The All Lord, The Brute, The Deicide
Agnurmasthash still remembered the early days of being mortal. Born during middle period of the millenium-long First War of the Gods, he and his clan had passed ownership between half a dozen titans as they warred against each other with the newfound power they drained from their subjects. Agnur remembered the pain every sunset when the poorly lain enchantment ripped all the day’s experience from his soul.
Persevere, his elders had said. Bear, they encouraged. Accept, they consigned. There was no choice.
But Agnur had always been a fighter. He was constantly in fights with the other children his age, and then the children older than him, until he was encouraged to follow the path of the hunter. But what had hoped to be an outlet for his aggression instead only stoked it, fueled by the indignity that came every sunset.
And so he would not accept the inevitabiltiy of the enchantment. For thousands of days in his youth, he fought to hold onto a shread of experience, only to fail every time.
Until he didn’t.
From there, his memory was a blur. His hunts were no longer about meat, but about the experience that he could tear from the dying animals. And while he had always preferred a straight-up fight, after a few months, he began ambushing his way up the local titan’s power structure.
Until finally, he killed the titan too.
And while he nominally seized control of his territories, he quickly found that he was far too weak compared to the neighboring titans and lost half of it almost as fast. In retrospect, he wondered just how lucky he had been in his earlier successess.
Still, he persevered, and while he reclaimed little over the remaining few centuries of the war, he built himself a reputation for aggression that favorably deterred many from taking things too far.
The First War ended with him on the weaker end of things by a fair bit. And despite his natural inclination, he welcomed peace for a time.
A century at most.
And then he began agitating. He didn’t particularly care for the calm, patient, caring, passive, peaceful zeitgeist that had settled upon the pantheon. But he wasn’t foolish enough to realize that with his weak position he could do little. And while he sipped from the well of experience tithed to him from his mortals, so too did the rest.
And so he trained while the others reveled.
And he waited. Patiently saving up as much experience as he could as others squanredred it. Always training. For the right moment.
For twelve hundred years he waited.
And then, in less than an hour, three gods were dead.
----------------------------------------
The Sentinel
The Sentinel was but a wolf-cub when Agnur took him in to be raised. A smarter then average specimen of a smarter than average wolf species, he learned from Agnur how to fight and how to harvest experience. And from there, it didn’t take long fighting alongside Agnur for him to be raised up to sapient.
Still, just because he was sapient didn’t make him an idiot or an individualist. On the one hand, he adhered to Agnur as his leader and protected him as needed. On the other, he maintained over the long centuries that followed many packs of she-wolves and their children. Still, none ever rose up to his prominence.
He did learn to speak, but rarely did so, much like Agnur himself. And most of the time he let Agnur speak for himself. But when speaking was required, he did learn a magic trick for how to do so.
Even when there were only two pawfuls of gods left, he kept aloof, but always at Agnur’s back.
----------------------------------------
The Steward
Domiel was arguably the most charismatic and charming of the gods, both before and after the Second War. Bleach blond hair, a short beard, high cheeks, well-hued of skin. Almost always with a kindly smile and a penchant for white flowing robes.
He always fancied himself a leader, and while he never led an iteration of the pantheon, he always had his own followers, and he was the one of the earliest agitators for a unified religion among the mortals.
Indeed in all debates, he always seemed to have a voice for the mortals.
He seemed good. A steward for the mortals.
But what he really was was a steward for their experience.
And then he died.
And unlike Mack and Gur, he could not come back.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
----------------------------------------
Adonite
Adonite was not born a kitsune. Nor a halfling. Nor an orc, a human, a catkin, elf, or dwarf.
Adonite was a metamorph, like all of their people. And, for better or worst, metamorphs were universally despised by all the sapient races and some of the non-sapient ones. A fear of replacements was a dour, distrustful thing and Adonite and her people were always on guard that their secret might be discovered.
To some extent becoming a titan, then demigod, then god solved this, as his divine colleagues were more concerned about what she was going to do than what he looked like. Still, her nature as a true metamorph was never revealed to the mortals, with her primiarly presented as a halfling, and later a kitsune due to her association with Kazuhiro and Ryoko, with the two forms being presented as different facets of his holiness and likely metaphorical, but if not metaphorical, then literal but divine shapeshifting between set forms.
Phew.
Still you may wonder how they ended up as the god or goddess of bread and steel. It was because of her early years as a mortal metamorph. The need to present a happy face, but ready to turn to battle in an instant.
----------------------------------------
Sturge
Sturge was a dwarf and, completely consitent with the stereotypes, that meant he was a crafter through-and-through.
Oh, yes, he was a very powerful god and could hold his own in a fight. And he had spent centuries ruling as a titan after overthrowing the prior dwarf titan who dared to interfere with his crafting. And then the millenia afterwards growing in power along with the rest of the pantheon. But power was but a means to his end: crafting.
Indeed, the mortal servants he kept on Caelum were primarily there to assist in his crafting. Some were direct, working on materials or sub-projects for him, while others were indirect, such as keeping the house for him. But they werent’ there to pamper him, but instead to make sure that he could craft as much as he could.
----------------------------------------
Horus
Horus was a pithecus and a scholar. And to greatly oversimplify his life, just re-write Sturge’s biography to make him a scholar.
----------------------------------------
Sleight
Do anything good enough and you’d become a god by doing that. And if you’re going to present yourself as a member of a pantheon to mortals, you might as well do so with what you’re best at. And that’s how the pantheistic religion—despite trying to act as an institutional force to better cultivate the experience grown by mortals—ended up with a goddess of theft and illusions.
Sleight was originally a garuda, though few ever directly seen her true form in millenia as she constantly kept illusions up. She started out as nothing more than a simple pickpocket and thief in a small city before the First War of the Gods. She was a bit of an odd duck, which was a particularly bad insult to a garuda, and few then would have said she was competent at anything except avoiding trouble and getting away with it.
And that’s what she did. She became a better and better thief, and starting figuring out simple illusions, risign up in the criminal underworld of the titan’s domain, as she was confronted by—and somehow defeated, intentionally or otherwise—various persons that were threatened by her. Then when she was finally caught by the titan, she somehow managed to avoid getting drained and escaped. When she got caught the second time, she managed to poison the titan and that’s how she found himself in charge of a titan’s domain.
Course there was none of that. She ran an illusion of the old titan for a long while, and then later when she tired of that, had a lackey pose as a new titan.
And so it continued, through the First and Second Wars, and now into the third. Never really that much direct confrontational power, but an unnatural ability to somehow always get away with it.
----------------------------------------
Myria and Burgum
In the iconography of the pantheistic relgion, Myria and Burgum were often twinned together, as two sides of a the same coin.
Myria was a dryad. She never particularly cared for power itself, but ended up accruing it—and, eventually becoming a god—because she was so intent upon plant life thriving. She was never particularly fond of violence, which tended to disadvantage her against the other gods. She would have preferred to simply overwhelm them with more life.
Burgum was a rzark. Like Myria, he never particularly cared for power itself, but ended up accruing it—and eventually becoming a god—because he was so intent upon his herd—and later, all animals—thriving. Unlike Myria, he was a bit more willing to engage in violence, though given his fairly late rise to sapience and some limitations to his physical form, he was never particularly as adept at it as his colleagues.
----------------------------------------
The System
Circa 666 S.A., v.0.66 of the System
Despite over two centuries having passed since the end of the Second War of the Gods, the System was still busy dealign with the aftermath. Of course, there was all the interactions with the gods and the uplift to the mortals, but really he was rather focused on still dealing with the profits he had made.
While he had not achieved his ultimate goal, he could not help but think that the Second War had abeen a wild success on his part. Of the 108 gods at the start of the war, he was down to only 11 now, and they had managed to talk themselves into leaving Ager for Caelum. And while they had taken their own possesions and some loot, the surviors had been someone reticent about raiding too much of the dead’s former homes.
Not to mention all the hidden “wealth” squirrled away by the dead in various hidden locations.
Truthfully, two centureis probably wasn’t that bad. The System had extreme difficulty moving physical objects, and he had to be discrete, so the actual job of finding and collecting all this loot was instead surreptiously delegated to tens of thousands of mortals over the decades through various quests, and then funneled logistically to various strong holds which, again, he had cajouled mortals into crafting for him (usually excavated mountains).
Now, wealth had a peculiar menaing for the System. He didn’t particularly care for gold, gems, armor, weapons, or any of the usual. Yes, he had some of that collected, because you never knew when you needed something to entice a mortal to do something else, and frankly keepign the quest rewards a secret from the pantheton was a bit exhausting, but what he really wanted was knowledge.
Not that the gods were necessarily a wealth of htat. Indeed, the System felt fine sayign that most of them were brutes and compeltey unintellectual. But many of them did have some notebooks from predecessors that they kept as potentially ueful items, and a few fo the dead were more intellectually minded. Adnt hsoe were the motherload.
In any event, the System had several mountains worth of material to review and catalogue, and he’d already eben at it for decades.
But how he finds one journal from one fo the dead. And it’s an intersting avenue of research. A way of using enchantments to break a hole in reality, here monsters the writer called Eldritch resided.
The System is reading this particular journal and is getting some ideas…
----------------------------------------