Johan gives the child a look over, other than the obvious wound on her arm he was searching for any other kind of damage. After a short time, he was satisfied with the results, seeing that she was healthy. The wound on her arm was not going to heal quickly, and it could get infected if not treated properly, not to mention the long-term conditions that it may lead to, it was clear to Johan that he would need to rely on his god in order to restore the girl to proper health.
“I am going to touch your arm in a moment, I am going to cast a spell to heal it.” Johan smiled at 0071 warmly.
“Magic? Is it going to hurt?” 0071 thinks back on the times she was involved with magic, they weren’t all pleasant, and usually painful?
“This magic will help you; it should be a warm and pleasant feeling.” Johan could see that the girl was looking anxious. “This is the power of my god flowing into you, fixing what is broken, putting your body back into order” Johan continued. “Tyr is a benevolent god, and he does not like disorder, when he uses his power to help you, he will not cause you pain, that is what makes him great.” Johan places his hand on 0071’s injured arm, muttering a prayer under his breath.
“My lord of order, I beseech you to cure the wounds of this child.”
At the end of his incantation, a warm blue light emits from beneath the girl’s bandages. She winces, expecting something unpleasant, when suddenly the pain in her arm is gone, and she feels a wave of relief. “see, that wasn’t so bad.” Johan smiles warmly at her.
0071 inspected her arm, it almost didn’t feel real, she has seen magic before but whenever she was injured, she would have to deal with it herself. “Can priests of other gods do this? Or is Tyr unique?”
Johan leans back in his chair, “If they want to, they can use their gifts to heal the sick and injured, but that isn’t all the power of the gods are good for.” The girl looks intrigued, Johan senses a moment to preach.
“How much have you been taught about the gods?”
“I know that there are many, and that shifters were created because the evil goddess Lunas cursed people.” Johan’s mood drops after hearing that the empires propaganda is being taught to young children.
“That’s not entirely true, but not entirely wrong.” Johan begins to preach to an unsuspecting child. “There are many gods, but they are split into two categories. We have the older primordial gods that we refer to as the Elder gods, there are nine of them...” Johan continues to explain the Pantheon.
These elder gods are as follows:
There is the evil god known as Bhaal, he is a god of murder, torture, and sacrifice. He tries to coax mortals into killing for him and creating alters from the flesh of their victims. He promises his followers eternal glory in his battlegrounds when they die.
Bilquis is a god of love, sex, and fertility. She hopes to teach her followers to be true to themselves, and to punish people who terrorise others with evil and sexual acts such as rape and molestation. People pray to her as thanks for their lives and to be blessed with fertile bodies when trying to conceive.
Jarkett is the god of creation, fire, and light. He created the world and all other worlds in the universe, he gave people fire to warm them in the cold and created the sun to protect them during the day. Creative people hope to be blessed by him so that they may create wonderful things like he did.
There is a neutral god called Mask who oversees lies, thieves, and actors. He was the one who allowed people to deceive others for their own betterment. While many nefarious thieves pray to him, famous actors also look to him for guidance, to learn to become more convincing in their performance.
Melora is the goddess of nature, agriculture, and life. She populated Jarkett’s worlds with plants, creatures, and other forms of life. She loves the beauty of the green and loves watching creatures growing plants. Farmers pray to her for a bountiful harvest and commit to protecting the nature around them.
The goddess of magic, rituals and knowledge is called Mystra. She produces the weave that powers the spells used by all spell casters. She teaches the ignorant how to make the most use of magic and allows the curious to follow a path of learning.
The Raven Queen is the goddess of Death, Fate, and Winter. She holds onto the memories of the dead; she helps to purify lost souls who find their way to her realm. Her disgust for the undead has led her worshippers to hunt necromancers and the bodies that they raise.
Storms, thunder, and the seas were created by the god Talos, and he holds dominion over it. Each ship worth its salt carries a shrine to Talos, praying for fast winds and smooth sailing. But Talos is not always so kind, captains that grow complacent must suffer under his test of storms, either they sink or sail, either path is acceptable to Talos.
The final of the Elder gods is Tyr, the god of justice, war, and order. Him and his followers are sworn enemies with Bhaal and his followers, leading to an eternal war of what they consider to be good and evil. Tyr taught people the difference between right and wrong, between order and chaos, between law and mayhem.
Johan stretches his preaching muscles, its been a while since he has allowed himself to talk to someone about the gods, let alone someone who was actually interested. 0071 looked at him in awe, she was learning so much about the world that she didn’t know before, but she was still confused, he didn’t mention Lunas. “What about the evil goddess who cursed my people.”
“That’s a whole ‘nother thing, I mentioned there are two categories for gods, the Elder Gods are the first, after them are the weaker New Gods.”
“New Gods are different from the Elder Gods because they were born, and created, in a way.”
“A long time ago, in a place very different from here, people were living in an age of heroes, there were people achieving what was thought impossible and spreading their fame across the world.” Johan continued, “When they died, people still thought about them, and even prayed to them, thinking that their deeds must have been the work of gods walking the earth.” Johan leaned back in his seat. “This wasn’t true of course, but enough people believed in it that the people who had died came back, as the gods people believed them to be, the power of belief is a scary thing.” 0071 was not really understanding how it all worked, but she kept quiet hoping that she would figure it out if Johan kept talking.
Johan began to talk about each of the eight new gods:
There was once a man named Arawn, who fell in love with the Raven Queen. He did everything he could to get her to notice him. He hunted necromancers, purified the dead, destroyed evil cabals, but none of it was enough to get her to turn her gaze towards him in the way he wanted. He figured he needed to do more to get her attention, and so he prolonged his life far beyond its reasonable limits to create a realm called Annwn that would attract the souls of the dead, where he would judge whether they were worthy of new life, or of eternal damnation in the Hells. After a very long time, Arawn realised that he had become what his lady hated the most, a Lich. In his grief he ended his life, only to be reborn years later after words of his actions were spread by people who had visited his underworld and returned alive. Arawn spends the rest of eternity guiding souls through their own self repentance in Annwn, as the god of death, rebirth, and the underworld.
A man called Jormungand wanted to explore more than what was offered in the world, he wanted to travel far beyond human reach, into other realms and planes of existences. Through his exploration and research, he began changing his body to withstand his journey, slowly taking on the form of a gargantuan serpent. Using the powers of his new body, he was able to freely travel to wherever he desired, into the hells, the feywild, planes of air, earth water and fire, even to the realms of the gods. That was his mistake, for he had intruded onto the battlegrounds of the god Bhaal, who viewed him as an unworthy intruder, killing him on sight. His village deified him and tried to follow in his research, seeing him as someone who had taken on the form of a pinnacle being. This ideology gave birth to a race called the Yuan-ti. A race to sacrifices others to their god of bonds, realms, and snakes. Jormungand lives out his eternity as the gateway between realms, people wishing to travel to other realms travel within his body to their destination.
There was once a great war between several lording nations, each believing that the others had done them wrong, each believing the lies of one man, Loki. Loki was perhaps, the most successful follower of the god Mask. He spent his life stealing from the wealthy, and giving it all to himself, he just loved accumulating wealth. But it wasn’t enough for him, he needed to pull off the greatest heist ever not witnessed, a heist for the ages, a heist no one will ever forget. He convinced kings of five nations to meet in battle on the same day using lies, acting, illusion and forgery. He then used the opportunity to steal everything from the treasury of each of the nations, all at the same time, a feat that for all would be impossible, just not impossible for Loki. Loki took all his treasure and hid it somewhere in the world before turning himself into the five kings, who had all allied together to form one nation in pursuit of the criminal who fooled them. Loki was executed after having told each of the kings a lie about where he buried the treasure, plunging the country into chaos once more. Theives around the world searched for Loki’s treasure, praying to him as the god of mischief, trickery, and illusion, hoping to get a clue. To this day, no one has ever found it.
There was once a woman who loved hunting. She did not care what she hunted, as long as it was challenging. She hunted fiends, fey, monsters, aberrations, even titans, nothing could match her. Her hunts were always signified by an illusionary moon she would leave above her kill, her way of leaving a calling card. Her adventures saved cities from dragons, allowed kings to ascend to their thrones, created homes for lost wanders, people saw her as a benevolent woman who could feed the world. The goddess Melora did not appreciate this huntress carelessly destroying the ecosystems she worked hard to create, and so she cursed Lunas with the form of a beast, Melora could not predict that this made Lunas an apex predator. When Lunas died, she returned as an eternal huntress in a realm of her design, where she could re-hunt all the creatures she had previously killed. Starving hunters begged her in their prayers to help them hunt, so she blessed them with the ability to become a beast when the full moon shines. Whether this was a blessing or a curse, is up for debate, nevertheless, she still reigns as the goddess of the moon, lycans, and the hunt.
There was once a petty vengeful lord who dedicated his prayers to Arawn, praying to bring his wife and kids back from the dead. The prayers of Osiris fell on deaf ears. After years of empty prayers, Osiris had enough and decided that if he could not live his life happy, then those who wronged him would suffer equally. Osiris spread disease, plague, and damnation to any and everyone who wronged him, he kept up his revenge until all that was left was himself, alone in the desert. There was no one else left that he could enact his revenge on, no one else but Arawn. Osiris spent years crafting his special revenge on the god of death, he created a necropolis beneath the sands of his home, stealing souls from Annwn and raising them as his undead army. At the head of his army, Osiris created his four Knights, representing Death, Plague, Famine and War. He wrote his deeds in a book of evil as his final defiance to the world before he was killed by the followers of the Raven Queen. Necromancers hope to follow his teachings, and people who were unjustly persecuted present offerings to Osiris in hopes that he will enact their vengeance in their stead. Osiris lingers in a domain of the Shadowfell as the god of the undead, revenge and curses.
In the feywild, there is a joyful race called the Satyr, they lived mostly at peace with the denizens that lived there. One day, a satyr named Pan encountered a gargantuan serpent by the name of Jormungand. Pan was not scared of the serpent, but viewed him as a possible merrymaker, and so led him back to his people. Jormungand told Pan about the world he had come from, and how it was not nearly as interesting as the feywild. Pan took that personally, anywhere can be as interesting as the feywild with a little effort, or so he assumes. Pan used fey magic to travel to the material plane, where he explored and spread merriment to the people who lived there. Pan was the start of numerous festivals and holidays that continue to take place today. After many years of work, pan was satisfied that he made the material plane as interesting as the feywild and decided to convince other fey to enjoy this realm as well, leading to a mass migration of feyfolk and fey creatures to the material plane. Having caused such a massive change to the world, Pan was seen as a deity, even if just a minor one. People began to pray to him expecting him to help them and answer their prayers, when all he wanted to do was party, quite a predicament. He decided the best way to escape his responsibilities was to fake his own death as the biggest party he had ever thrown, which lead to his actual death. Pan now lives forever in hiding in the feywild as the god of joy, parties, and wine.
The was once a small village that was settled in the middle of a mountain, every day its inhabitants would have to travel for hours to gather food, water, and other supplies. A young genasi girl named Terra was displeased that people would go so far out of their way for essentials, when they could just move the village closer. The elders of the village explained that their village was placed to protect the world from an evil group of elementals that were sealed within. Terra understood the villages responsibility but felt her own responsibility to help her people. So, every day for years, Terra would carve a path through the mountains alone with her bare hands, until she eventually created a tunnel to the outside, letting her people gain better access to what they needed. She expected praise but only received contempt, for she had open the village to the dangers of the outside world. Eventually bandits arrived hearing about this hidden village and looted everything from the weak inhabitants. Terra tried to fight them off, but before she could drive them away, the bandits released the elementals that the village kept guarded. Terra fought the elementals as the villagers fled the village, before the elementals could escape, she collapsed the mountains around her, burying the village, and the elementals with it. The bandits spread an exaggerated tale about a deity that could move the mountains, create calamities at the snap of a finger, in hopes of stopping people from making their mistake. Terra became known as the goddess of the land, mountains, and natural disasters.
The final story is about a smith by the name of Vulcan. He was a fire giant that cared for nothing but tending his forge, he loved to create trinkets and weapons. Overtime his work became items of legends, artifacts handed to kingdoms, but everything he made he considered to be a failure, flawed, defective. He never had the supplies to make something truly amazing, truly astounding, an item worthy of the gods. That is until he came across a fortuitous encounter with a group of adventurers, asking him to use the bones of a goddess to create weapons to slay a demigod. This was the chance Vulcan had waited for, he poured all his talents into making these weapons, and finally an amulet for himself. The adventurers left with the weapons, and Vulcan finally felt at peace. Sadly, the next day he was killed by a group of mechanical creatures. Wanderers that later found his forge discovered his blueprints, his amulet and evidence of his creations, and dubbed him a ‘Blacksmith for The Gods’. This later changed to ‘Blacksmith of The Gods’, then to ‘Godly Blacksmith’, and finally ‘God of Blacksmiths’.
Johan blew a sigh of relief as he was finally done telling the tales of the new gods, he figured it was worth the time it took to see the look of amazement on the girl’s eyes. He figures it will be a while before he preaches again however.
