is this christmas in july!!! ok so the gods are a biit complicated
let me just be super clear: these are Eldritch Gods. eldritch meaning beyond our understanding; you cannot hold a god's whole existence or concept in your head, you cannot model their behaviour and figure out what they're going to do, you cannot Understand Them at all, and if you try, you will lose your mind. it's like counting the grains of sand on the beach. You Are Too Small To Do It. (i usually call them "it" to be accurate, "she" to be sillay, they're beyond gender lol)
but we can understand them through refractions, tiny fractured pieces. singular images that make up a whole.
in this particular world the gods are sort of otherworldly... creatures? people? ideas? they have autonomy but not the same way we understand it. they're also very self interested assholes who like to be worshiped because it gives them intricate control of the world, their favourite playground.
there are four gods in this world, and each of them has a domain/set of domains that they're Powerful in. these domains frequently overlap. if a god wants to Change something in the world, she's liable to do it through one of her domains. i'm going to put individual descriptions under the cut
Primordial
AKA: Death, Roke
this is the oldest of the gods, quite literally older than the universe. primordial is the god of the void, emptiness, darkness, chaos, entropy, death, rot, infinity, vastness, space. she is also Dead. the primordial was killed by artifice in a battle looong long before humans were around, and thousands of lesser eldritch beings now feast on her corpse like whalefall; these bottom feeders become part of her and enact her will, in their own individual fun ways.
encounters with the primordial frequently involve strange figures designed after death and decay; they like to make deals, and are often extremely, brutally fair, you can rarely get one over on the primordial. also, "death" in this case is broad - nines is haunted by the primordial, and is immortal but stagnant, a death of change.
second-oldest god, as old as the universe. artifice is the god of the stars, systems, mathematics, connections, "coincidences" (there are no coincidences), fate, patterns, structure, clockwork. when you see fibonacci numbers in pinecones, when celestial bodies fall into beautiful dances together, when spiders build intricate traps - when the world makes sense of itself, there is artifice.
the only reason she doesn't rule the universe wholly is that the primordial shattered her into a billion pieces, limiting her influence on the world. each of those pieces is independently working to piece the whole back together, and become the beautiful machine that makes the world go round. most of them have to do this by influencing humans - sometimes just as couriers, but sometimes the piece actually digs itself into a person. now that person is a part of artifice, too. like a hivemind, and much smarter than you.
Rhae-Ilthar
AKA: Lur-Ilthar; Raze, Chimaera
twin of velthy, probably as old as civilization. rhae-ilthar is the god of the sun, fire, beauty, gold, obsession, addiction, ruthlessness, hunting for sport. rhae-ilthar tends to refer to the gold, and lur-ilthar to the fire, but both are generally acceptable. when you get tunnel vision and can't think of anything but your love, but your work, but your dream, when you'd burn it all to the ground if it meant you got what you wanted, this is rhae-ilthar.
naturally, this makes rhae-ilthar pretty vain and self-centered. she has a habit (thanks to malachai, her loyal servant since 0 A.D. or so) of Gilding people - their blood runs gold and they become immortal, at the cost of like any semblance of sanity or humanity, and they do a lot of her bidding. her favourites she kills and elevates to Divae, flawless depersoned extensions of herself that she speaks through on extremely rare occasion. she is building an army of these divae, quietly and methodically.
this is because she plans, true to her obsessive and audacious nature, to dethrone Artifice as the God Of Everything. after all, just behind death and creation, the likely most worshiped god of all time? is the sun.
Vel-Thuthaal
AKA: Ouroboros, The Serpent, Harrow, Rage
twin of ilthy. vel-thuthaal is the god of the moon, fear, hatred, darkness, the ocean, dreams, nightmares, blood, shadows, hunting for food. she is also a big fan of snakes obviously. vel-thuthaal ultimately wants to swallow the world in darkness and evil because it's fun. she was thwarted once in history, and was sealed into the moon (sort of figuratively, in a more literal sense she is prisoner in an empty dimension all to herself) so she couldn't end the world.
she has spent all of her time and her very limited resources, reaching feebly through the bars of her prison to touch the world in dreams, trying to escape this prison. to do it she needs a vessel, a straw through which to pull the ocean back into the world, a human to hold (and inevitably shatter under) her weight. trouble is this human needs to be very well prepared for the job, broken thoroughly so she can in her wholeness stroll in.
enter silas, a human who wants nothing more than to Know the unknowable. who has bent his mind towards holding just a little more complexity, to walking just a little farther into the shallows. now all she has to do is drag him into the deep end.
(fun fact: this is the only god who will speak to you in human language herself!)
UMMMM yeah those are my little guys. theres actually lots about them and if you wanna know more about one of em i can answer questions yay. ive also got moodboards and gijinka designs and playlists and,
