When we reached the summit, we expected to be finally free. Free of influence, free from the gods touching our minds. We were fools to not realize the mountains were alive as well, that the few stragglers of clouds did not also have a soul.

The Soul

To understand the gods, one must first understand the semantics of the soul. The soul is no more than a name for the unseen connections between things in the physical world. We see this most often in the gifts bestowed by the divine, creating threads of connection between other souls and themselves.

It is naive to think only the divine and humanity have souls. Through centuries of research, we have found any animate process seems to be capable of growing itself a soul. From weather patterns to rivers flowing down mountains, to the slow erosion of glaciers.

While we know less about them, the connections between large groups of souls (be it a nation, a horde of animals, or a forest) seems to be able to form some kind of sense of being as well.

While the physical world is able to conjure up and create souls, the soul is also capable of manifesting itself as physical phenomena. This most often happens when the right patterns are found in the physical world, though it can also be forced by gods.

Human Souls

Human souls are the most well understood. The ability to form meaningful connections appears late into the childhood of most humans, with the most common connections being those to other humans, nations, and other living creatures.

These connections seem to have little effect on the actual behavior of the persons in question. Connecting a human soul to the collective soul of a nation does not make them feel more attached or trusting to this place. Instead, it seems that these bridges are formed through actions in the physical realm, and through the ideas of the person themselves.

It is not that these connections are in their entirety meaningless: When a soul is severed from its host, they become prone to confusion, distanced from emotional affairs, and they grow tired as their body tries to reconnect with the soul.

This process of regrowing the connection can take weeks in case of full severance, though in most cases of partial severance the effects are lesser and are gone after hours or days.

Living Souls

Of course it is not just humans that possess souls. Animals and plants have been found to grow them in much the same way, though to a much lesser extent. These souls are capable of making connections as well, though the connections are weaker.

Animate Souls

Animate souls are souls that belong to processes that contain no life. These include weather patterns, the erosion of mountains, rivers flowing downstream, and more. These souls are even weaker than the living souls, often incapable of growing connections at all, as they are unlikely to be able to associate with anything.

Divine Souls

The meaning of souls and their connections becomes more apparent when we consider divinity. The gods do not grow souls themselves. Their souls are remnants of other souls that existed. When something dies, its soul is slow to decay. And so, when these souls come together on the plane they exist on, they can form a new kind of consciousness from the connections that the souls knew.

These souls, however, continue to decay. Because of this, the gods must continue to sustain themselves one way or another. Some do this by bolstering themselves with connections to other living souls, while others do the same by consuming the remnants of souls of things that were before.

While uncommon, cannibalistic gods exist as well, either preying on the power of their kin, or consuming them whole.

However, when we consider the connections gods have with people or other living souls, we shouldn’t consider them to be antagonistic. They tend to be a symbiotic relationship, with little harm to the living thing.

Collective Souls

Collective souls are different entirely. Collective souls can be found in hordes of animals, colonies of plants or fungus, or in nations of people. While these are not entirely a true soul, these conglomerations of connections can sometimes make connections all by themselves.

In practice, this means that gods can bestow their gifts on groups of people, or on forests. In addition, this means that gods can feed off of entire groups of people as well.

In the rare occasion where an entire nation dies in a single blow, the collective soul of the nation is likely to form itself into a god, because of the amount of connections it has to other decaying souls at the time.

The Gods

Consider gods to be no more than the decaying souls of an event that happened for an extended amount of time. A river that ran dry, a forest that burned down, or a person turned to a corpse. When the soul no longer has a physical thread to connect to, it starts to decay. On rare occasions, when the stars are aligned, it becomes a thing in and of itself.

This raises an interesting concern: The god that roams a forest was not born from the forest, but from something that likely predates it. The god of a river was not born from that river, as it has not yet run dry and its soul is still there.

The reason for this is simple: The god feeds on the souls of the location it now roams, so it may sustain itself.

Creation

Divinity is most likely to be born under the circumstance there is a large amount of decaying souls and not many other gods to feed off of them. Initially, such a situation may create dozens of minor divinity. Most of these will not survive, as many of them will never find a way to sustain themselves.

Whether a new god is capable of sustaining itself is often directly correlated with its origins. A god born from the rotting corpses of a battlefield is more likely to survive than one born from a colony of ants being annihilated.

For one, the corpses of the battlefield are greater corpses. In addition, there are more ideals of survival and fighting spirit that existed recently on the fields of war.

Contrary to popular believe, the behaviours of divinity are not static. Though the initial ideals of the divinity have a great impact on what they will behave like for the rest of their reign, it is also not uncommon to see them change like people do, especially when they are still young and have to feed on the souls they can find.

A special case exists for divinity born from other divinity. This can happen in two ways: Either a god can die, and their soul can start to decay, or a god can split some of its soul off, manipulating it to a certain image, to create some sort of child for itself.

Feeding

Because of their nature, gods need to sustain themselves. There are three major ways for a god to do this.

The first is for them to consume souls. This is most often done by killing the host, then taking reign of the soul and destroying it, joining it with themselves. This kind of behavior is most often found in gods with lesser intelligence, hunting in animal-like manners. These kinds of gods tend to not survive for very long.

The second way is for a god to exist in a location. This is most often seen in gods spawning from burned down forests or a river run dry, locations where life is quick to return. They lock themselves into the location, to some extent become the location, and feed off of the cycle of life that happens on their land.

The third and most relevant one is through making connections with other souls. Most often, these connections are made with living souls, or the souls of persons. Often, these connections come with some kind of endowment, a gift in return for relation. This form of feeding is harmless in most cases for souls that can grow on their own, and tends to be the most sustainable.

There are also cases of gods making connections with other divinity, cabals of gods following a greater god. These bonds are dangerous, as they may end up in these lower gods being unable to sustain themselves.

It is also not unheard of that gods, especially younger gods, drain their followers too much. This happens especially for newer connections, causing waves of confusion and disorientation. In the worst cases, souls are consumed in their entirety and must regrow bit by bit, gaining its connections anew as well. This process is much the same as the one where a person severs the connection to their own soul completely, and healing takes a similar amount of time.

Endowment

In the modern day, connections with gods often come with some benefit to the person the connection is made with. This happens with some animals or plant species as well, but this is less common.

These endowments are often considered magic, allowing their users, the endowed, to manipulate the physical world or other metaphysical constructs in ways that would not otherwise be possible.

This does not mean that the endowments given by the gods are completely free. Often, gods will ask for direct devotion or other sacrifices to bind people to themselves in more ways than just the connection of the soul. In addition, endowments are not entirely space-free. Most divinity tether themselves to the physical realm to allow them to interact with it.

This in turn means that most endowments are tethered to locations in the physical realm, or to proximity to the god that gave them. Because of this, it is not uncommon for people to travel with their gods, or for gods to travel with their people. After all, it is difficult to stay connected with something over long distances.

Lineages

While the gods do not often reproduce or create kin, the ones that do often do so because they are successful in sustaining themselves in large enough quantities.

Jahtri’s Monsters

Jahtri’s monsters are descendants of a god called Jahtri that was first found after a heavy storm in the far south in Thilnim. While the divinity itself was killed after a hundred year struggle, these descendants are known to spread quickly. While first only being contained to Thilnim, they have since spread far and wide across all continents.

They all take on animalistic behavior, often looking like animals or humanoids, corrupted in some way. While they don’t live long, the way they reproduce quickly has allowed for this lineage to survive, to an extent they are now considered normal, even though the world was not this hostile many centuries ago.

The gods feed solely by killing. They kill animals, but most often hunt for the superior souls of other gods, or humans. They do not make any connections whatsoever, and there have been cases of them killing entire villages and leaving nothing for them to sustain themselves upon, leading to an inevitable end.

Because of their short lived, rash nature, these creatures are relatively easy to kill. They are more bound to the physical realm than other gods we see, and physical harm does a great deal of damage to their souls. Any adventurer should be warned, though, because even when they appear physically dead, they may use the remnants of their decaying soul to regenerate their bodies.

Lürri’s Kin

Spawning from Jahtri as well, Lürri’s kin is a lineage of divinity that is more aligned with human interest. These gods tend to take more humanoid shapes, though often still appear corrupt, as if they can’t quite understand or take the shape of our physical realm.

According to legend, the first of these gods spawned when a warrior, Lürri, made a pact with the dying soul of Jahtri to keep its lineage – and by extent some of the creature itself – alive if it would aid him. Nowadays this means that most of Lürri’s kin is kept as slaves, much to their own dismay.

The gods in this lineage give their gifts to humans to keep themselves alive, their endowments most often appearing in the form of connection breaking, tracking, or other matters related to the soul. In addition, some god-killing divinity have been reported, able to drain away connections and energy from god’s souls through the humans they endow their gifts upon.

Lerhee

The descendants of Lerhee are mostly found in the eastern empires, failing to get traction on other continents. Lerhee’s descendants focus their connections and endowments on those who follow them deeply, often basing themselves in religions – new ones or forcing themselves into existing ones.

They appear humanoid, and as they walk through the streets, most people would have a hard time distinguishing them from most other humans, save for their almost unnatural perfection.

Spawning from the deaths of civilizations, the fields of war, and bloody revolutions, Lerhee’s descendants most often give their followers endowments related to what they believe to be justice, strength, or purity.

The most frequent kind of gift from this lineage is the gift of healing, though much like most other gods, they are unable to give any external healing that comes at no cost. Often, the harm must be placed onto something else, or the regeneration comes at great cost to either the user or the divinity’s soul.

Iba

The Iba, though not clearly all coming from one lineage, are a group of divinity that have wandered the wilderness with humanity for ages in the past. These gods are thought to have existed before the dawn of the first civilizations.

Perhaps because of this, many of these gods appear as animal-like spirits, often leaving themselves to wander forests, fields, or lakes and oceans. These most ancient ones often bestow gifts upon their connections with relation to hunting and gathering.

Newer, yet still ancient gods related to craftsmanship, cooking, art, and other fundamental tasks more often appear as objects, in rare occasions used by people. Their endowments almost always relate to the craft they represent, or craftsmanship in general.

A small group of these gods wanders the forest in more humanoid forms, though they are never fully human. Their faces change, appearing as different kinds of animals. These are known to be more territorial, protecting the land they consider theirs. In the last few centuries, this has often come down to protecting the land from Jahtri’s monsters.

Some of the Iba tell stories of prophecies, things that will come to pass in the future. While some believe these stories to be important, they are often too unclear to take any real conclusion from, even after the foretold event has happened. Because of this, it is unknown whether the prophecies hold any actual value.