and hopes, and was radiated out into the ambient energy of the world around them. Those same emotions were then absorbed by the various legends when they drew that energy into themselves to fuel their power.
As such, they were shaped by those impressions in the ambient mana, little bits and pieces of it gravitating to and merging with the gods that already embodied the concepts that were drawn to them. This meant that war gods, for example, would be sculpted into the image of the perfect warrior by the dreams and thoughts they absorbed, while a goddess of love or beauty would become a paragon of whatever people viewed as most gorgeous.
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In simple terms, it meant that though the gods had their own existences, thoughts and personalities they were also in part shaped by the people that worshipped and empowered them. It also explained the vast variety in the different pantheons, due to them being shaped by the cultures they ruled, even as they shaped the cultures. Doctor Crawford fully stated that it was just a theory so far, but it seemed to be holding up.
Apollo had explained it in his famous interview, how avatars were not the entirety of a divinity. He had said that trying to kill a god by trying to kill their avatar was akin to trying to murder someone by attacking one of their fingers. Yes, you could cause them a lot of pain, drain them of quite a bit of blood, but ultimately it was a small part of the whole. The gods suffered their avatar´s pains, and if destroyed they would weaken but would be ultimately protected from total destruction by their multiplanar nature.
As you might imagine, those first few weeks after it became clear that the gods and other so-called myths were real were not easy on the world. The results of some gods reclaiming the domains that they regarded as their rightful property were at once amazing and terrifying. England had managed to get off lightly due to Balor’s attack and the arrival of the King during the early days after the Black Sun. The rest of the world ran the whole gambit from barely affected to completely taken over.
You see, when the gods started to come back, many didn’t just go straight back to the countries they had once ruled over. Some did return to their traditional lands, the Egyptian and Chinese gods were good examples of this. Others simply scattered to the wind, choosing to go wherever they thought would be the most interesting. In some cases, the gods of a pantheon held together, all working towards a common cause. Other times pantheons seemed to fragment into individuals each following their own agendas.
The Olympians gods though . . .
The thing you need to understand is that the Greek pantheon is one of the most famous, almost certainly the most influential as far as Western civilization is concerned. It isn’t a case of belief, since in those terms the world is dominated by Abrahamic religions and Hinduism. Rather it’s a case of who knows about their images, their stories, their history. Nobody fully understands the way that belief, or even just knowing about a god, translates into power for them. But popularity, simply knowing their stories and legends, does have something to do with it.
The most famous Greek gods, or the Olympians as they are more commonly known, were one of the most prevalent collection of gods in the world, their images and stories having spread and influenced so many other cultures. They had been a major influence upon the Romans, their own gods being near mirrors of the Greek ones. And their influence had endured. In Britain one example was our Britannia, who had been modelled after the classic image of Athena. Or take the images of the trident-wielding Poseidon, or Zeus with his thunderbolt we saw day to day advertising machinery or cleaning products. Or the wings or helmet of Mercury or the wing of Nike the goddess of victory. Just to give a few examples.
And then there were their legends, Greek legends that endured long after their worship had ended. Heroes like Hercules or Odysseus.
I could remember my dad reading the story of Hercules and his Twelve Labours to me back when I had been only five years old. Clearly the version he read me was the kid-friendly version. There was no mention of Heracles killing his own family, nothing about horses fed on human flesh, nor about a stable filled with animal shit. Sure, there had been monsters and villains, but it had lacked the grimmer details. Still, it had been enough to hook me, and over the next few years, I’d managed to badger my dad into reading me most of the best Greek myths. Later I actually studied Greek legends in school. Then, as I got older, I sought them out in films, games, comics, you name it.
As far as the Western world was concerned, the Greek gods were the most famous and visible, and when the Black Sun left and the Path of the Legends opened again, the twelve Olympians and many of their fellow Greek gods took little time in asserting themselves.
Artemis, Gaea, Pan, all were responsible for some of the returned forests and the disappearance of entire towns and cities, while Poseidon had returned to the oceans and begun to clean them up. Others, such as Apollo or Dionysus, had loved the new world they found themselves in, and had wasted no time in making themselves part of it and availing themselves of all the pleasures and opportunities it could offer.
Zeus became especially famous, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he became infamous, by being the first god to create a privately-owned corporation. Well, in truth it was more the creation of Athena, Hermes, and Hephaestus, but Zeus was the guy that gave the orders, and he’d shown himself to be surprisingly adept at running a business. It was big news, how the American government was handling the situation. There’d been plenty to read on this turn of events.
Olympus Industries, the corporation the Greek gods had established, was growing explosively due to being the only company in the world that was mass producing literally divine items. Granted, they were relatively minor things, but even so, they were selling things like enchanted bracelets at the price that was normally reserved for things like cars. Also, for all the other headaches they might be causing The USA, they had proven to be an economic boon to the nation. They provided new jobs and services that helped the country continue, even with the turmoil inflicted upon them by the mythological powers that had returned.
Other countries were more or less fortunate depending on your point of view. China was one such example, a nation in which the returning gods were unwilling to work with the government already in power. Nobody was quite sure how it had happened. There had been some sort of negotiation going on, and then one day the talks had all broken down. Catastrophically!
Many of the details had been classified and kept from the general public, but what was known was that military forces were ordered to take the divine agents into custody. Those divinities had not taken the attempt well and had fought back. More military assets had been called in, and then more powerful deities had become involved as the situation escalated out of control. By the time the dust settled China had become the first global superpower to be completely under divine rule. Surprisingly very few citizens had much of a problem with this, but as you might imagine, other governments around the world were very nervous.
Life went on, but the focus of attention was now on a new world order that included a small but ever growing number of the returned myths and legends. As the world tried to make sense of the changes that had taken place there was just as much tension as there was wonder. Almost everywhere there was a feeling of living on the edge, a feeling that there was a shoe that hadn’t dropped.