More Saints and More Angels

Well it’s been a second, but let’s get back to the gods of the old faith, shall we?

This post focuses on some gods that are a little less prominent, so there’s more about the gods and a little less about the servants. Oops

Utagi

Utagi is a god of the wild places, art, wisdom, and in some circles, madness. He’s also dead, though even in death he remains divine. Gods don’t die like people do, the death of a deity is a slow, slow process. They’re like stars, their end can take thousands of years. When a sun explodes, it expels most of its mass, ejecting it into space, the fusion at the center of its core stops, and even still, the star keeps burning in the sky, slowly cooling until it’s exhausted all of its remaining energy.

When a god dies, it falls dormant, slowly withering, expelling every last scrap of divinity. Utagi corpse still burns, for now. He answers prayers, he experiences wakeful fits of rage or sorrow, but the light is going out. His dreams used to fixate on revenge or the moments of his death, but now he dreams of his fading, and what is to come afterwards. 

Utagi was slain by Amora, as the stories go, when a long-standing feud finally boiled over, dissolving their friendship. He killed her followers she took his life in an act of revenge. It’s a story I won’t recount here, as you’ve doubtless heard it countless times before. 

Utagi’s most well known creations are the beastfolk, who were said to have been formed by an earlier conflict when his blood first hit the earth, however covering an entire mortal culture is a bit beyond the scope of this post. However, blood still flows from Utagi's mortal wound in the center of the Altumeran Heartlands, slowly corrupting the surrounding landscape. It drives the vegetation in the area to grow into strange latticed patterns, and it sprouts the Draedera, the nightmare beasts.  They are strange, mismatched things, half formed ideas of future creations, dribbling out of the dead god’s skull, swirling together into something more. Within the boundaries of the gravesite, you will find gaunt, emaciated wolves the size of houses with rows upon rows of teeth, beetles that mimic butterflies that mimic ants that mimic beetles again and again and again, frogs that are somehow only long prehensile tongues, great weeping songbirds that cry for you as you are hoisted upwards by their talons and dashed upon the rocks. 

Dying gods are still powerful. Nobody ever said they were beautiful.

Rastma

Rastma is a goddess of storms, the sea, change, and justice. She is blunt, simplistic, and incredibly powerful. Gods in certain southern traditions are often viewed along an axis of passive to active, and of the gods Rastma can be considered by far the most active. While all gods have active and passive elements to them, Rastma's activeness lies not in her self direction but her style of problem solving. Myths portray her as stubborn but generally content,  until spurred into action by some annoyance or injustice. She features heavily with her “partner”, Medibracha, as an example of an active/passive pair of gods, a somewhat common structure for close relationships within the divine pantheon of the Old Faith. The other stand out example of this is Amora and Natos, though they are somewhat more traditionally active and passive respectively, whereas Rastma and Medibracha’s self direction is inverted from the standard structure (ie a passive god that prefers to lie in wait and an active god that prefers to be proactive, rather than the other way around), but more on that later.

Rastma is a force of nature. She is idiotic, easily deceived, and quick to anger, it would be easier to stop a hurricane in its tracks than to quell her rage. Her chosen animal is the bull, the resemblance goes without saying. This is the form her angelic servants most often take. They are the Strangraeths, the 6 legged bulls of the storm; great, majestic beasts of thunder and lightning. They are often sent to test her devout, any who are able to successfully ride them and bend one to their will will forever have the blessings of the storm

She is also, according to myth, the queen of several lesser weather deities and spirits, though not willingly (Rastma wishes only to be the master of herself, anything else begins to get too difficult). These deities, the Raas Vedra are catalogued, revered, and invoked by the storm callers of Rastma, as well as the wizards in southern lands who still practice divine mathematics rather than more secular methods of arcane manipulation.

Medibracha

Medibracha is the companion and tormentor of Rastma, a goddess of the mercurial second moon, the goddess of knowledge and cunning, of scholars and thieves, the trickster spirit of the south. 

There are many stories about Medibracha’s exploits in myth, she spared humans of the world’s deadliest disease, rust, tricking it into infesting metal instead, she stole the wings of griffons and forced them to crawl, she scared frogs out of the water and onto the land. As previously stated a lot of her myths have to do with her relationship with Rastma, which is more or less comparable to an older and younger sibling dynamic. Medibracha feels mischievous, pulls a prank on Rastma, whose immediate reaction is to begin smashing things until she understands what’s going on, said to be echoed in the mortal realm by large catastrophic storms (it is for this reason you pray to Medibracha to avert a storm, rather than Rastma).

She’s well known as a trickster but also as a teacher, as previously mentioned. Medibracha is seen as both a liar and as someone who reveals lies as well, and any good follower will become a master at both in equal measure. 

“Lies” is also a bit more broad than it would appear at first glance. Medibracha’s teachings dictate that several key factors of reality are falsehoods, and her divine gifts allow one who has gleaned this reality to exploit these lies to their fullest.

The truth of forms is the most well known and flashy of these abilities, in fact, it formulates a large basis of transformative spells in the traditions of wizards and witches (or transmutation, as it is often known under the old elven classifications). In essence, the lie of forms is said to be the misconception that one’s given physical reality is immutable. The truth of forms is thus the opposite, no thing is ever truly fixed in its shape. Holders of this truth can transmute themselves, shifting from one form to another with ease. That thief you couldn’t find in your airtight vault is a fly on the wall, that sage who seemingly fled town during the purges was the stoat curled up in his old tattered robes, the woman who stole your purse now wears the face of her father, walking right past your face as you frantically search for her. The truth of forms is only really applicable to oneself, it takes far more effort to change another thing’s form as they have likely not grasped the fact that they are capable of such a change (that stone wall still believes it is immutable, the fool that it is).

The lesser known truths, of identity, place, and substance are all foundational to many mystic and arcane traditions, though they are said to be harsher truths to grasp, and it is said none in living memory have understood all of them. Of course, if someone did, would we have ever heard about them?