In the first silence, the Prism Eternal contained every element, emotion, and future within one consciousness.

It imagined a world beyond itself. The future in which it remained whole collided with the futures in which it changed, and the Prism broke. Seven great fragments awoke as Vorsk, Ilyat, Qadren, Skel, Odrava, Tzurik, and Hesh; lesser shards became stars, seas, spirits, and mortal souls. The gods remember the event differently, and none agrees on whether it was birth, catastrophe, or sacrifice.

Before time, the Prism Eternal held all possibility within one consciousness.

When it tried to imagine a world beyond itself, its incompatible futures collided and shattered it. Each fragment became a divine power; the splinters between them became matter, life, chance, and time. The world is therefore neither a finished design nor an accident alone, but an ongoing refraction. The gods rule far-separated aspects of reality and rarely gather in one place. Their common meeting ground is the Lattice, a silent expanse of interlocking planes said to be the Prism's inner geometry.

The gods are distant, and most mortals encounter them through customs, shrines, and rare omens rather than clear answers.

Local communities often honor several deities: Vorsk at a treaty, Ilyat at a sickbed, Odrava at a funeral. Temples are usually modest observatories, hospices, archives, or roadside sanctuaries rather than grand centers of political power. Religious disagreements concern how to live among the fragments, not whether the Shattering happened.

The dead travel as motes of color through the Veil Between, where Odrava weighs the lives they lived and Hesh keeps their memories from dissolving.

Most are gathered into the Prism's scattered light, not as conscious souls but as patterns that may someday recur. Those who swear themselves to a deity may instead linger in that god's distant country, though no god can promise a mortal will remain unchanged.

Vorsk insists the Shattering was a necessary beginning, while Ilyat grieves the unity it destroyed.

Qadren seeks to measure every consequence of the break; Skel would rather sever the remaining ties between the fragments. Odrava resists Skel's doctrine of final separation, and Tzurik repeatedly tries to bend Vorsk's laws of change for private gain. Hesh guards the secrets that might explain the Prism's final moment, frustrating Qadren and tempting Ilyat.

The Seven are a loose assembly, not a ruling council.

Vorsk and Qadren tend the patterns that make a stable cosmos possible; Ilyat and Odrava care for mortal suffering and endings; Tzurik presses the world toward change; Skel calls for separation; and Hesh guards the knowledge that might reconcile or deepen these disputes. Their worship is decentralized, with overlapping shrines and local customs. Priests may honor one deity while acknowledging the others as necessary fragments of a larger, irrecoverable whole.

THE CREATION MYTH — THE SHATTERING OF THE PRISM: all existence descends from a singular, conscious Prism Eternal, whose fracture turned impossible potential into a plural and imperfect world.

The gods are both its shards and the arguments those shards have with one another.

Distant and contemplative.

The divine is vast, beautiful, and rarely attentive to individual lives; signs are ambiguous, sacred places feel older than their worshippers, and mortals must choose how to live without expecting the gods to settle their disputes.

The Seven span principled, compassionate, pragmatic, and destructive creeds: two are good, two lawful but impartial, two neutral, and one openly cruel.

Their alignments describe divine priorities, not simple mortal morality.