Something I’m really, really wondering in Araman, given everything we’ve just witnessed with Kother’ai, the ritual, re-tethering the afterlives is …
Where did the dead gods go?
The afterlife is broken. As a system, right now, the whole thing is broken. The Tenebral Reaches, something that was only ever intended to be a liminal space, a veil for souls to pass through on their way to somewhere else, has become this massive geography, bloated with trapped souls. The afterlives of the Shapers were lost, untethered, and floated off with all the souls who’d been sent to them over the millennia under the Shapers still trapped within them.
I get the impression that the Old Path was how things were originally meant to work. Souls were never meant to be stuck in death at all, either in the Tenebral Reaches or in an afterlife, at least not permanently. They were meant to walk the Old Path, to leave behind their old lives, and cycle back into the world to live a new life.
That conversation with Tsul’rekshi: “But something endless cannot simply by unmade. Energy cannot ever be destroyed. And so new form need be given to it, to unmake the evil that was.” It was meant to be a cycle. Reincarnation. Creation and destruction in an endless loop, allowing that which is eternal to constantly change and keeping moving. Souls. Energy. You live, you die, you circle back, you live again, you die again.
But not all souls wanted to do that. Even before the Shapers. Some souls wouldn’t move on, tried to stay in the Tenebral Reaches, and that was where you got undead.
And then the Shapers arrived, and they maybe … either agreed with that, or took advantage of it, or possibly both, but they made their afterlives. Possibly as batteries? For the same reason the Tachonis are now trying to pump souls into the Tenebral Reaches. Thousands upon thousands of souls, trapped in pocket dimensions, feeding power to the Shapers they believed in (willingly or not). They carved out pieces of other planes to turn into afterlives, and started diverting souls on a massive scale away from the cycle of life and death and into permanent storehouses.
At least Sylandri and Azgra, and possibly the Shapers in general, appear to have been violently opposed to the Old Path. Which does make me think that the afterlives may have been an important part of the Shapers’ power base. They came down hard on druids, tried to destroy knowledge of the Old Path itself, so that much of how it works survives mainly as folklore and superstition, and did a lot to indoctrinate mortals to seek out the ‘safety’ of their afterlives instead. The ‘promised reward’.
Well. Except for Azgra, who didn’t bother sugarcoating it with a pretty lie. He just straight up told them that they belonged to him and they’d go where he said they’d go, and they’d fight his wars for all eternity. Uli: “Of all the Shapers and all the people of Araman, he told us to serve him, as all the Shapers did. But we were the only people that knew that we were doing it without a reward. The land that was promise to us after death was the same as life, just more suffering. Endless wasteland choked by ash and fire.”
But I do think that the afterlives probably were intended to be … something like batteries? Places to store power in the form of souls, belief, slaves.
And then the Shapers died. And something about the shock of their death completely untethered those afterlives and cut them adrift. The souls in those afterlives remained lost and trapped. And because …
The Shapers ruled for thousands of years. They’d been siphoning power and souls from the cycle for thousands of years. They’d destroyed knowledge of the Old Path, attempted to stamp it out. They’d indoctrinated their peoples, for thousands of years, to yearn for the safety and security of a permanent afterlife instead. Eternity protected by the grace of your god, no need to fear the turn of the wheel, forget everything you were, lose everthing you’d gained, to gamble on your next life. The Old Path is frightening to a lot of people. Oblivion. Yes, you’ll go on, but you won’t remember. It’ll be you, but not you. Your soul, but not your life, memories. Going around again is frightening. The Shapers made it so you don’t have to take that risk. You just go one place, and you’re safe forever more.
So even after they died, I think a lot of mortal souls just … didn’t know where to go anymore, or didn’t want to go anymore, and the Old Path itself has been so damaged by millennia of loss and damage and decay that it’s … well, even more scary, and also in need of all the help it can get. So souls are getting stuck. The Tenebral Reaches is ballooning under the stress of all the stuck souls who are too afraid to go on anymore.
Did the Shapers also have souls? Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transmuted. They were eternal. They can’t just have vanished. That energy had to go somewhere.
So … where? Where did the souls of the dead gods go?
So. I think there are three options? And they’re all some degree of concerning-to-potentially-apocalyptic:
They, like so many other souls right now, are trapped somewhere in the Tenebral Reaches.
They went to their own afterlives.
They didn’t go anywhere. They’re still on Araman itself, in the form of the Barrowdells.
If it’s the first option, it might explain what the hell the Tachonis are fighting in the afterlife, why they need an army, why they need to cram as much power as possible into the Reaches, and why Primus Tachonis is so fucking terrified and sure that his family will either be victorious or dead within the year. There might be … there might be undead gods trapped in the veil between worlds. Which is terrifying. And a little poetic, if the gods themselves were also trapped by the damage they’d done to the Old Path and the shape of the world. Hoist by their own petard, as it were.
Potential issues with this idea: Why did the Tachonis never ask anyone else for help with, you know, the apocalyptic threat of multiple dead gods? And also … are the Tachonis supposed to have been strong enough to hold off dead gods all by themselves? For seventy years? Might be reaching.
If it’s the second option, that they all went to the afterlives they’d created for themselves, that part of the purpose of siphoning souls from the cycle to create afterlives in the first place was to have both batteries and potentially a backup seat of power, then that might make our protagonists new mission to reconnect said afterlives to Araman a bit … Um. Well. That could pose a tiny complication? You’re not just bringing back the afterlives, you’re also bringing back the dead gods. Which would, to be fair, be deliciously cruel.
Potential argument against this option: Kother’ai, the ritual, just successfully hooked the Dying Fields back up to Araman, and Azgra did not come with it, and Vokjan Murzat, who has been in the Dying Fields since his death more than a century ago, did not know where Azgra was. Which would suggest he’s not in the Dying Fields.
However. The thing is. Both for this theory and the third theory of the Barrowdells. Azgra may have been a special case? Because his Barrowdell is the only good Barrowdell. Azgra may have been …
I’ll come back to Azgra. Give me a second.
The third option is that the gods never left Araman when they died. Their souls became their Barrowdells, their malice directly converting to a living, or rather undead, curse upon their lands and their peoples. This may be why the Barrowdells are so powerful and entrenched. The gods cast their souls into a dying curse upon the ones who slew them. That curse is being powered by their souls. Which …
I like the idea. Very Captain Ahab. Hatred beyond death, malice beyond death. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!” They hated mortals so much for daring to strike them that they refused all hope for themselves, any chance to move on, and bound their own souls to the earth just to be able to punish them. It would be cool.
That would make fixing the Barrowdells essentially a matter of exorcism. Attempting to heal the gods and move them on. Because energy cannot be destroyed, only transmuted. To heal the land, the gods would have to move on.
And here. Here we come back to Azgra. Why is his Barrowdell the only good Barrowdell? What did he get that no other god did?
A Farramh. The ritual of the Old Path.
Is he not in the Dying Fields, not in his Barrowdell, because he was allowed to move on? To walk the Path and cycle back as something new?
And would … would he have gone? Azgra, of all of the Shapers. Azgra, who never even tried to disguise his malice. Would he, of all the gods, have be pacified enough by some grudging, forced words of thanks to simply move on? Azgra, who was motivated by hatred more openly than any of them.
But. But he was more open than any of them. He didn’t hide it. And there’s also …
Uli: “You lord over a people, tell them that we are meant to cover all of Araman in conquest and victory, and he tells us to be brave, to fear nothing, march forward though the blood rings in your ears. How old, dead Azgra thought he was doing anything other than training us to do what we did, I’ll never know.”
Maybe he didn’t think he was doing anything else. Maybe he intended exactly what he got. War and conquest that covered the whole world. The death of the Shapers dream, at his hands. The hands of the weapons he’d made.
Tsul’rekshi: “Gavzidra, the River of Blood, first flowed upon the face of Araman when Azgra the Conqueror was first wounded by his siblings as he sought to bring strife, conquest, and war to the face of Araman. His dream did not exist in harmony with theirs. And therefore, back did they drive him, to the lands of Kahad, where he bled, and from his blood did clouds of ash and lands of chalk and soot flow forth. And his people did he gather to him.”
Maybe Azgra, of all of them, was able to pass on, because Azgra, of all of them, had gotten what he wanted. Revenge. Conquest. His truth, piercing through all their lies. It wasn’t about the orcs, about mortals, about Araman, it was about winning his war with his siblings. He was destroyed himself, yes. But he destroyed them, all their works, in the process. His dream overwrote theirs. He won. He died a warrior’s death, and his war rode out and destroyed all their works in the process.
And at the end of it, freed by his truths, by what he had taught them, his own weapons thanked him for it. Grudgingly, but genuinely.
Azgra … I think Azgra might have walked the Old Path. Guided by that Farramh, sure in his victory. I think he might well have been satisfied enough to let go.
So his Barrowdell being different, and Vokjan Murzat saying he’s not in the Dying Fields, might be no proof whatsoever about where the other gods are, and in what form. Because Azgra … Azgra might have been different. We can’t use him to know what’s up with the others.
So. Three options. Or, possibly, four, if one or more of the others has also moved on. But the Shapers were eternal too, like the Gavzidra. They might have been killed, but they couldn’t have been completely destroyed. That power had to go somewhere. The only question is … where?
The Tenebral Reaches, at war with the Tachonis? In their own afterlives, which our protagonists are so usefully hoping to connect back up for them? Or in the Barrowdells, a seething hatred and malice that never left?
Or, maybe, somewhere else entirely. These are the options that occurred to me off the top of my head. But I am very curious.
When you kill the gods … where do the dead gods go?
amandla
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