GENESIS 1:31

 The Starry Firmament is not my only setting. I originally meant to have a world under it, though now I intend to have the Firmament as a sort of sub-setting you can plug into others, like Magical Industrial Revolution but not nearly as good.

I call this new world of mine Cold Silver Heavens, a planet of men, djinn, giants, and more things to inhabit the world as I make them up. Here are the Gods, who look down on it all, and who are looked upon in return- except for one who goes unseen.

THE GODHEAD, THE PRIMEUMATON, THE HIGHEST HIGH. 

The God. So vast and powerful, so all-encompassing that very few people worship it directly. To pray to it is like praying to everything at once. It is the world, it is the creator, it is the destroyer. You are part of it. Served by the Angels, beings of radiant silver fire that give off no heat or smoke.

In its place, two aspects are worshiped:

PROVIDENCE, THE CREATOR, THE GIFT-GIVER, THE DAWN KING, THE UNENDING, THE RELENTLESS 

The God of creation, life, excess, greed, and more. Spoke the words of the Divine Vocabulary to bring the world into being in primordial times, and still continues to create and give to this very day. Associated with the sun, which is also its main symbol; the same light that makes the plants grow can also wither and burn them when the dry season comes. Appreciated but feared. Its priests take vows of charity, adorn themselves in as much gold as possible, and perform miracles of healing, animation of the inanimate, and good fortune. The Church of Providence is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, and just generous enough to not be widely despised. They may be greedy bastards, but it's their goodwill that keeps a lot of people from going hungry.

DENIAL, THE DESTROYER, THE ESCHATON, THE EVENING MASTER, THE RELIEVER OF BURDENS

The God of destruction, death, deprivation, poverty, and less. Destined to end the world when its allotted time comes to a close, when there are no lives left to live and no stories left to be told, but nonetheless works to keep the relentless excess of Providence in check before this time comes. Associated with the moon, which is its main symbol; the night is a dark and dangerous time, but a time of rest and reprieve from the toil of the day. Feared but appreciated. Its priests take vows of poverty, and only own what they can carry on their person; they can still theoretically be wealthy if the things they carry are valuable, but this is generally frowned upon. Their miracles are ones of disintegration, exorcism, and nullification; The priests of Denial have no organized church, mostly wandering around as circuit preachers and solving problems wherever they may crop up- usually by vaporizing the problem with a pointed finger.

The Aspects of the Godhead reside in the Cold Silver Heavens on the northern and southern poles of the world, where they are attended by the Angels. Many have tried to reach these distant places, and none have returned; the seats of power of the Gods are not places for men to tread.

There is talk of a third aspect, TRANSMUTATION, that makes things into other things. This is known as the alchemist's heresy, and has only just now starting to gain traction among the public. Its "priests" are the aforementioned alchemists, who turn lead into gold, reshape flesh, and seek immortality- which is to be unchangeable. The worshippers of the other two aspects have yet to acknowledge this as a true faith, but the Godhead encompasses all things, right? They tolerate it as long as the alchemists work to their benefit.

The noble art of boiling piss and drinking mercury.

The next few Gods aren't quite as powerful as the listed aspects of the Godhead, but they are in turn far more active in the affairs of mortals.

THUNDER OVER THE MOUNTAIN

The God of weather, war, magic, and prophecy. An angry deity who speaks through storms, leaving words burnt into lightning-struck trees and engraved in hailstones. Is known to have taught mortals how to work metal into deadly shapes in ancient times, as well as magical tricks that King Arum the Torchbearer hadn't figured out in his time; as a matter of fact, Thunder Over the Mountain was one of the first Gods that mankind turned to worshiping after old Arum's primarily agnostic kingdom fell. Its priests are the Wise Men, known also as Wizards, who wear pointed hats and live in lightning-conducting towers. The Wizards perform no miracles–they cast spells, you gibbering superstitious jackass–and operate primarily in academies or through apprenticeships.

A Wise Man, allegedly.

LORD OF THE PEAKS

The God of brutal nature and inhospitable environments, a bringer of avalanches, blizzards, and rockslides. The kind of deity who is not so much worshiped as widely feared and appeased; everyone begs the Lord of the Peaks for mercy when they go up into the mountains, no matter what God they praised last Sunday. Apocryphally described as an enemy and lover of Thunder Over the Mountain, although the Wizards always laugh if you ask them about it-among the Gods, they say, such human behavior is just an affectation. The Lord of the Peaks has no priesthood, and seems to lack any interest in having one, but this doesn't stop some crazed mountaineers from inducing avalanches and other dangerous environmental hazards as a form of sacrifice; if they make it happen to other people, it doesn't happen to them.

THE FLESH OF STONE

Not quite a God, or at least not a conscious one- the Flesh of Stone is more of an unusual natural phenomenon that happens to have worshippers. Some say that the earth itself is a living thing, and sometimes, it has organs. Caverns of that stand out from the rest, smooth-walled yet worked by no mortal hand; hearts, lungs, intestines, and other innards recreated perfectly in stone, shifting to pump water, draw breath, and occasionally, to devour and digest intruders. These sites have power, and those that harness that power are called the Chthonic Monks, who baptize themselves in underground rivers and dry themselves off in windswept tunnels. These monks can turn their flesh into living rock, turn the flesh of others into unliving rock, and swim through the earth as if it is water.

The sea.

The sea is a godless place. They may have made it, but none claim it as their own. Once you get out of sight of the coast, you may as well be in a desert. Nothing good lives there. Atheists are generally stereotyped as pirates and other untrustworthy mariners. Among the most feared of the ocean's inhabitants are the Sea Monks, loathsome giants that peer over the sides of ships with their fist-sized, unblinking eyes, grasping with their boneless hands to pull unfortunate souls into the depths or tear them apart like paper dolls. It's hard to see them until they've slithered up the hull; Sea Monks have mostly flat bodies, crushed under the weight of the ocean, and their skin can take on any number of colors, from abyssal blue-black to brilliant red. They speak, too, with voices like whalesong, and leave strange marks on the sides of ships they wreck. Their language remains unknown.

But the tone of their speech, unmistakably, is one of lamentation.

THE BLOOD STAINED DANCER

Of all of the Gods, She is the most beautiful, even though all of her arms and legs are stained deepest carmine with blood. Of all of the Gods, She is the most human; the Blood Stained Dancer is the only God who governs human emotion, as well as the only one with a known gender. She reigns over love and hatred, joy and rage; all things for which the heart beats, the Blood Stained Dancer rules. Hers are the hands which caress and tear asunder, yet She is an impartial God; it is Her station to dole out these emotions, not feel them. Even the most human of the Gods is still a God, at the end of the day, a thing which is fundamentally inhuman. Her priests are the Enchanters, who paint their hands and feet red, repairers and destroyers of hearts and minds; they cure madness as easily as they incite it, stirring blind rage, ecstatic joy, foolish infatuation, or stone-faced calmness with nothing but a touch. Their manipulations are almost always obviously unnatural, artificial things, and only the very best of their number can perform them with subtlety.

THE INVISIBLE ONES

It's hard not to hear about them. Debased cults praising Gods with unpronounceable names in blasphemous rites under the light of distant stars. Fallen meteors, like the one that wiped the capital off the map a few months ago, glowing with unearthly colors and cut all over with strange glyphs.

The Primeumaton made the world and its inhabitants. It did not make the other Gods. Thunder Over the Mountain, Lord of the Peaks, The Flesh of Stone; they came down from the stars raw and unformed, once, not yet beaten into a shape by perception. We made them in our image. Still, more embryonic spirits of Gods to come hover over the waters of the Firmament, unseen and unformed, bewildered and astonished.

These Invisible Ones want to be seen, and thus born. They hunger for our vision, and thirst for our belief.

Falling through stars forever.

THE SERPENTINE ARCHONS

Life ends with death, as decreed by the PRIMEUMATON in its aspect of Denial. There is nothing awaiting you. After all, what meaning does life have without death's finality? Still, most people don't want to die, whether they know it or not.

The world once belonged to others. The Serpent-Men, as keenly intelligent as they were vastly cruel, were masters of the planet, and all life on it; humans, giants, and djinn were all once their slaves, among many other less notable peoples. Still, they were beholden to the Gods like anyone else- was it not Providence that gave them their mastery over flesh, and did Thunder Over the Mountain not gift them with their fearful sorceries? What could have made the Gods turn on their strongest and cruelest servants to instead give favor to a bright-eyed ape who became the first king?

The Serpents feared death, too, especially as their empires fell into decline. They were remarkably human in mind, if not in body. They had tried to arrest old age, but they could only delay it, never stop it. Even their closest successes died from horrific cancers. The body was fallible, clearly engineered for weakness; immortality could only be found in raw thought. Five of their most powerful sorcerers were the first to ascend, elevated as self-sustaining entities of pure conscience imprinted into the fabric of reality- and they pulled the ladder up with them, so to speak. They would be as Gods, accepting no competition. The next day, a young human with a twisted foot reignited a fire with his will alone, and it was all downhill from there for the Serpents. The Gods retracted their favor.

Still, those five sorcerers persisted through untold eons, hiding away in a vast cavern large enough to hold an entire country, where the final remnants of the Serpent-Empire reside. Their immortality was a false thing, their minds and souls beginning to dissipate back into the static, but just as a body of flesh may be restored with a meal of flesh, so too may a body of soul be restored with a meal of soul. They reach up, whispering in thoughts and dreams, making promises of eternal life; all they demand is a pledge, and eventually a pilgrimage to their great vault of stone. There, the adherent is given the same ascension that elevated the Serpentine Archons- and is promptly devoured, to be consciously digested over the course of a century to sustain them. There is life after death, truly, but not for you.

Their ruins are not empty,

And their creations plague us still.