According to the oldest temple tradition, distinctions arose in the Unshaped Expanse when the first heat met the first water.

Their opposition produced air, life, stone, and the remaining powers. No scripture agrees on which deity awakened first; even Tüzet and Urdak's oldest myths name the other as already present.

Before time, there was the Unshaped Expanse, neither void nor matter.

Twelve powers emerged as its first distinctions: heat, water, air, life, stone, frost, storm, light, shadow, metal, dream, and ending. Their separation made the world possible, and their uneasy interdependence keeps it from dissolving. The gods inhabit remote elemental reaches that overlap the mortal world only at rare conjunctions.

The gods are distant: they answer through omens, unusual weather, dreams, and the occasional impossible coincidence, not casual appearances.

Mortal temples are local and practical, tending hearths, wells, roads, groves, archives, and burial grounds. Rival priesthoods often cooperate during disasters despite their gods' conflicts, while no single church claims authority over the entire assembly.

The dead pass into the Still Interval, a remote expanse between the gods' realms.

There, Kártek weighs no souls: each spirit is drawn toward the element it most resembles, or wanders until a mortal rite calls it home. Vezdra tends the paths of returning life, while Orsik keeps the final silence. The gods rarely intervene, and reunion is a hope rather than a promise.

The assembly maintains a cold balance rather than peace.

Kártek's stone dams the floods of Urdak, while Urdak's waters slowly undermine Kártek's foundations. Zselya's green abundance presses against the consuming fire of Tüzet, and both claim that the other misunderstands renewal. Fúvár carries the distant voice of Hólt, whose silence threatens to end every cycle. These rivalries are ancient, intermittent, and usually expressed through weather, migration, and scarcity rather than direct divine appearances.

The religion has no central hierarchy.

Each settlement maintains shrines to whichever powers its people need, with a circle of keepers convening for seasonal rites and emergencies. The Twelvefold Assembly is a teaching framework, not a command structure: priesthoods preserve their own customs, exchange calendars, and settle disputes through councils of witnesses. Funerary keepers associated with Orsik are commonly granted neutral status.

Elemental interdependence, cosmic distance, and mortal responsibility in a world shaped by powers too vast to offer easy answers.

Distant and numinous.

Divine power is real, but personal guidance is rare; nature's beauty and danger feel immense, and mortals must interpret signs without certainty.

Varied: the assembly includes benevolent, impartial, volatile, and predatory powers.

Alignment describes divine temperament, not a simple division into good and evil; even the kindest gods remain distant.