Divinity

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They become consumed with purpose. But why? You could ask, “Why are we bound to the surface of the earth with weight?” The immense mass of our planet attracts us to it. But why? Whose design is that? For what purpose? A wall would fall, but a god holds it up. No rain would reach Asthaom, but a god brings it. A people would perish on the ocean black, but a god shields them from the sea and sky.

This is a god, the bones of the world. When asked what their design is, they would answer, simply, “Because it must be done.”

Gods are living things that have survived death. Metaphysically speaking, they can be thought of as wounds in the Memory of the World, or bodies of magic that exist despite the destruction of their physical bodies. Gods are eminent mages and world-shapers, powers which they have historically wielded over others with impunity.

History

The sun is thought to be earth’s first god. It was once a microbe living in the primordial sea, in a time before the proliferation of life as we know it today. When our previous star collapsed, this creature was annihilated, along with all other forms of life (and most of our planet.) What remained was a ghost of that ancient will to live, which accreted into the immortal sun. ? It is not known if this god survived the most recent collapse of the sun.

Although there are some beings old enough to remember a world before humanity, nobody knows who the first human god was. They are no longer with us. While functionally immortal, gods typically choose to die (or metaphysically disperse) after a few hundred years of immortality. See: Death.

Birth of Magic

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You cannot hope to count god’s atrocities in a single night.

This section is empty. More to come…

Metaphysics

Mind-body dualists define gods as “metaphysical bodies that exist without a physical body.” Typically, we would call this exsacrenation ? or death. The mechanism that allows gods to exist without a physical body is not understood. Nevertheless, gods seem to draw great power from this physical-metaphysical dissonance.

Some Mnemonists consider gods to be memory-wounds, or things that shouldn’t exist. Their power comes from being a paradox. ? Others dispute this, and theorize that gods are actually world-memories themselves, but ones that have gone “completely off-script.”

In Southern Satik, the word for god means something like “flayed one.” This is a fitting description of the Senkeretic divine. In Senkeretics, gods are beings that are alive, even though they’re missing all of the functions that are typically necessary for life. The purpose of divine metaphysics is to explain why.

Ascension

All gods ascend from mortal beings. Ascension is achieved through means that are poorly understood, even by modern metaphysics. Several mechanisms have been proposed:

Sunt-Force Trauma

Divinity is so tightly linked with trauma that the two are almost synonymous, leading some metaphysicians to theorize that divinity is achieved through trauma.

Mnemonists speculate that some forms of trauma are so extreme, they create dissonance between the material world and the Memory of the World. Individuals may then “step sideways” through this dissonance to escape the pain, becoming gods. Others propose that gods are metaphysical remnants of events so violent they cannot be scrubbed from memory. Senkeretics agree with the notion that divinity is a form of trauma, but argue that the process of becoming a god is a physical transformation. This trauma, therefore, is “physical in the way that psychological trauma already is; a wound in someone’s very being that becomes a wound in the flesh.”

Critics of this theory point out that correlation is not always causation. It may be that there are other mechanisms at work, for which trauma and divinity are merely consequences.

Descent Horizon

Some scholars reason that divinity is like magic. It isn’t just a personal wound, but a wound in the world around you. The same mechanism that caused the birth of magic also causes divinity. In other words, people become gods by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Much like an incident pit spiraling down into a point of no return, divinity is an “inevitable outcome” of many small disasters that come together to create the perfect storm. This is why it is so difficult to predict who will become a god and why—It is a function of history, not just metaphysics.

Kairos Limit

The Kairos Limit is an obscure metaphysical theory proposed by the Ancestral Sarikote, and later advanced by Motu’s loyalists in the shadow of Asthaom’s water wars. It claims that divinity can only be reached by violating certain metaphysical thresholds, namely the “Sea-Mountain Boundary.”

The meaning of this variable is lost to time. The phrase “Sea-Mountain Boundary” calls to mind the horizon line, but this is not the actual boundary. Likewise, it is said that the Kairos Limit is reached when someone “widens” the Sea-Mountain Boundary, or the gap between the earth and the sky, but this is thought to be an analogy for the true mechanism.

Many have attempted to reconstruct this mechanism, to the point that the Kairos Limit has attained an almost mythical status in divine metaphysics. Some used to think that the Limit was a “promised inheritance” left behind by noble and powerful ancestors. ? Others took this further, and theorized that the riddle of the Limit was itself the Limit— that is, by “solving” the Limit, one opens themself to divinity. Others yet developed a self-destructive obsession with finding this “solution,” and— dissatisfied with metaphysics— they withdrew from society altogether to pursue their work.

Today, the Limit is a curio. It has fallen out of favor with most metaphysicians because of its weak reconstruction, fanatical scholar-cult, and lingering association with Motu’s loyalists.

Death

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The matter remains unresolved.