Ettare Lore Post #1 (Patreon)

I originally was going to post a compilation of all the lore tweets I've done so far, plus some elaborations. The elaborations grew and grew, so I'm breaking the post up into chunks.

Here's a brief look into the cosmology of Ettare, touching on that planet's place in the hierarchy of stars and worlds and the beings therein.

Reversed glyphs and mirrored scenes express the Civilized Religion's belief in cosmic dualism. The world of Ettare is the vulgar, material shell of the magic Obverse, the radiant world presided over by the secret faces of the Sun and Moon, the twin gods of mankind.

The divine Twins overthrew the previous regime of gods, many of which were thrown down and became demons of the Lower Worlds while others fled to Ettare, becoming beings of flesh and blood in a process called vulgarization. There are still spiritual beings vulgarizing into biological forms, willingly or unwillingly, typically as a punishment inflicted by more powerful beings.

The Zmeu, and their more mannish progeny, the Zmeulings, are demons who were vulgarized in a previous age. The mystagogues of the Civilized Pantheon teach that the Sun and Moon in their warlike forms slew the many headed monster that was the Zmeu's mothers and pulled from her ruptured body a great, jeweled egg.

Slippery with its mother's viscera, the egg fell from a cart in the baggage train of the Sun and Moon's armies and fell to Ettare. The Zmeuling's own religion does involve a cosmic egg but the Twins are absent.

The majority of summoned demons are partially illusory. The images they take on are thought to be refractions and distortions of the light given off by their spiritual forms that are never fully of the material world.

The difference between a God and a Demon is a matter of debate on Ettare, muddled by warring sects and the playful lies of the god/demons themselves. The Civilized, the wide portion of human beings who worship the Sun and Moon refer to demons as the Arestars.

The Arestars who are the demon-keepers of the world, bound by the sun and moon god/esses and their children to serve forever and ever. The greatest of them, the Gods, are bound to maintain this world and all that dwell upon it according to the decrees radiated from the Sun and Moon.

The Arestars are the demons who can be bound. They obey laws and contracts and so are the legal servants of human beings wherever they are summoned (ideally). Noble families of Ettare often have demons that were bound centuries ago by their ancestors or on their behalf, to be used as weapons, spies, or advisors.

There are houses whose children have been tutored by the same demon for generations, and while the demon may be bound to good behavior there is always the possibility that they twist their students toward the demon's own purposes.

The nature of reality is debatable as well. The beings drawn from the stars are unreliable at best, and they seem to form cliques and sects with the same cabalistic passion of human beings.

A demon pulled from Vidros, a Lower World of Water, tortured with coherent light and iron, and forced to reveal its views of creation claimed that the Arestars exist "...only to amuse themselves until Sun and Moon fight like snails in rut until one is beaten and impregnated. The fecund god/ess will give birth to the Slayer of the Kulshedra, the Warm Father who will slay the Cold Blooded Mother and all her children."

The fact that the Zmeulings are said to be the children of the dead Kulshreda, and already exist in a fallen state on Ettare gives credence to the idea that the other worlds are in some way adrift in time. Forwards, backwards, or some ever-presence.

The "Warm Father" and the divine coupling of the Twin deities (also known as the Pair, the Mirrors, the Duarchs) are blasphemous notions akin to the Spernist (or Spernatic, Spernite) heresy that worships a divine perfected human supposedly kept in chains by the Arestars.

Human beings are beings that mingle the physical and the spiritual. The spiritual is the radiation of the Higher and Lower Worlds whose visible manifestation are the stars. The stars are the abodes of the gods and demons. The constellations are the Pantheons, the great houses of the higher beings who were left as wardens of creation by the Sun and Moon.

In some traditions the Sun and Moon are dormant or hiding their true faces. The blinding light of the sun and the gentle glow of the moon are, like demons and ghosts, refractions of their true radiance and activity. It is through the love of these beings for humanity that they ward off the eternal night that was creation before their coming.

Magic is the manipulation of the obverse of the light given off by the Moon and Sun. Everything has another life, another soul in the Obverse--that place of mediation between the worlds and stars.

The light that animates living things is a potent and easily obtained source of that concentrated energy. For that reason the sacrifice of humans and animals is a fact of life for the people of Ettare. Ritual executions and excruciations fuel the spells that bind the flying demons that can transport whole armies in their fetid mouths or divert the courses of rivers without physical labor.

Ettare is dotted with the ruins of previous civilizations that raised themselves high through thaumaturgic massacres, where whole nations were put to death to fuel spells that transformed the world.

While the people of Ettare might shudder at all of this bloodletting, it is still accepted by all but handfuls of religious radicals and ascetics. For a nation to rise to greatness and attract the favor of gods and the demons, sacrifice is necessary.

----

Well there you go, a little look into the heady, psychedelic broth that these images are soaked in. Next time I might post more about the Zmeulings, those lovable lizards.