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.