Diety

"It is always possible the records are incomplete."

- Proverb of the Azurejays, Scholar-Knights of San Sylvester

This article is incomplete and will require additional work.

A deity, also known as a God, Divine Paragon, or other appropriate epithet, is a special class of being whose power eclipses and encompasses that of all living mortals - even the least powerful god can handily dispose of the most powerful warriors and mages of Ahren, at least in single combat. Divines are always immortals - some of them have outlived all of history itself - and are extremely difficult to kill because of their peculiar relationship to life, existence, mortality (and mortals), and source.

In general, deities can be divided into three subcategories. Of those, the first two are the Gods Known, those species of divinity of which mortals are aware:

• Primordial Dieities, whose histories extend outward past the most ancient known history and may possibly eclipse the supposed cycles of existence and non-existence experienced by Ahren; that is, they are gods of the broadest universe, rather than Ahren itself. The Primordial Dieties are the most limited in number - but powerful - of all dieties.
• Realized Dieties are beings, who through one mechanism or another, have "become" divine at some point in the calculable history of Ahren. Some, such as the many in the High Elven Pantheon, were created or birthed by the Primordials, or indeed, any other dieties. Others, such as the deities of the Orcish Pantheon, became divine in death through the faith of their survivors. Still others, most famously the Awakened One, became divine in their own right through the realization of deep truths.

The third subcategory is largely unknown to the average mortal denizen of Ahren, and is considered outright heretical in almost all faiths: the Gnostic Aseity. These (speculative) deities (usually proposed as a Monad, or singular entity) stand entirely outside the fabric of cosmology. As even the primordial dieties do not claim to have created the universe in its entirety, where such an entity is believed to exist, the creation of the universe is usually attributed to it.

Under such divisions only one god is a complete outlier: Gob, the Goblin God, who by all outside accounts was certainly created ex-nihilo from the Goblins through raw faith.

The powers of divine beings are as varied as their origins and the interests of both them and their followers. While constrained to some degree by ideas like faith and portfolio, the gods nonetheless have minds and personalities more or less as mortals understand them (or at least are capable of expressing ideas in mortal terms - some, especially the primordial, deeply eclipse human cerebral capability). In general though, an understanding of the limitations of the divines relies on three core concepts: faith, source, and portfolio.

Faith

This information is couched in terms best familiar to Ars Magica and is used to explain how the universe works under the hood. It should not be taken as the average mortal's understanding of the mechanics of faith or even be usually considered true in regions where Ars Magica is not the standard operating model of magic.

The currency and feedstock of divinity is Faith, without which, no God can exist. In this sense, Faith is being used as the simple nomenclature of a force-substance similar to Source which can be generated only by mortals and is both consumed and transferred by the gods. Faith powers divine magic in a manner analogous to Source powering Ahrenic magics; not in the sense that clerics and wizards have different sources of magic, but in the sense that a deity's investiture of a cleric with the capacity for miracles is a consumption of Faith, the gestation of a realized deity by another deity is a consumption of faith, the elevation of a venerated ancestor is a consumption of faith, and a god's exerted influence within their realm is a constant consumption of faith.

Put simply, Faith is a sort of anti-source. It is created by complex and difficultly-understood (even by the divines) processes within the souls of sentient mortals, and transferred to deities through acts of worship, be they overt or covert. A deity can both horde vast stores of latent faith (it is thought that this is how the primordial deities survived between periods of the relative sparseness of mortals), work Faith-based magic in a similar way to how mortal spellcasters manipulate source, or even become Faith Starved.

A deity is said to become faith starved during periods in which it has few, or no, mortal followers. Such a condition can arise from the deity's own misrule, its failure to prevent cataclysmic events from befalling its people, or sectarian conflict amongst mortals. When this happens, a deity loses its ability to generate Faith in replacement to the faith it is spending by existing and maintaining a realm. Deities are acutely aware of this problem, in the same way that humans usually do not need to be warned of the horrors of the possibility of famine. If such a state persists long enough, the deity may eventually bleed off all of the faith that sustains it, and "fade from existence".

Peculiarly, through rare processes, a deity can be restored from having faded to faith-starvation through a sudden revival of its faith amongst mortals. It is thought this likely happened in the case of the unspeakably ancient god Anghara, who is the only deity whose teachings openly espouse a cyclic view of existence and time, and who simultaneously claims to have survived several such cycles.

Source

This information is couched in terms best familiar to Ars Magica and is used to explain how the universe works under the hood. It should not be taken as the average mortal's understanding of the mechanics of faith or even be usually considered true in regions where Ars Magica is not the standard operating model of magic.

The interrelationship between the deities and source is poorly understood, even by the gods themselves, as few (save those generally seen, in one way or another, as "gods of magic") have concerned themselves with a formal study of such things. What is believed to be true is that a deity can freely convert their reserved faith into source at massive returns; investing a small amount of faith therefore generating an enormous amount of source. Some deities are sufficiently talented at spellcraft as to then work magic more familiar to mortals using it; more often, they transfer this source directly to their devout as a reward for their faith.

Portfolio

All deities have a portfolio, or an area of mortal life with which they are concerned, and to within which their powers are typically constrained - note however that a narrow portfolio does not necessarily imply a "limited" godhood. A good example of this is San Heather, who is nominally a god of architects and engineers but has been seen, repeatedly, to be one of the pinnacle craftspeople amongst the gods and is known from hagiography to have been a mighty warrior during both her mortal and divine lives.

Portfolios can shift over time. Anghara is a marvelous example of this, having almost certainly once been but one god in a Pantheon of such beings, with a narrow focus on knowledge and magic, who, through changes in his faithful, has become an All-God, with purview over almost all aspects of life, in a manner similar to the Almighty. What effect this has on the personality or capability of gods is not known, but it is likely tied to changes in their available reserves of faith.