#avowed lore

here's why (spoilers below cut)

the beyond seems so straightforward. it's the gods' home. it houses souls waiting for reincarnation.

but the gods can claim their own little areas and manifest surfaces, images, sounds. it required physical machinery at ukaizo to even keep a steady flow of essence to it. what mysteries might we find if not for the gods claiming it as theirs?

One final journal entry from some of the Microsoft provided Avowed footage that I doubt most folks have seen.

mulling over my 'canon' envoy being a hybrid court augur/vanguard scout who chose to let the leaders of the living lands vote for an independent nation.

in the months and years following the siege of paradis, i see her taking on a role that's essentially the same as aragorn being chieftain of the dunedain rangers. she rebuilds the tebaru senakis not as a fellowship of sapadal godlikes but as a ranger order based on the rangers of fior.

she's not interested in being the new head of state. maybe she'll accept it as a ceremonial position, but it's not what she or the leaders of the living lands want. that type of top down hierarchy doesn't vibe with the denizens of the lands. so instead she focuses on making sure the people are safe from the wilderness and imperial aggression, and the most viable way to do that is to have rangers patrol for threats.

one tiny lore tidbit that is fairly obscure, and actually might have a lot to do with the story of avowed is that the emperor's scepter has an adra jewel which stores the souls of past aedyran kings and queens.

this comes into play in a couple of lines with sargamis from the barbarian gamescom footage, when the player and the oracle speculate a bit on just why the emperor would send our envoy in particular.

could the ancient souls in the scepter, y'know the major icon of aedyran heraldry

could the ancient souls have communicated to the emperor that our godlike envoy might have some connection to the living lands. and could that connection go all the way back to the godless and the origin of the two major ethnic groups in aedyr? both the meadow folk and wood elves are said to have originated in the far north.

north, vitally, being the direction in which lies the living lands. was there some calamity that caused the godless to flee and become the far distant ancestors to the aedyrans?

spoilers under break