Naturally, to the uninitiated, being part of an advance team sounded like a high honor; but having been at this now for just over two hundred years since her canonization, Hilda knew better. This was her fourth recon job, and they all sucked. They had to do a complete perimeter scan and interior scan for the region, which meant manually checking the area for any sign of anything that could potentially disrupt the archon and his or her Host.
If only she had a decent singing voice, maybe she could have gotten into a Host. Just show up and sing praises to Tiernon and whichever archon needed to announce their presence. Unfortunately, she couldn’t carry a tune, so that wasn’t going to happen. Not to mention that the body fascists in the Hosts would have made her afterlife miserable.
Squelch. Hilda stopped and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She had just stuck one of her golden-slippered feet into a six-inch-deep puddle of mud. Great. It would probably get stuck in there. Boots would have been so much better, but no; avatars could not wear boots while in the field. Not unless it was specifically mentioned in their canonization and subsequent depictions that they wore boots.
Seriously, was it really this big of a deal? There was a battle, a few priests got taken out, so they went dark. Priests die. If the Afterlife Receiving Department was a little quicker on reporting deaths, they could have had the explanation already, with no need of a Visitation. However, there were no reported dead priests from the area. Of course, everyone knew the department was a day or two behind on reporting.
Gods and Their Agents[9]
“So, what are your plans for him?” Antefalken asked Tom as they sat on a ledge a few hundred feet from the mouth of Tom’s cave. They had taken the knight there as a first staging location. The knight would need to sleep and the cave was far safer and cooler, a dark place for him to rest. The man was extremely beat up. Tom guessed he was about as close to dead as a human could get in the Abyss, without actually being dead.
“I have no idea.” Tom shook his head. “It was one of those ideas I had in the middle of combat that sounded a lot better then, than it does in reality now.” His wings twitched; he was still feeling rather wired from the battle, which was surprising given the time that had passed.
Antefalken smiled and shrugged. “Yeah, I’ve made more than a few of those decisions in my life. Usually involving a pretty maid.”
“After the crap he was pulling during the battle, I figured he’d try one last time to cheat, kill me. I was thinking if he finally showed some honor, I would just grab you guys and we’d leave. However, if he wanted to try and cheat one more time, I’d give him a lesson he would never forget.” Tom shook his head again. “Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time was that that meant I’d get a lesson too: what to do with a hostage.”
“Killing him would have been a lot easier. He would probably be happier up there in the heavens with his god. Who knows, they might have made him a saint,” Antefalken replied.
“Easier, yes, but I’d like to put an end to these stereotypes of demons being pure evil killing machines — basically all the bullshit he represents,” Tom said, gesturing to Talarius back in the cave. Tom grimaced and emitted a small belch, rubbing his stomach.
Antefalken chuckled. “Good luck with that; it’s pretty much what his religion is about. Tiernon is a warrior god, dedicated to expunging evil. It is their raison d’étre. You get rid of the stereotypes about evil, you get rid of their religion.”
“But evil isn’t a thing. It is a point of view, a perspective. It’s how one behaves and interacts with others that determines good versus evil,” Tom complained.
“Well, I might argue that it’s not that simple. From a practical point of view, it is political, or societal. People form groups, align with others for their common good. Oftentimes, what is good for one group is bad for another. Think of it as a competition for resources. So in that sense good and evil become relative, depending on which group you are in,” Antefalken said.
“Yes, but I think there has to be a higher level of arbitration or justice that can define intergroup good and evil,” Tom said, grimacing again as his stomach continued to rebel. Rather odd, since he had not eaten anything.
Antefalken shook his head. “That can only happen when everyone agrees on the same ultimate authority to decide that.” He rolled his eyes back a bit. “And even then, you have groups that say they worship the same god, but have almost entirely opposite views of that god or goddess, and then you get intragroup schisms and warfare.”
Antefalken chuckled. “I’d be careful of taking that too far; you might get lumped in with the followers of the archdemon Anselm.”
“Who?”
“Anselm, he was, or I suppose is, an archdemon popular about 1700 years ago. He was probably the only religious demon ever. He was also a masterful logistician who provided to his followers a logical proof that basically required the belief in the existence of a one true god, of which nothing greater could be conceived,” Antefalken said.
Tom grinned. “I think I’ve heard of such a being.”
“Indubitably, the omniscient, omnipotent single creator god,” Antefalken agreed. “Not a preferred concept on the Outer Planes.” He raised his arms in an amused shrug. “Go figure.”
He sighed and then continued. “In essence, Anselm argued that as a mental exercise, if one could comprehend or conceive of a being of such infinite magnitude that it was the best and most of everything, that it had every virtue, power and grace conceivable, such that no being could possibly be greater, then the existence of such a being in the physical world must be true, and one could not possibly deny such an existence.”
Tom shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Antefalken smiled. “His construct was to have one conceive of a being so vast, so omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent that one could not possibly imagine anything greater than that construct existing. This is because if you came up with some other property that a being could possess that would make it greater than the being of your concept, on any front, then the being of your concept would automatically possess it, in order to become the greatest thing you could conceive of.”
Tom shook his head again, still not following.
“Here is the clincher: existence, the actual physical existence of something is and must be a higher state of being. It must be greater than the simple concept of such a thing.” Antefalken looked him in the eye. “The existence of something is greater than the concept of that same thing. It is more real,” he said.
“Yes. I agree,” Tom said.
“So if your imaginary being was actually real, tangible, then it would be greater than your imaginary being. Yes?”
“Yes,” Tom said, starting to see where this was going.
“Thus, if you took your imaginary being, of which nothing greater could be conceived, and it actually were physically real, that real being would be greater than the imaginary being that wasn’t real. Thus, in order to complete your imaginary construct, your imaginary being must be real. Because true reality is greater than a mental construct. Thus, you must believe that your mental construct is real in order for it to be the greatest thing you can conceive of. Thus, if you can believe in such a being, then you must believe it exists in order to be logically consistent with yourself.” Antefalken smiled brightly at Tom as the demon tried to digest this mental bender.
Deities are primordial forces in the cosmos. They are the puppet masters that all mortals jump to. Their abilities cannot be measured in any rational manner, unlike demons or angels. They can be ranked against each other, but even so, those rankings are based upon mortal perceptions and may be grossly inaccurate.
The deities exist in the Planes of the Gods. This is a loose term for any region of the multiverse beyond the Astral Plane that is not the Abyss or the Elemental Planes and is not any of the Planes of Men. These planes, in many ways, are extensions of their inhabitants and creators. The physical laws on each of these planes are dictated solely by the will of the deity or deities inhabiting it. Thus, they vary greatly amongst themselves, and several even vary from whim to whim of the local deities. There is no guarantee that any of the tenets of magic, animus, or anything else will apply on any of these planes.
While many large regions of these planes have been set aside for the followers (deceased and otherwise) of various deities, other regions are completely hostile to mortal life. Normal, unprotected animus cannot survive in many of these regions: the magical and animatic forces are simply too great.
Many religions try to place the deities in their pantheons in specific hierarchies. In general, this system rates the deities of a specific pantheon by a class system, similar to avatars and others. The important thing to remember, however, is that this is not the same level system used for demons or avatars. Deities have no levels measurable in mortal terms. This is, further, a relative rating of deities within a pantheon. A class VI deity in a minor pantheon, in objective power, may only be able to shape the course of time as much as a class II deity in a major pantheon.
In general, the power of a particular pantheon, and its ability to control events on the Planes of Men, is usually (but not always) commensurate with the number of worshippers on that plane. Deities within pantheons are usually very busy struggling between themselves for domination and usually will not pay too much attention to things beyond the realms of their worshippers on the Planes of Men. Thus, most friction between deities comes from within a pantheon.
Pantheons, however, do not live in a vacuum. There are quite obviously other pantheons competing for control of the same nearly infinite number of (in)finite planes of men. One might presume that there is enough space to go around, but apparently not. In addition to rivalries within pantheons, there can also be rivalry between pantheons.
It is only within these horrifying times of struggle that one can make judgements on the powers of specific deities relative to those in other pantheons. Even so, it is nearly impossible to do, since so much of the battle is truly beyond mortal ken. Further, such battles are also usually indirect, played out by mortals acting as the pieces in a game of chess (in the same manner deities in a pantheon might struggle, only on a more epic scale). Often, such titanic struggles may destroy entire nations (and/or banish or slay pantheons) or even entire planes.
Even in non-epic struggles, in everyday business, few deities get too involved. Except for certain very independent-minded deities, very few will ever engage directly with any opponent, or even work directly on the Planes of Men. Almost all prefer to work through mortal agents, with free will providing the randomness that makes the game exciting for the deities.
Agents of the gods, those magical beings variously called saints, angels, or avatars, along with mortal agents used by prophecy or chance, are for our purposes simply referred to as avatars.
Avatars
Avatars are the agents of the gods. They are servants who are assigned to a wide variety of tasks and act as the emissaries and agents of the gods upon the Planes of Men and other planes. The term
Angels are perhaps the most categorized of all avatars. There exists a hierarchy of angels which seems to transcend the different pantheons. While not all pantheons have angels (and often, if they do, they will be called something else), most do have at least a few. Not all pantheons that have angels have angels of all classes. Some may only have one or two angels in the entire pantheon. Finally, often it is not apparent to the average worshipper if a particular divine servant is an angel or something else. For the purposes of this treatise, all avatars that are not saints, mortals, or deific incarnations (gods in physical form) are considered angels.
Angels are immortal, eternal beings (although in principle, they can be slain) like the gods themselves, but created by the gods. Angels are primarily beings of spirit who are capable of assuming physical form. Various religions have, in fact, commented on the noted similarity between angels and demons. In fact, there is a great deal of similarity, even in terms of mortal descriptions of these beings. Heretical individuals might even go so far as to suggest that the principal difference between demons and angels is that angels are in the service of the gods and demons are not. Obviously, however, there is much more to it than that. Angels are generally benevolent towards mortals (at least towards those of their deity's faith) and most reports indicate that they are beings of great beauty and magnificence. The obvious counter to this is that the angels of the darker gods are not necessarily beautiful, and are certainly every bit as dangerous as any demon. The angels of a particular pantheon always mimic the ways of their masters.