Before we talk about the Deities, and their opposing entities, and how they manifest, we should delve a bit into how the world came to be. Venleitche has only one creation myth, reflective of its having only one religion, although how that myth is told depends on who’s telling it. The basics are always the same. The Transcendence has always existed. The existence of a thing implies the existence of a greater thing and a lesser thing. There could be nothing greater than the Transcendence, infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, but it could devolve lesser entities, fractions of itself, and being able required it to do so in a way understandable only to those who have experienced the Harmony. The Goddess and the God devolved from the Transcendence, and existed in a balance of love and trust, as they were still effectively part of the Transcendence.

Again, a devolution was possible, and the God and Goddess created the physical world, and populated it with finite beings that over many lifetimes could experience infinite variations on their themes. (We’ll talk about reincarnation later.) They created this world with rules and strictures, operating parameters and root equations if you like, paramount among these being the Balance. Everything must remain in balance for the world to exist, to continue to exist, to be a reflection on a lower level of reality of the Deities. The Goddess and God wove Themselves into their world, so that Their creation could experience Them directly, and They could in turn see the world through the eyes of all of its forms of life.

In doing so, They came under the sway of the rules They had created. They could not act directly without balancing consequences, and what might those be for saving an entire city from destruction? Beyond that, if a God and Goddess of love and trust exist in the world, and can affect it, a counterbalance must also. In creating the world, the Deities cast their reflection into it. In order for a Balanced world to exist, opposing forces had to come into being, and in that moment, the dark side of the mirror gained independence, purpose of its own, and the world was created with the seeds for its own destruction buried within. The Dark has names, but no one speaks them with any good intent. The Dark has voices, but they sing of pain.

And so the world goes, spinning on the point of a needle, tipping one way and then the other as the balances shift. Every action has consequences, and those of the Deities may echo for generations. The Dark gnaws at the foundations, knowing that if it acts too openly, it creates opportunity for the Deities to act in consequence. The key comes down to the actions of the mortals, whose actions individually do not have the impact of Divine intervention, but who collectively push the Balance of the world in a slower and more controllable manner. Who each mortal listens to, Divine or Darkness, what each one does, will move the world a little closer toward or away from its ending. Choices matter.