THE LORE
The Sworn Gods
The fallen human empire's formal, half-remembered pantheon — the gods the Vallen Imperium swore its oaths by. Vallen the Wright, who made humankind, is dead. The Lady of the Long Water keeps her silence. The Last Guest works on. They are not the world's only gods; they are one people's, and that people is fading.
The Sworn Gods are the human empire's oath made into a religion — not the world's pantheon, only Vallenkind's, formal and threadbare now that the empire that swore by them is four centuries in the ground. Every other people has its own gods, its own dead and living powers, and does not much care whom the humans swore to. But the humans still swear, and these are the names they swear on. **Vallen the Wright** — the humans' maker, god of making, law, and the well-made thing; the one who fashioned humankind and witnessed its oaths, which is why an oath sworn 'by the Wright' was held to bind. He is DEAD, broken at the Sundering. His is now a dead-god faith: shrines still tended, contracts still sworn by his name out of habit, priests still burying the dead and blessing the works of a god who cannot hear a word of it. This is the specifically human tragedy — your maker is dead, the world frays, and you do not know why. His agenda is none; his absence is the hole every other power in the Vale bends around. **The Lady of the Long Water** — deep water, patience, the keeping of the drowned dead whole. She is ALIVE and silent, the Hessk's god above all. Her work is keeping: quietly gathering in what the failing world lets slip — the drowned, the sunken, whole flooded villages — and returning nothing until she is asked for it correctly. She is the one god the Vyr fear, for a world they erase does not vanish; it falls into her keeping. **The Last Guest** — endings and death, the one power all peoples half-share. To name it is to call it — a spoken name is a summons — so no one says its name, and its rites are acts of closing: latch the door, snuff the lamp, shut the dead's eyes. It is AWAKE and working, and its one care is that every ending be completed properly. That sets it quietly against the Lady, who hoards endings unfinished, and against the Menders, whose death-by-monster is a botched, uninvited ending nobody closed. The old reckonings count the Sworn Gods differently and the priests count them shortest, but the empire that could have settled the question is gone. What remains is three names, one of them a corpse, held by a people who no longer rule anything but their own funerals.
KIND
religion
DOMAIN
the fallen human empire's formal pantheon
PLURAL NOTE
One people's gods, not the world's. Other peoples keep their own powers and do not swear by these.
Connected
Type Fields
All Relationships (16)
references
- ←The Drawing-Down — The chord was sung at Vallen the Forge-Singer, who could be reached only in his own language of song.
- ←Holy Thunderforce — The blade is the work of Vallen the Forge-Singer, who 'made law and weapon both by sounding them true' — the only sword that still carries his note.
- ←The Emerald Sword — The blade is the living-water blessing of the Lady of the Long Water — 'the Hessk still bow the green to' — given a hard edge.
- ←Ancelot, the Ancient Cross of War — The cruciform greatsword is the war-relic of the Unnamed Third of the Sworn Gods, whom it is bad luck to count aloud — an oath stood on its point.
- ←The Wanderer — The old creeds seat the Sworn Gods on the Wanderer — the Far House that walks its own road across the night sky.
- ←What the Writ Records — On the Settling of the Vale — Frames the breaking of the god Vallen as a lawful 'settling' of him, not a fall.
- ←The Sundering — The Sundering was the breaking of Vallen the Forge-Singer, one of the Sworn Gods.
- ←The Wright's Shard — The Wright's Shard is the largest shard of Vallen's sundered weapon — a piece of a god of the old pantheon.
- ←Correth, the Bronze Seat — The Bronze Seat held the Imperium's great temple to the Sworn Gods — the heart of the oath the empire was.
- ←The Old Reckonings — The Note is the bottom floor the Sworn Gods sang above — the held pedal-tone their voices stood on, and the deepest layer any cosmology in the Vale can name.
precedes
- ←The Primal Discord — The Sworn Gods swore because they had fought each other — their oath is the compact that ended the Primal Discord.
worships
- ←The Vallen Imperium — The Imperium was the oath to the Sworn Gods made into an empire; it swore by Vallen above all.
- ←The Hessk — The Hessk still bow the green water to the Lady of the Long Water, a Sworn God who never answered after the Sundering.
member_of
- ←Vallen, the Wright — Vallen the Forge-Singer is the first of the three sure gods of the old reckonings — and the only one known to have broken.
- ←The Lady of the Long Water — The Lady is the second sure god — sworn into the pantheon rather than over it, because the coast was hers before the Imperium had a single law to sing.
- ←The Last Guest — The Third is the last sure god the reckonings keep — and the one they will not name aloud.
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