Deities
There are four keepers, each one representing one of the four forces of the world of Avern, Magic, Nature, Life and Death. Each of these are among the firstborn of the gods, and are somewhat more worshipped than any others among the pantheons. Even after the Abandonment, the four Keepers are often whispered about, and some old ones remember what they were. Common sayings related to them exist, even if the origin has been forgotten. During the harvest, Charin is invoked, and her symbol is often etched on farming equipment even if it has been forgotten why it is done that way. Four holidays are named after the Keepers. Each of the Keepers is the sovereign of their own realm beyond the physical plane. The Keeper of Stars resides in the Astral plane, the Keeper of Nature resides in the Physical plane, the Keeper of Life resides in the Upper planes in the Halls of the Souls, and the Keeper of Death resides in the Lower planes, in the Halls of the Dead. The Keepers are all neutral in their outlook on life, the four aspects being neither good nor evil, nor aspects of lawfulness or chaos.
Worshipers of the Keepers feel that those that worship the other deities are incredibly small minded and do not understand the broadness of the universe. Of all the Keepers, the Mother of Elves is perhaps the best known. After all, her children all take from her name.
There are those that worship the four keepers together. When these are found, they use a holy symbol that combines all four of the symbols of the Keepers. Usually it is an hour glass laid over a spiral background with a leaf to the right and a seven-pointed star to the right. There is debate among people as to if the Maker and Unmaker are really two of the Keepers, but it isn’t so in reality, of course.
The Primary deities were the second born at the dawn of creation. These deities were born with a balancing opposite. The order of their birth is presented in the chart, born in pairs with their equal and opposite. The neutral and evil nature of the deities determines their place of residence, either the upper or lower planes. Those that are neutral in nature take up their residence in the planes of law and chaos, to either side of the physical, but neither upper nor lower.
The people who follow each of the primary deities tend to align with each other. They group in fellowship, and in worst case it leads to fanatic tendencies among them. Some groups have subgroups and occasionally there are groups that worship groups of more than one god/dess as a group. These groups are looked upon several different ways. Single god/dess worshippers sometimes call these blasphemers, feeling that worshipping more than one god/dess is tantamount to being a traitor to all the gods. Those that worship multiple gods feel that the single god/dess worshippers are missing out on a world they cannot even understand. They often refer to them as single or closed minded and much too narrow in focus. There are pantheists, those that worship the entire pantheon, and are often disliked by the multitheists and monotheists alike because they are not choosing a path at all. They also feel that those that worship the secondary or auxiliary deities are too narrow in focus, because of the specificity of the foci of the secondary deities.
The secondary deities were the third grouping of gods born to the Phoenix of Light and Phoenix of Dark. Once again, they were born in pairs, with their equal and opposite. They are somewhat lesser in scope than the primary gods, their focus tends to be on some specific area, but even that specific area can be very broad. They are born in opposition, but some of the pairs are Neutral in their outlook, such as Joryn and Soryn. These two don’t necessarily engage in fighting with each other, they are simply opposite aspects of the world. Others, such as Luan and Ravera, are in constant contention with each other. They all have a specific purpose that could be in another god’s domain, but rather than other, they have been born to assume the powers over that area. There is a still a lot of debate among their worshippers as to whether they are as powerful as the primary deities. The truth is that they are just as powerful, they are just created for an even more specific purpose as the primary deities. Like the primary deities there are monotheists and polytheists. There are those that choose to worship the secondary deities as a whole pantheon, and those that choose to worship all the deities together. The secondary deities seem to not prefer chaos or order at all, unlike the primary deities.
Once the Abandonment happened, all of the Great Prophets went into hiding. Ackana sent assassins after them all and received word that they had each been killed in turn. She doesn’t know that they banded together to trick her into believing they were all dead and are all three frozen in time and space at different locations throughout the world of Avern. Each of them has a trigger that will release them from their frozen state, but none will be released until the Veil has fallen. The exact time is unknown to anyone even the Dark Phoenix who can see through time cannot see past the Veil.
The untold secret that only the Dark Phoenix holds is that these four were only created through her intervention. For many years, the gods attempted to birth children of their own, however without the divine spark from the Phoenix, the children simple ceased to be, sometimes in a moment, sometimes in a few days. Either way, The Dark Phoenix could hear their cries and pain from trying to live when they could not, and thus intervened to “help” her children with their own children. The passing interest in having their own children left after there had been four born, the other gods abandoning their thoughts of creation for other pursuits and after they realized how unlikely a viable offspring would happen.