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The Pantheon

Seven gods, and the one who refused.

All eight were World Builders. Seven gave up physical form at the Awakening and bound their life-force into mortals. Taelkor refused, and the Long War followed.

The Faiths

Every one of the seven has a following, differing enormously in size, visibility, and in how much it wishes to be found.

• Church of Elandria. The largest, and the only one that is properly an institution: continent-spanning, with courts, schools, granaries, and roads. When someone says "the Church" unqualified, this is it.
• The Circle of Verdant Flame (Faeren). Ancient druidic order, secretive and reclusive, respected and quietly feared. Creed: "Purity is Balance. Balance is sacred." They are not pacifists about it.
• The Monks of Seraphis. Scholarly, sworn off permanent attachments so nothing distracts from study. Tutors, researchers, advisors, especially where there are no academies.
• The Deathless (Vaelith). Secretive and outlawed in some kingdoms. Their code is stricter than their reputation: the right to life, to death, to free will, and to submit.
• The Sapphire Temple in Lusteris serves the whole pantheon, though its High Priest has always been an Elandrian.
• Nytheris, Orithon, and Zareen have worshippers everywhere and no order that advertises itself. For Nytheris that is understood to be the point.
• The Order of the Black Star (Taelkor) was over five thousand years old and has not been heard from since 1267 SC.

Divine Isolation

The seven do not perceive the world as a person in it does. Having given up their forms, their contact with reality runs entirely through lifelines: prayer, ritual, divine magic, and significant acts within a domain. A war igniting reaches Zareen. A ruler enacting law reaches Orithon. Where the lifelines are absent, so are the gods.

Here the lifelines are strong enough that a god can push through briefly into something a person can stand in front of: a voice, a light, an intervention at the moment it is needed. Elandria most readily. It is rare, it costs them enormously, and none of them can sustain it.

They also do not simply talk to people. The most devout serve a lifetime without a word and read the answer in circumstance, in whether a prayer worked, in how a thing fell out. A god speaking plainly to a named person founds a faith.

Why Any At All

Newcome does not have an unusual number of gods. It has the only ones.

The Last World

Newcome was one of the last worlds the Builders made, and that is the whole explanation.

They had been finishing worlds and walking away for eons. The account says they did it "without question," which is not the same as doing it easily. By the time they reached this one they had left behind a long line of things they loved, and this was where it stopped being possible.

Several of the seven have work elsewhere in this galaxy. Faeren shaped forests on worlds nobody here will ever name. Elandria painted skies four systems over. They have had no sense of any of it in twelve thousand years.

Religion Elsewhere

The galaxy is full of faith: thousands of religions with temples, orders, scripture, schisms, and clergy who have given their whole lives.

None of it is connected to anything. There are no gods out there to answer, every galactic faith is a cultural invention, and nobody has ever had reason to suspect otherwise, because a universe where prayer does nothing is simply the universe.