The Dead

"The Gods are Dead and they are in Paradise. Hallowed be their forgotten names." -- Common conclusion of prayer in Church of the Five Saints

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According to the common knowledge of The Enlightened, either before or during The Pyroclastic Ruin most of the Gods perished. In addition, according to whispered legend, which borders on bald-faced heresy, says that the ancient Gods of The Enlightened used to walk the world and made their homes on A'nensire. These taboo histories go on to say that it was these same corporeal deities who's terrestrial war culminated in The Ruin itself. Whether The Ruin was the means of their demise or the result of it remains a subject of much contentious debate amongst these heretical philosophers.

What is known, according to The Church, is that all the Gods now reside in Paradise, a perfect afterlife reserved for those faithful few who follow the teachings of the Five Saints. In this round-about fashion, the Church has kept the Gods at the center of the faith while establishing exclusive means by which they can be accessed (The Saints).

As far as Church records go, it is unclear which of the Gods were so slain. Church doctrine further complicates the subject as it has long been deemed sinful to write or speak the name of any deity in vain (this is to say never written or said aloud by a mortal, period). In all official church texts and holy scriptures the names of all Gods are represented four horizontal lines, three short, one long. The three short lines are thought to stand for the prefix "Ash", an ancient elven honorific meaning "Mother/Father/Parent" in a penultimate sense, while the final longer dash would most likely hold the place for each God's proper name. Because of the gross ambiguity of such a vague set of place holders, not only have the names of the Gods been lost but even the spheres of influence and portfolios of purview have become mashed together, leaving a hand-wavy "the Gods created all and ruled all" statement with no real exposition.

  Of course, much of these teachings conflict with and contradict other faiths, and even some of the histories supported by the Church itself. For example, all of the sapient races indigenous to Veraqez whom worship Gods and the like hold that most all of them are alive. Now, most of these divine beings are distinctly different from those the Enlightened formerly worshipped, and this isn't to say natives to Veraqez don't have stories in which some of their Gods die or even stay dead, but it is of import to point out that none outside of the Church seem to believe that ALL the Gods are dead.

  Perhaps more importantly, however, is the Church's stance on the Bound. How could there be such vile Gods, who had to be locked away from the mortal world by the sacrifice of their godly brethren, if all the Gods are dead? If the Bound are also dead, then why would the Dead have had to sacrifice themselves to bind the Bound? And if the Bound are bound and not dead, then the claim of all Gods being dead must surely be untrue. Some devout scholars may try to jump to absurd conclusions, claiming that the Binding stripped the Bound of their godhood or some similar interpretation of their scriptures, even though all the holy books clearly state the persistent divinity of the Bound. As it is, it just remains one of those great contradictions the Church just don't want you to think about too hard.