Among the Powered, the most favored Kings were the Paladine, as they took their jobs very seriously, indeed, for however long they sat the throne. Overall, Sources were the most effective, as their ability to Make Fate for an entire Kingdom was colossally powerful in the long view of things. The Divine might want a Paladin on the throne, but the people wanted a Source!
Of course, Huul and Imprus had their own ideas about who was best as a King, but those tended to just be Theocracies, which would be in constant conflict with the Land and find it difficult to keep Acclaim. They might be able to keep a True King from rising, but they’d never have one of their own... not that they truly cared, as Kings were their Kingdoms, not the servants of their gods, which was naturally unacceptable to such gods.
There was and would always be people who denied Kingdoms and Allegiances. They lived and struggled on the fringes, making do in their own ways, tending to be extremely self-reliant, and so did not participate in the greater benefits, always getting caught up in the conflicts between gods and nations and swept away.
Opting out was not protection. Opting out just meant you were not heard when you needed help, and were then crushed remorselessly. If you turned to darker Powers to try to get ahead, it got even worse, and genocide was completely not out of the picture for making that choice.
But some people would make those choices, they always did. There were atheists and die-hard Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims still out there, which led into another problem...
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“When the Shroud is lifted, the World will change.”
And I would probably not be here. I was 99% certain of it.
“Of all of those consequences, I am not yet certain, but of some of them, I most certainly am. I am going to go over some of them with you.”
On the Holo behind me sprang up:
* Direct influence of the gods
* Direct influence of other Powers.
* Technology may or may not endure.
* Species and creatures from off this world, both alien and dimensionally, will begin interfering in matters.
* The Spirits of the Lands will no longer be suppressed.
* Mortals are not in charge. They are only a part of things, and Mortal Free Will is all that gives them value.
There was absolutely no doubt that a lot of faces twisted upon seeing all of that. Getting it drilled in that they were pretty small was not going over well, but that wasn’t my problem. I was already aware that as a mortal, I was a bittest of the bit players.
“Let’s begin with the first.” The symbols of the various Divine Powers acknowledged here rose up on the Holo behind me, in their colors.
I began to talk about how the gods viewed the world, as sources of the Mortal Free Will that ended up driving the Alignment Conflicts.
Skin color? Race? Wealth? Temporal Power? The gods didn’t give jack shit about any of that. They cared about Faith and Mortal Free Will. Everything else was just a tool to gain those two things, regardless of the god’s portfolio. The fact that many of the Good gods openly didn’t care about those mortal things, while other gods buried the fact behind teachings to attract people, was simply another Alignment conflict.
You were valuable until the moment you died, and the gods saw you as influence centers and capable of bringing others into their beliefs until you did so. Performing well in the service of your god might give you a reward in the afterlife... but the afterlife was not a place of peace, as any old stories and their own imagination could supply. It was not a Christian realm where Heaven ruled all and kept demons and devils safely stowed in Hell.
Oh, no. Gods had conflicts, gods had battles, and those battles for Faith, Free Will, and the mortal souls that came with them spilled into the mortal plane all the damn time.
When the Shroud was lifted, the Divine and their servants could intervene directly or accidentally, and they would do so, in an ersatz game of Divine influence and moves played across time and space.
There were wars going on in the afterlife, as the Sins and Virtues of the Past and Present gathered into real, fundamental forces that clashed with one another all over Creation.
“But what about Balance?” I asked of them all, and I rolled my eyes to the skies in what was definitely not an encouraging sign. “In the afterlife, Balance is simply where those who have not picked a side choose to go, and they die. If you want Balance, you better swear yourselves to the Inner Planes, to Elemental forces that form the building blocks, lose your humanity, and become Elemental things.
“Oh, and there’s plenty of Aligned creatures in the Elemental Planes, too, and guess what? They go to war over it.”
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They all grimaced.
“But,” I raised a finger, “here, now, this mortal life of yours. This, this is where you have value. This is where your actions and deeds mean something. To give you an idea,” I lifted palms and eyes towards the transparent ceiling, and the Haze overhead. “The Shroud.”
A figure of globes formed behind me; growing, expanding out, changing color, expanding out multiple times more, expanding out, layer after layer of expansion.
One of those globes winked, and we zoomed in... to see the Earth spinning there, covered in a blue haze, the fifth generation of expansion of the Shroud.
“Every world before our Earth has fallen to the Shroud. Fallen to undeath.” They started doing the math; some of them could, some of them couldn’t. They only knew it was thousands of entire worlds. “But their deeds mean nothing in the overall scheme of things. Undead do not have Free Will, they are of Evil. Evil’s power does not ‘grow’ where the living fall and the undead rise. It merely gets redistributed from elsewhere, and put here.
“Undead give nothing to Evil whatsoever, regardless of how heinous their deeds are from our perspective. They do not have Free Will, and so, to Evil, they are merely a cleaning tool, like a janitor sweeping the dust of other Alignments out the door, leaving behind nothing of use to anyone, even themselves.”
They all blinked at me in shock.
“Gods and demons fight over Mortal Free Will. You have the choice of how to face this as a person, as an individual, and as a society. Which side, I wonder, will you choose to stand upon? Because there is no ‘balance’, there is no middle. You choose, or you get swept up in the fight as a hapless fool.”
I let that dangle for a moment, as the symbols of the gods faded away, and other symbols in random fashion arose and faded behind me.
“The Fey. The elder races. The creatures of Mythos. The Elder Gods. Those Outside Creation.
“Right now, the Shroud holds all of them at bay. Some may not be able to see us at all. Others can, and do not wish to be trapped under the Shroud.
“Some of these are mortal-ish forces, many of them are not. But they all have interest in the minds, souls, or other aspects of mortals, and they will come in, and they will... make trouble.”
Everyone grimaced knowingly. There was already shit like that happening, often driven from the mortal side of people wanting power. Now those Powers were going to come looking... and Tempting!
“If you think the world is violent and dangerous now... things are going to get even more iffy when the Shroud comes down.
“Your greatest protection against all that is naturally The Divine.” They all blinked. “It is the Divine who suppress many, many other Influences. The Divine want your Faith, Free Will, and Souls, and so they stop other Powers from butchering whole worlds as passing snacks, driving everyone insane to see what they can glean from our madness, mass mutating us to see what happens, or simply taking control of whatever hapless soul they wish for whatever games they want to play.
“The Divine stop all that asshattery. In the great cycle of Faith and Prayer, that is the Duty of the Divine: making sure we are not simply crushed underfoot like random ants, or made to dance in the lens of a magnifying glass for the amusement of the non-finite.”
Opting out just got you killed. It was all Right There. The gods were under no obligation whatsoever to protect those who didn’t pay heed to them. If my audience’s faces got a little pale as I began to list out some of the forces Out There who would end up looking down here, well, that was what we had gods for, right?
And the people those Influences naturally looked for were the ones clinging to gods who did not Answer them.
I spoke at length about Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other old religions approached by emissaries of other Powers claiming to be their gods. I talked about how they played on the people’s fears and hopes, claiming they were the chosen ones, all the others were false gods, and now they only had to throw away the other gods and prove their faith...
And I talked about all the blood that came out of such things, every single time. Of creatures of Mythos birthed into existence here by men and women copulating with inhuman beings, thinking they were going to be mother or father to the Savior of all mankind or somesuch shit, things that could enslave whole worlds and turn them into living nightmares for the survivors.
The crap that came out of those godless Bible/Koran/Torah-clinging communities was all bad, all the time. While some might be born Powered and be able to access other kinds of magic to help their people, they lacked Divine protection, and so Shit Happened in such places all the damn time, because they were bringing it upon themselves.
Deny the Divine, for good or bad, and you denied their protection. Shit happened to you. Atheism was no defense, and being an agnostic didn’t get you much, either. Those Outside were always looking for weakness, and such people were exactly that.
If you didn’t like it, tough shit. It wasn’t up to you!
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I went on with enough examples that I could tell I was really starting to spook them with how I knew about this stuff. Well, they could have talked to the Angelos, and found out the same damn thing, and even the Windgraf had tons of stuff to talk about that his people knew of. Having to knuckle under to the gods didn’t come easily to Elemental forces, after all...
“I don’t know what the status of technology will be when the Shroud goes away. It’s one of the things we’re going to test tonight.”
That surprised everyone. Tonight we were going to Open the Sky. How was that related?
“Missile and rocket technology is fairly advanced, it’s just that it can’t get through the Haze. At the Ceremony tonight, there’s going to be several things going on related to technology.
“First of all, we are moving telescopes into place, and lots of cameras and video memory. We are going to photograph as much of the sky as possible, and in detail.
“In particular, we’re going to be looking at the moon, and the city I saw there when I blew the Haze open in Mexico.”
They got that look of me holding stuff back from them. I ignored it and continued.
“And we’re going to launch something into the upper atmosphere, hopefully, and equally hopefully get some data off it. If we don’t get any data whatsoever, that is going to be very poor news.” I fixed them all with a stare, and dropped the big bomb. “The Earth is no longer in the Solar System. We have no idea where we are in the multiverse, or even When we are.
“And that... is very good news.”