Safe in the spots that the light can't reach

Oh yeah I mean the quick and dirty version which is what we're doing bc fire alarm, 2 am, etc etc, also I just watched Fire Island while drinking a canned mocktail to which I poured a shot and a half of tequila is really just that the Hall of Mercy represents that the Shapers were, well, Shapers.

Remember how fucking dumb the attempts at colonization metaphors were for Exandria because there, the gods genuinely did create mortals, and so any focus on the Primordials failed to really place mortals in said metaphors, which is kind of a problem if your goal is to talk about mortals? Well, this is the actual colonization metaphor. There are entities who likely will never recover from the impact of colonization (eg, the elves). There are people who are reclaiming past traditions and thriving, but bear a great deal of scars from that legacy (eg, the orcs). There is artificial separation and exacerbated racism/xenophobia vs. the much more....evenly heterogeneous with a few exceptions world of Exandria. The gods granting specific gifts to a few houses has left a legacy that persists despite Tansul being dead, which is much more accurate to postcolonial societies than this idea that you kill the gods and you eliminate the source of inequality.

I feel the Hall of Mercy is most emblematic, because it shows that the Shapers imposed an order on the world that was always too small for it. It never accounted for dragons, or giants, or anything sentient that was not of the seven races, and did not even permit them to go on the Old Path or whatever other pre-existing afterlife but actively forced them into this system that then gave them no space to exist.

Compare again with Exandria, where the gods created mortals and gave them the means to shape the world from the beginning, increasingly relinquishing power over time vs. tightening their clutches. We have a world where druids were hunted and persecuted vs one where the most established druidic order was independent of the gods, with no expectations of worship, and also was created to guard the sealed Primordials.