Paladin Worldbuilding: Origin of the Sacred Seas, Heavens, and Hells. (Patreon)

Your fellow user Loukemia asked about neutral spirits, so I wrote this worldbuilding document to explore that a little further. There will be some mention of them in the book, but they'll largely be outside the scope of Darren's adventure unless I go for a second arc after this one concludes.

That being said, their origin ties into the origin of the Sacred Seas. So that's where I wanted to take this. I actually already had one of these written from wordbuilding before I wrote this series (Check out the He Who Slays Demons chapters, which eventually became the Paladin of the Sword series). Nevertheless, it was about time I redid the document will all the updates to the world I made while writing the first two books. So here's a revised Origin of the Sacred Seas.

The beginning of the Sacred Seas, the Heavens, and the Hells

Years ago, the Sacred Seas was wild and unsettled land. The people who inhabit it today came from a distant realm as ragged refugees seeking shelter as they were persecuted for their religion.

Those refugees found that they were not alone in this wild realm. While there were no people here, there was no shortage of spirits. Whatever civilization had inhabited this land before its new settlers' arrival, there was no sign of them. All that was left to tell their tale were the ruins that the new colonists quickly used to build new cities for themselves.

In settling this land, they soon came into contact with the local spirits. Some were friendly, some were hostile, others minded their own business so long as the humans minded theirs. But as human settlements grew and pushed ever outward, their borders pressed against the lands of these wild spirits.

Some, like satyrs and goblins, were quickly slain by a few competent warriors with swords and shields. Lesser spirits could be vanquished under the light of the sun or through the powers of magical scholars of the day known as wizards.

But other spirits would not be killed or forced out so easily. Great dragons roamed the skies, capable of destroying all but the most fortified human settlements. Mighty hordes of beasts could eradicate the population of an entire city in the span of a day.

The humans endured, fighting an unending battle. In doing so, many brave heroes rose and fell among their ranks. Though their bodies died, their spirits lived on in the hearts and minds of their kin, and soon those lingering spirits took shape and form, powered by the wild aura of the lands themselves. Some of those spirits even maintained enough of a sense of who they were and what they stood for to defend their descendants beyond death, and the living humans worshiped them for it.

Bit by bit, generation by generation, the forms of these ancestral spirits absorbed the energy around them. They grew more intelligent until, eventually, they had become as coherent after death as they were in life. Many living humans began to view becoming such an ancestral spirit as part of their religion and that this transformation was the goal they should spend their lives pursuing.

The spirits knew there was no place for them in the mortal world. But they could build a realm of their own far above it. They found that this magical aura that granted them form after death was the power of spirit, and it could be developed and twisted by thought. So they contacted their living descendants, teaching them what to believe in order to reshape the world with their minds. Through monumental effort and much study, they redirected the natural magical energy of the mortal world to forge the heavens.

In one blow, they siphoned away many of the dangerous spirits who were giving their descendants such trouble and transported them where they could do no more harm to the mortals on the surface, and they would never again spawn where they could trouble their descendents. This heavenly realm of energy was in many ways better than ever for both the ancestral spirits and the wild beasts they'd taken in, allowing them to become more potent over time simply by living within it.

But not all spirits of power could dwell within the heavens. The heavens waged wars on the beings too powerful for humans to defeat, paving the way for their descendants to conquer and settle these wildlands. But in doing so, some of these wild spirits became ever more hostile. They found kinship in the exiles and the unwanted humans of the world. Those who'd been cast from civilization because of their ruthlessness, brutality, and lust for power.

And not all of the ancestral spirits within the heavens were pure of heart. It was just as easy for the evil and malicious to survive death as it was for the good among them. As soon as the threat of the wild spirits had become manageable, the heavens began to fight among themselves just as their descendants divided from one nation into many.

Wars began within the heavens themselves, and sides formed as ancestral spirits battled among one another. Eventually, the lesser group was banished from the newly formed heavens altogether, and they found shelter with the defeated spirits who had been their enemies.

Those spirits had taken shelter in the dark and hidden places of the world, in a realm of shadow and death, feared by the humans on the surface. The bitter ancestral spirits who'd lost the war for the heavens encouraged these dark beliefs, forming the hells just as they had formed the heavens. And soon, they had a realm for themselves as well, and the hells took shape.

And so the wild spirits vanished from the face of the Sacred Seas, leaving to join either the heavens or the hells. But the temples still warn their pilgrims of their existence, for there are lands beyond the Sacred Seas that have not yet learned of glory of the Heavens...

Note:

So that's a heavily abridged tale of how the Sacred Seas came to be the way they are in the books. There were many spirits once upon a time, and some were quite powerful. There were even wizards who studied these spirits and the energy that allowed them to exist to harness magic with their minds. Of course, such a practice is definitely completely impossible nowadays, right?

Anyway, let me know what else you guys are interested in exploring. I've got some work unrelated to novels to catch up on, so I'll probably spend the weekend cranking that out. But next week I'll be up for a few more of these worldbuilding documents if you guys are still interested.

The plot for book 3 is slowly taking shape in my head, though there's going to be several revisions before we get to the one that finally gets written.