Gods Still on Earth

Soul Guides of the Dead are deities that have a special ability, one that many other gods often lack. They have the ability to pass the veil between reality, which allows them to quickly teleport to the Underworld and back to Earth as they deliver souls of the dead to the Underworld Judges. There used to be many soul guides, but in current times, there are only three remaining on Earth, and only one of them still performs the task of delivering souls to the afterlife.

Soul Guides also have the ability to split into various splinters or Shards of themselves. While most other gods are cut to pieces as part of a war or rebellion like Cronos or Osiris, Soul Guides split themselves into smaller pieces willingly. They are said to have tens of thousands of shards, all with a fraction of their original power. Some Soul Guides like Anubis look the exact same no matter which shard you are speaking to. They have the same personality and power set, and they all wear a jackal mask. Others like Xolotl have many different forms and no two of them look the same or even share the same personality. Shards of Xolotl do share the same thing in common though: They all lack eyes.

The son of Ra and the Egyptian Soul Guide of the Dead. The Egyptian Gods were among the first pantheons to leave Earth for the Celestial Realm. After Thoth and Ammit left, Anubis was unable to continue weighing the souls of the dead on his own and his only duty was to make sure Earth was free of wandering spirits. In time, The Egyptian underworld, the Duat, became a vast ruinous desert, where souls wandered aimlessly regardless of their deeds in life. These souls would coalesce together into demonic entities that grew more powerful as the desert was filled. These entities eventually grew so powerful that they threatened existence itself.

The Egyptian Underworld was eventually sealed off by the Lords of the Infernal Realm. Hades, the Greek God of the Dead, tasked Anubis with delivering souls to him instead. Hades would sort them and send them to where they deserved to be. Anubis carries out the task to this day, appearing before recently departed souls as a version of their Grim Reaper and taking them to the underworld. Contrary to popular belief, Anubis does not have a Jackal head. He has a very human face with black hair and golden eyes. He just hides it with a large blackened canine mask, showing his indifference to the dead.

Son of Erebus(Hades) and Nyx. He was the Greek God of Death, transporting the recently departed souls of the dead to the Underworld, who were later ferried across the river Styx by Charon. Around five hundred years ago, an event caused him to leave the Underworld. Some say it's because Hades refused to leave Thanatos his kingdom when he left, instead deciding to give it to his niece Persephone. Thanatos left the Underworld for Earth and has yet to return or deliver a single soul.

On Earth, Thanatos stopped dealing with the recently departed and instead started absorbing the unfilled aspects of his other siblings who left for the Celestial Realm long ago. For a small fee, he can tell you your future, when your inevitable death comes (taking the aspect of Moros). Or you can pay him to take vengeance on someone who wronged you (taking the aspect of Nemesis). He is the God of Death, the God of Retribution, the God of Doom, the God of Fate, the God of Sleep, of Dreams, of Nightmares, and more.

He has gathered quite a bit of power and material wealth, enough to take on any of the Kings of Hell, though taking on so many aspects of so many different gods has started to making him a little unstable, his personality wildly shifting during the course of a conversation. He probably would have been fine if he split into multiple shards of himself like the other soul guides, but he is arrogant and wants the power of these dozen gods in one single form.

An eyeless shapeshifting god from Mesoamerica. He is the Twin of Quetzalcoatl and also the dark opposite of Quetzalcoatl. His brother is the heroic warrior wind god of the Morning Star, revered and loved by all. He is the villainous cowardly fire and lightning god of the Evening Star, feared and hated by all. His brother is the God of Knowledge, Healing, and Learning. He is the God of Monsters, Death, and Deformities.

All of the other gods loathed him, and the people of Central Mexico only worshipped him because they were afraid of his brother. The only job he was good for was being a messenger and guiding lost souls to the underworld. Quetzalcoatl always believed in him though, even tasking him with guiding the Sun through the underworld each night, a job that Xolotl accomplished repeatedly for thousands of years.

When the other Aztec gods left Earth for the Celestial Realm, Xolotl was banned from going. Quetzalcoatl left him the Sacred Wind Jewel, Ehecacozcatl. Recently in the last five hundred years, Xolotl disappeared. The Sun can take care of itself. Souls cannot, and Xolotl's lack of action has made the problem of spirits overrunning Earth much worse recently. And since all of Xolotl's various shards have their own personalities and identities, convincing them as a whole to resume their duties is impossible.

Artemis is the Goddess of Archery, the Hunt, and the Moon. She was born in the lands of Lycia with her twin brother Apollo. Her mother is Leto, the Goddess of Wolves. She spent most of her early years in Lycia, until Zeus came to destroy the land. He took Artemis and Apollo back to Greece with him and considered them to be Olympians, the ruling Gods of Greece.

There Artemis grew up under Zeus's tyrannical rule. When she was old enough she would run into the forests and stay there, far away from Olympus, where she was friends with various Dryads. Her one love in life, Orion, was killed by a serpent, sent by an unknown god. This caused her to become quite detached from Olympus and embrace nature instead.

When the other Greek gods left Earth for the Celestial Realm, Artemis stayed behind, still distrustful of the other gods. She shows up here and there throughout history, but otherwise seems unimportant in the big picture.

Bastet is an extremely powerful but affable and easygoing Goddess that reincarnates from time to time. It is unknown how many lives Bastet has lived but some people say the number is nine. Bastet's current form is named Nourhan El-Masry, and has been around for about sixteen years. She is a student at Manalith Academy. The students there think she's a little too friendly, mostly because Bastet has the tendency to act like cat more than a human sometimes, but she is still one of the more popular students at the school due to her kindness.

In times that were ancient even to the people that built the pyramids, Bastet went by a different name, Sekhmet. She guarded her father Ra from the Serpent Apophis for a time and was said to be a fierce lion Goddess. When Apophis was defeated, Sekhmet 'died', and was reincarnated into a new form, becoming the Goddess of domestic cats, homes, and women. In current times, the DDDF keeps tabs on her but has no reason to take any action. They do have contingency plans in place however.

While many different pantheons of gods left Earth for the Celestial Realm, there are notable exceptions, mainly in southern and east Asia. In Japan, a number of deities are housed in shrines with some of the sites so holy that normal people have never seen the inside and have never seen their gods. Raijin however, has traveled outside his shrine and has been seen many times. Most people outside Japan thought his appearances were nonsense until after Great Revealing and the revelation that there still Gods walking the Earth.

Raijin is a chaotic destructive god and loves battle. He famously defeated invading Mongol fleets in 1274 and 1281 by creating a typhoon and hurling lightning bolts at the invaders, destroying their ships. In 1853 he directly challenged American warships, but a lucky cannon strike on his head knocked him out. After that, Japan was forced to open their borders to Western Trade. Raijin never lived down that embarrassing moment.

The Son of Odin and Jörð, Thor is the Norse god of Lighting and Strength. Asgard exists in the Celestial Realm, but the gods regularly visited Earth, especially Thor, who loved battling Giants and fighting in wars. During wars, he would often help the side that prayed to him before a battle and his presence made quite the impact.

When the people of Northern Europe started converting to Christianity, their old gods stopped visiting Earth with the exception of Thor. He continued to fight in wars until no one prayed to him anymore. Thor challenged the remaining gods on Earth to a fight if he came across them, and there were dozens of such battles. Eventually he lost the will to do such things.

He refused to go back to Asgard and stayed on Earth. He lived in Norway and then Iceland for quite some time. The last known battles he participated in were during World War I.

Hera was always a little unhinged. She connived her way into being Zeus's consort and the Queen of the heavens, at least in Greece. She took out half a dozen other goddesses before her, either by convincing Zeus to kill them, turn them into monsters, eat them, or exile them.

When Hera was finally officially married to Zeus and made queen of the heavens, she held that title for only a few decades, a blink of an eye in the life of a god. Athena had executed her rebellion and defeated Zeus, deposed Hera, and forced all the other gods to bow before her, at least for a short time. When the time came for the Greek Gods to leave Earth for the Celestial Realm, Hera refused and stayed behind.

She Convinced the people of Greece that the gods were still around, and also spread the Greek influence across the world. She became known as Juno in Rome. But she was also quite the Tyrant, every much as terrible of a ruler as Zeus was or Chronos before them. She was defeated by Artemis and Apollo with the help from their mother Leto.

The Goddess of Werewolves and the mother or Artemis and Apollo. All European Werewolves are descended from her in some way and need to drink her Blood in order to gain their full power. Leto once had lands of her own, Lycia, in western Anatolia. Her kingdoms were destroyed by Greek armies and Leto swore to take vengeance on them. before she could enact her plan, she fell asleep for hundreds of years.

Unlike Hera, Leto was not torn into a thousand pieces when she went dormant. Artemis and Apollo would not allow it. Instead they secured their mother in the Temple of Leto in the Alps, then left. Thousands of years later, during World War 2 Leto woke up and set her werewolves across the world to kill everything. Artemis stopped her and had her body sealed in a metal casket, wrapped in chains and sealing magic. Hopefully this prevents her from reawakening, for now.

Zeus was the god that overthrew Chronos. The resulting war, the Titanomachy, ended with the Olympians taking control of Greece. Zeus however was quite a poor ruler. Chronos was a Tyrant, but his world was at least one of order and harmony, even if forced. Zeus let Greece fall to ruin and the only time he took action was because a certain town or city wasn't worshipping him anymore so he would use a Thunderbolt to destroy it. He also had a habit of forcing himself onto every woman his eyes came across even if they were related to him.

Zeus was eventually overthrown by Athena, daughter of Metis. Metis was Zeus's second wife after Leto. Hera convinced Zeus that Metis's child was the one that would overthrow him, so Zeus swallowed Metis. Athena was born inside an empty void in Zeus's stomach and when she grew up, she clawed her way out. Athena played nice for a few centuries before she launched a rebellion against Zeus.

When Zeus was defeated, Athena gave him the same punishment as Chronos. She had him chopped into countless pieces. these pieces were than scattered across both Earth and the Underworld so Zeus could never be reassembled. Athena then had most of the Greek Gods leave to the Celestial Realm instead of taking over rule of Greece.