Cosmology

Nu and the void

Nunamnir fled through the stars. A Dremnae, a servant of the void, caught her on the way and impregnated her with darkness. She was taken in afterwards by Hyton, the Star God, and bore him children. "The void within her corrupted each of her children." Every god of Nu carries that corruption, and every people those gods made carries a share of it.

Nunamnir sleeps. She is the core of the world. Her firstborn, Aezithis, was ill-born and had no world core of his own, so he formed the crust around his sleeping mother. She is the core and he is the crust, "a constant umbilical." The Underworld is his.

Above the gods

Beyond Nu and her children sits the void archon Dremnar, "a vast brain-like consciousness floating in eternity," and his unwanted children the Atatari. The Atatari split twice. First into the Fulatari, who became worlds, and the Caelatari, who became stars. Then into the Kalderae, who resisted their father, and the Dremnae, who serve him.

The Void Princes that the void cults swear to are Dremnae, and the Dremnae are the reason the Codex has a bestiary. A summoner tears a fissure in the Caelyrean and pulls a mass of one through, and a hair off a Void Prince is eighty feet of Remoulded standing in a field; the lesser fragments dragged through with it are the Great Shattered. A Dremnae will also answer a call meant for a dead person and come back wearing the spirit, which is half of what the Dreamt Ones are. The Abominations of Chaos came by a different road, "out from the corruptible waters of chaos itself, funnelled through Aezithis's heart from Dre'mnar himself." Only the Crimson Horrors are native to Nu.

The Caelyrean is what a summoner tears. It is the filter Hyton laid over the world, of time and of perception, and the standing purpose of the Remoulded court is to shatter it "as to devour the souls of Nu and the raw, untapped energy of his wife, Nunamnir." Every casting punches through it, and the puncture does not close cleanly. It weeps.

Providence and Doom

The settled world names its two poles Providence and Doom. Providence is the measured interest of the Caelatari, the stars, in a person. Doom is the taint of the Dremnae, and the more of it a person carries the more of them is lost. The struggle between the two is the spine of the age, and of the novel the world is built on, PYRE: TO BURN A GOD.

Where the dead go

No worldly god keeps an afterlife. Not Aezithis, not Orton, not Irus, not Vaeyar, not Nunamnir herself. Every faith on Nu that promises its dead a realm is promising something its god does not have.

Every soul on Nu goes to the auction of the star gods and is sold there. The Constellation Court runs it. The Void Princes buy at it, and the Princes do keep realms, which is the whole of the advantage the void cults hold over everyone else. On the edge of the Caelyrean, near one of the moons, rests the Tantillian, "a swan shaped opal ship," and "as long as a soul has not began its venture on the vessel, you may be summoned back." A soul pulled back is Stolen, in the star gods' own word, and Xikon the Grand Soul Catcher is sent after it for a thousand and one days.

Almost nobody on Nu knows any of this. The few who have come back from the auction are taken for mad.