Editing Acrozatarim/Cosmology (section)

==Origins==

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The creation myth has four elementals creating the world but being unable to create true life; they then fell into eternal slumber, and can be physically seen in the starry heavens as distant stars/planets.  They're the creators but you can't really get anything out of them; they're asleep, after all.

Their dreams dwelt on the frustration they had encountered, and as vastly potent cosmic elemental beings, their dreams actually had a life of their own, forming the Elder Gods, alien and eldritch beings (with four at the fore, as it were, one per elemental).  The Elder Gods were able to create life, as well as play with all sorts of the fundamental rules of reality that the elementals, their originators, had laid down.  So in the period known as the Dawn era, the Elder Gods made a dizzying array of life, spun together strange energies into the world, and generally, well, played god.

The Elder Gods did (and still do to some extent) have religious followers, including priests, but are only divinities due to power level rather than to any innate holiness or fuelled-by-faith type of nature.  They certainly had 'portfolios' but these were particularly weird and more based on what they ''did'' than a particular division of concepts amongst them.  Gilam, for instance, is the Father of Dragons (a servitor race it created for itself), the Eternal Fire That Consumes (as it originated from the dreams of the fire elemental), the Wall and the Tablet of Law (for its creation and enforcement of the concepts of civilisation and boundaries); Ephras is the Great Weaver, who wove connections between things; Hashrukk is the Daemonflesh, the fertile and fetid pit from which much life was forged.  As to actual clerics using divine magic, there are followers who can use Elder-linked power but it's not divine magic in the traditional sense.

However, the Elder Gods are also currently dead / their essence torn into fragments.  Up until the Dawn War, they were physically incarnate (even if not entirely physical) and potent enough to be a seperate realm.  Now they are no longer incarnate and may be properly dead, or most of the way there.

The problem with the Elder Gods was that they went mad.  I mean, they were pretty mad already by the standards of the hapless beings they'd created, but they turned to full-on Lovecraftian lunacy in their conflicts with each other and their increasingly byzantine reworkings of reality.  Many of their creations had had enough, and rose up against them.  Here, the Younger Gods came into their own.  The Youngers are a broad category that actually collects a whole pile of different beings together; some were potent spirits, some were actual mortal or supernatural individual beings, some may not have existed at all.  The exact manner in which they became involved in the Dawn War and how they achieved divinity varies.

It's hard to say exactly how many Younger Gods there are.  Let's take one of them - Urazel, the Warrior and Preacher to Dragons, a deity generally associated with war, horses, discipline and fire.  Urazel, so the folklore goes, was a Huronese man originally, an inspiring commander who led the Drakkar Empire into battle against the servitor races that held loyal to the Elder Gods and who, famously, won the alliance of many of Gilam's own draconic servitors through a philosophical debate.  The exact manner in which he achieved godhood varies depending on the source, but like all the incarnate physical beings who became godlings, he excarnated after the War (possibly forcibly due to being terribly injured).  Urazeli doctrine says he ascended and now is a god.  However, in ''other'' regions of the world, the same associations and some of the same actions are ascribed to other beings with different names; some mortal, some spirits.  Urazel has ecclesiastical petitioners who can wield divine power; so can these other versions of the Younger God.  So which one's the real one? Or are they all correct?  What does it mean that the dragons marked Urazel's preaching with a sacred stone on a blasted plateau; but that other god with very similar features from half-way across the world ''also'' seems to have indications that she really existed?

Essentially, a lot of the deities appear to exist in different forms across different cultures, sometimes with rather different characteristics.  There are also a ''lot'' of Younger Gods, and plenty of other spirits underpinning the elementals' world; so there are widespread notions of a celestial bureaucracy or hierarchy (which partially covers how various people and beings may have become divinities in the first place), and which figures are believed to have done what are quite varied in different regions.  A few Younger Gods are close to ubiquitous wherever you go, but even they are often portrayed in very different ways.

Younger Gods do have wielders of divine power as followers and usually have portfolios ascribed to them (like Urazel, the patron deity of Huron, commonly ascribed horses, war and fire).  Some have quite powerful temporal followings, particularly those that are considered patrons to a particular nation or people.  ''Currently'', however, they are not massively interventionist; some have literally small armies of temple-guard serving their clergy, but this doesn't mean that they regularly (or even rarely) intervene in the world.  Most priests are also not divine spellcasters at all, although that doesn't mean that some of the faiths can't call together a lot of divine spellcasters when they need to.

And beyond the world?  Scholars and scientists know there are other planes, other realms of energy, but I haven't decided on how deeply understood such things are yet. People are aware that the elementals came from ''somewhere else'' first, that time and space existed before the world did.