Religion:

Religion in Everwealth is both anchor and fracture, bound to the strange, distant nature of the gods. These beings are not architects but embodiments of existence itself, steel, fury, time, felt for ages only in omens, storms, and dreams. They never sought worship, nor answered prayer, content to let the natural balance hold. Mortals, unwilling to endure silence, invented answers of their own. Faiths sprang up for hearth and harvest, plague and greed, some so fervent that belief itself birthed false divinities, tulpas sustained by worship. It is in this grey space, between belief and being, that entities like The Hollow Crown are whispered of, not gods, not lies, but something other, stories made solid enough to stare back at you. The silence the true gods answered our prayers with however, ended with The Fall. Xaethra, goddess of greed and desire, set an infernal army of Devils from The Hells upon our world, forcing the gods to intervene at last. For the first time, they spoke, gifting laws, tenets, and the sacred link that allowed mortals to channel divine power as Clerics and Paladins. Faith became spell and steel, and armies marched under banners of heaven. But Xaethra’s victory collapsed when her own general, the devil Vile, betrayed her, shattering his soul in a failed mutiny that hurled a colossal golem into the ground like a meteor, sundering the world. She remained unscathed though, and would too in The Great Schism to follow that her devastation had caused; This would mark her 'defeat', and-so the gods withdrew, their voices silent once more, leaving behind only fragments of doctrine and the power to answer conviction, but not conscience. And when they withdrew, it was the false gods and in-betweens who filled the silence again, tulpas, cult-idols, and fae powers and Devil god-kings, whose presence is endured rather than worshipped. But now they know the truth, we know what a real god is, and the damage they can do.   What followed was no age of peace. Faith-born magick, blind to morality, armed both zealot and tyrant alike. Crusades bled the land white, inquisitions scarred generations, and the The Knights of All-Faith rose as arbiters of doctrine when the blood finally ebbed. They claimed authority over all belief, yet were mistrusted by many who remembered the long silence of heaven. Even Xaethra, reviled as the god who nearly damned the world, found sanctioned worship within their ranks. For she is not only greed but want and need, and some argue that makes her no less sacred than any other. Meanwhile, common folk still whisper about the Hollow Crown, “His Grace Who Waits,” who is said not to grant prayers but to collect consequences. He and others like him blur the line between divinity and dread, making every creed suspect: is it god, demon, or dream answering? Thus religion in Everwealth remains a paradox: the gods are vast and unknowable, yet dependent on mortal faith to endure. They are revered and feared, their gifts both covenant and curse, their silence as dangerous as their speech. And the institutions built in their name, chief among them The Knights of All-Faith, supposedly the arbiters of peaceful worship across religions, embody this contradiction most of all. They outlaw heresy, yet kneel before Xaethra. They preach unity, yet fracture belief with their own rivalries. They denounce false gods, yet leave gaps wide enough for things like the Hollow Crown to root themselves in mortal thought. They claim to protect the innocent, yet history remembers their pyres and inquisitions. In their hands, divine truth is a weapon, its edge turned outward in holy war and inward in hypocrisy. The gods may be silent, but their chosen still speak, and every word drips with the blood of interpretation.