First, there was Celeste.  Empress of the Heavens, the Creator of All Things,
she created the universe from nothing but her sheer force of will.  She made
the stars and galaxies, the planets, and the vast, empty space.  And when this
was done, she created seven other beings, to dwell with her, in and above the
cosmos, beyond the trivialities of living things.  Celeste is known to all
people, for all cultures have some theory of creation.  Even if her name
may differ from place to place, the stories are the same - of a divine force
that made all things, that raised the heavens, that gave the basic breath of
life.  The skraelings of the northern islands call her Iksha,
she-beneath-the-waves, believing her to live in the abyssal caverns.
The nomads who walk the upland moors name her as Telos, an old word not of
their own language, which loosely translates as "end" or "goal", perhaps
naming what she has done.  But most other folk know her as Celeste, the name
given to her during the time of the ancient empires, and as much as the divine
can speak, it is said that she approves.
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She then made two noble lovers, Aurelion, and The Lady.  Aurelion first: 
from iron and star-fire and steel, a being of impossible strength and honour.
His sword could cleave the earth.  It is said that in ancient time, beyond
all written history, the land was a single, massive continent; that Aurelion,
driven to rage, brought his hammer down from the heavens and shattered the
earth, creating the islands, atolls, and archipelagos.  He is worshipped by
good-hearted folk as a deity of valour, gallantry, and honourable combat.
Ancient people sacrificed fatted calves and sheep the night before battle,
both as a display of wealth, but also of piety.  His image is common on the
pottery of the ancient ages, a great, armoured knight wielding a massive,
curved blade.
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Then, Celeste combined serenity and starlight to make The Lady.  A divine
creature of immeasurable beauty and goodness, The Lady took Aurelion as her
lover.  In mortal form, she appears as pure light, though the most pious
have said that she appears to them directly as a young woman of impossible
beauty.  She has been reported with black hair, red hair, grey eyes, green
eyes; and she carries a small flute, from which she plays sweet and haunting
melodies.  Certainly of the three good and noble deities, she figures least
prominently in the histories - Aurelion and Celeste represent a kind of
righteousness and power to which many civilizations aspire.  But The Lady
has always had a small number of worshippers, often simple folk such as
peasants or shepherds.  She provides a kind of basic joy and happiness, and
her devotees claim a closeness to the divine which the other deities do not
provide.
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To balance these forces of good, Celeste then created two beings from the
empty void of space.  First, from the vacuum's inexorable cold she created
a being of winter, of dark magic, of killing and keening.  This creature,
appearing in human form as a bent crone, is the goddess known as Shiver.
Believed to be the most cunning of the Nine, she connives and schemes, taking
interest in some living things and seeking the fall of others.  She brings
early frosts, killing crops; calls blizzards to kill livestock and children;
delights in hardship and toil.  But to her worshippers, Shiver grants great
secrets.  In exchange for blood sacrifice, she imparts ancient powers,
teaching arcana that was lost when the world was young.
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But if Shiver represents a cold cunning, her ally embodies catastrophic
strength.  Formed of dark matter, the being known as Urgoth was made by Celeste
as a counter-balance to Aurelion.  Seen in earthly form as a massive shadow,
taller than the highest mountain, Urgoth commands a terrifying horde of
evil beasts: hydras and chimeras, goblins and ogres, nicors and bunyips.
Throughout living history, he has brought terrors to fight the creatures of
good rallied by Aurelion.  And if Aurelion loves honourable combat and valour,
Urgoth enjoys little more than wanton killing, maiming, and gore.  He delights
in torment.  His temples contain the dismembered and dessicated corpses of the
sacrificed, who themselves are prisoners captured in battle.  And he demands
the same cruel qualities in his initiates, who seek to sow chaos and
destruction on a grand scale.
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After the creation of Urgoth, the differences between the five of them quickly
became clear.  Urgoth clashed with Aurelion.  Shiver sought to undermine
the goodness of the cosmos.  And as the ages passed, they fought and fought.
They fought as the galaxies formed and as the world took shape.  And while the
world was hot and lifeless, Celeste looked down and saw that there was a
missing balance.  To counter this, she created three more of her kind, with
the desire that they would play the part of mediators and judges, that they
would help protect the universe from the sparring of the divine.
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To put life on the rocky world, she took stone and water and nascent air
and made herself another creator.  Vedere was his name.  Bringing him into
being, Celeste taught him how to create and name things.  He made oceans and
land, birds and insects, all manner of life.  He breathed life into everything
by speaking its true name.  He taught the tall grass to sway, and the mantis
to strike.  He taught fish to swim, and then to leave water to live on land.
He made the first inhabitants of the world, those whose names are lost but
known to him.  He made the fair folk, giants, unlings; later, elves and
dwarves, gnomes, goblins and ogres, man.  Though bound to neutrality, Vedere
most frequently sides with the side of good, as it is said that Celeste
granted a large portion of her own being when she created him.
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Within the earth, she placed a massive wyrm, a world-snake whose anger
shakes the earth.  Though Vedere created the initial placement of the world,
Voros enacts change through his wrath, raising mountains and erupting volcanos.
Living deep within the world, Voros sits apart
from the rest of the divine, rarely speaking, rarely taking sides, content to
watch the way things unfold.  His strength is apocalyptic: tens of thousands of
feet long, it is said he could reach from the earth and touch the moons in the
heavens.  His scales are said to glow a deep crimson, as if he is made from
magma himself, and his eyes are a deep and unsettling yellow.  Throughout
history, people have long associated him with dragon-kind.  Wyrms are made in
his image, of course, and it is believed that his worship peaked during the
historical period known as the Dragon Age.
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Finally, Celeste made one more creature.  She looked down at the world and
saw that it was beautiful, but static.  Seasons came and went, but the world
seemed to follow a set course.  Vedere had created a beautiful thing, but even
with Voros acting upon the world from below, the earth seemed predictable.
So she made an agent of unpredictable change, a creature woven from
probability and unpredictability who would walk the earth, causing strange
and unexplainable events.  She made him appear as a normal man, though
cloaked.  She granted him a companion, plucking a raven from a mountain ash
and granting it immortality.  And then, she set him loose.  He wanders the
plains and forests, crosses the oceans on his back with his raven on his
chest.  And everywhere he goes, there are strange, unexplainable events.  It
is said that he makes buildings collapse, or lovers meet; that empires have
fallen at his whim, and that others have formed in his wake.  He was named by
the tribes of the western plains as The Trickster, after he passed through
their camp and a birthing buffalo produced a pure white calf.  As this story
spread, so did his name, and this divine being has been known as The Trickster
since.
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She made only seven: eight gods and goddesses, including her, but they are
unerringly referred to as the Nine.  The ninth was not made by her, but is
something else entirely.  A beast that existed before the universe, and that
shall surely last beyond.  Pure blackness, pure evil, a force so terrible that
the others imprisoned it in a place beyond the universe, in another reality
altogether.  Sceadugenga: a word from the Wolf Age, it means shadow-walker,
light-eater.  Though trapped in its unreality, parts of it poke and probe at
the edges, testing its prison, manifesting briefly in the physical realm.  
These appear as masses of tendrils that writhe like a million snakes, and 
attack with such force as to raze entire islands.  Sceadugenga attracts the
most cruel and nihilistic creatures, those who seek the wholesale destruction
of all things.  Its servants can be identified by an ugly black mark on their
foreheads, a rune that pulses and bleeds, naming them as servants of the black
god.
