Overview

The Divine are not a single race or species, but a collective term for higher life forms that manifest within the Grand Song. They emerge when sound becomes meaning, when harmony or dissonance takes form, or when stories persist beyond the lives that first sang them.

To mortals, these entities may appear as gods, angels, demons, spirits, or other unnamed forces.

The Four Divine Reigns

Scholars categorize the history of the Divine into Four Great Reigns, each representing a fundamental change in the nature and influence of divinity.

Reign of the Vital

The first voices to rise after the First Tone's sundering were not gods as mortals know them, but titanic principles. They were born not of belief nor story, but of resonance itself, sung into being by Hallenmyr in the raw wake of their own birth.

So came the Fundamyths, embodiments of Space, Time, Form, Mass, and other principles of being, and the Elemyths, sovereigns of the primal elements, such as Gdarna, Qundan, Arbn, and Rahn. These Vitals shaped the foundations of existence: the turning of heavens, the flow of ages, the bones of stone, the breath of flame. Their reign endures still, for without them reality itself would falter.

Reign of the Vaunted

In time, mortal song itself swelled into crescendo. Stories were sung so deeply they could not be silenced by death. From the Chorus rose the Vaunted; heroes, prophets, mages, kings, whose resonance defied stillness and endured beyond the grave. Some were lifted by the worship of others, deified by story. Others willed their own echo into permanence, refusing to fade. The Vaunted stand as living myths, demi-divine figures who bridge the mortal and the eternal, their power rooted not in the abstract but in the legacy of lives lived.

Reign of the Visions

When souls awoke, so did thought. Even the simplest idea; fire as warmth, death as terror, love as bond carried weight. With enough belief, focus, or repetition, these thoughts quickened into form. Thus rose the Visions, beings wrought not of matter but of meaning. They clothed themselves in guises mortals could grasp: angels, demons, spirits, or gods of river, harvest, justice, dream. As thought deepened, so too did the Visions, until they came to embody abstract truths: Law, War, Mercy, Death. Sustained by belief, they wove domains within the Chorus, and many ascended to godhood through the songs of mortal worship.

Reign of the Voyagers

The present age is marked by intrusion. Not all gods are born of the Grand Song, some arrive from beyond its harmony. These are the Voyagers, entities whose resonance descends from outside the known planes, beyond Hymn and Clamor, beyond even the Chorus. Alien, ineffable, often bent to patterns no mortal ear can parse, they sing songs that warp meaning or refuse to sing at all. Some bend reality with tones too vast, others remain as silence that listens but never answers. To mortals they are eldritch, unsettling, impossible; yet their presence cannot be denied. They are called Voyagers not for their journey, but for their arrival, often as heralds from the edge of the Hush.

Prichordials

The Prichordials are the eldest beings of the Grand Song, entities born from the first vibrations that split the Hush. They are not gods in the mortal sense nor spirits shaped by belief but the original chords of existence itself. Each Prichordial oversees a plane, or in rare cases such as Hallenmyr, multiple; their essence is inseparable from the timbre they govern.

Unlike deities, who are shaped by faith and will, the Prichordials are self-sustaining. They do not require worship, and they rarely clothe themselves in forms mortals can easily comprehend, save for Hallenmyr who created the physical template of life and sacrificed their self to birth the material realms known as the three echoes. They represent the unyielding symmetry of Order, the sundering fire of Dissonance, the ceaseless turning of Flux, and even the silent unmaking of Void.

Though often mistaken for gods, the Prichordials are more ancient and more remote. They do not bargain or scheme like lesser divine do; their will is absolute, expressed through angelic, demonic, or entropic hosts. To mortals, their presence is less an encounter with a person than with a law of nature itself, inescapable, unyielding, and infinite. Perhaps however, they could be swayed some way, but nobody knows how.

Fundamyths

The Fundamyths are the first generation of the Vital Divine, primordial entities woven by Hallenmyr in their late youth upon leaving their mother and father's shelter. They embody the fundamental laws that allow reality to function, acting as stabilizing principles rather than deities in the modern sense.

The Fundamyths do not rule or demand worship; instead, their continued existence defines the boundaries and structure of the cosmos itself, making ordered reality possible.

• Tirona, who marked the passage of Time
• Enos, who stretched the bounds of Space
• Tharnus, who bore the burden of Mass
• Omirel, who shaped the grace of Form

and countless "lesser" others—

They reside within the Chorus and are in charge of overseeing the affairs of the many pantheons and domains, and worlds within the Aria, ensuring that they do not disrupt the balance of the Grand Song.

It is heavily believed that they were responsible for the Late Choral Bombardment that drove titankind to extinction and eventually gave rise to the mortal specie that now thrive on Yoren.

Elemyths

The Elemyths are the second generation of the Vital Divine, born from the Kiln as raw forces given will. They are primeval embodiments of the elements; fire, water, earth and air, defined by constant motion and conflict rather than balance.

•  Gdarna, the Torrent Unyielding
•  Qundan, the Stone Unmoved
•  Arbn, the Storm Unbound
•  Rahn, the Flame Unfettered

Unlike the Fundamyths, Elemyths are volatile and self-asserting, their endless clashes spawning lesser elements and shaping the most violent and untamed aspects of the many worlds.