The Two Courts and the Auction

Faiths

Nearly every people on Nu prays to something, and nearly every one of them prays to a power that keeps no realm. Above the worldly gods, on the far side of the Caelyrean, two courts of twelve stand against one another in the dark, and those two hold the only realms there are. One of them runs the market that every soul in the world is sold at. Almost nobody alive knows the market exists.

The Constellation Court is twelve ideals held up as stars and kept burning. The Void Princes are twelve appetites that fed at a wound in the base of existence. Twelve stand against twelve, pair by pair, and every pairing is exact.

Kelvon, the Even Hand	Nine stars, a level beam with a pan hanging at each end. Sufficiency, honest weight, the knowledge of enough. Sacred to millers, granary-keepers, quartermasters, tax assessors, the men who divide a carcass. Stands against Ghida, the Glutted Maw, whose hunger is devouring without end.
Vessar, the Unhooded	Eleven stars, a human face seen straight on, the brightest two at the pupils. Truth of person, the honoured face, being what you appear. Sacred to envoys, oath-witnesses, judges, actors who fear their own trade, anyone who must be believed. Stands against Atahr, the Skinless, whose hunger is faces, mimicry and the theft of shape.
Cormion, the Unsundered	Twelve evenly spaced stars, one closed circle with no gap. Union, the held join, fellowship that survives disagreement. Sacred to householders, guild-brothers, shieldwalls, marriage-makers, anyone who must stand beside someone they dislike. Stands against Skarn, the Sundered Crown, whose hunger is fracture, the longing of whole things to be many.
Sethis, the Gentle Close	Seven stars, a closed eye at rest, the lower lash curving gently up. Endings honoured, grief completed, the good death. Sacred to grave-diggers, physicians at the last, widows, the very old, those who sit with the dying. Stands against Muraan, the Dreaming Wound, whose hunger is the refusal of endings.
Farun, the Clean Yield	Ten stars, a bound sheaf, broad at the head and tied at the waist. Right growth, health, proportion in living things. Sacred to farmers, herdsmen, midwives, field-priests, anyone who must judge whether a thing is thriving or swelling. Stands against Sarkha, the Crimson Bloom, whose hunger is rot as fecundity.
Dolmar, the Plumb	Eight stars, a square with both diagonals, the brightest at the centre. Form that holds, the right angle, the maintained structure. Sacred to masons, bridge-wardens, engineers, keep-holders, and the Do'urssan of the Great Holds above all others. Stands against Ulmog, the Unshaped, whose hunger is chaos, the failure of form.
Halvan, the Shoreward	Nine stars, one long horizontal line with a gentle rise at the end. The surface, breath, the held boundary between air and deep. Sacred to harbour-wardens, lamp-keepers, ferrymen, the Order of the Sea Tower, every sailor who intends to come home. Stands against Voraal, the Drowned Silence, whose hunger is the deep: pressure, patience, the sea's memory.
Vharun, the Kept Coal	Six stars, a small upright flame, narrow at the base. Warmth, will, chosen motion, the refusal to stop. Sacred to hearth-keepers, northern folk, night-watchmen, the sick who intend to recover, soldiers in the fifth hour of a battle. Stands against Vhorzun, the Still One, whose hunger is stillness, entropy, cessation.
Anneth, the Ledger	Thirteen stars, an open book seen from above, pages spread flat. Memory, record, the defended name. Sacred to scribes, parish clerks, heralds, genealogists, the Zephi, anyone who keeps a list nobody asked for. Stands against Nulith, the Unremembered, whose hunger is the erasure of names and histories.
Sollun, the Open Palm	Ten stars, an open hand with fingers spread and separate. Liberty, the right to remain apart, refusal. Sacred to free cities, wandering trades, freed slaves, younger sons, anyone who has told a lord no. Stands against Vezmar, the Reassembled King, whose hunger is dominion, the compulsion of severed things toward reunion.
Torvath, the Clasped	Eleven stars, two clasped hands, and his stars are visibly fainter than any other in the sky, two of them nearly gone. Fealty, marriage, ancestry, the kept bond. Sacred to sworn knights, married houses, ancestor-keepers, the Covenant of Chivalry, every lord who means his oath. Stands against Khoraz, the Flame That Takes, whose hunger is belonging, and who is winning.
Aurin, the Second Dawn	Twelve stars, an arc rising from the horizon, ascending left to right. Endurance, the carried grief, the morning after. Sacred to widows, veterans, the bereaved, plague survivors, anyone who has to open the shutters and go to work. Stands against Valgur, the Sorrow Rooted, whose hunger is despair, grief that grows downward.

The Constellation Court

The Constellation Court is twelve constellations held in battle formation across the night sky. Its domain is the ideals held as stars and the defence of the Caelyrean. Calling upon his allies, the Court forms up and the light of twelve constellations pierces the Caelyrean: defensive pacts built to wage war upon the Void Princes and their forces of darkness should they ever face them.

They are not worshipped as persons. Each constellation is an ideal held aloft and kept burning, and what is venerated is the ideal rather than the star. Providence reaches the world through them by one specific mechanism, and it is not prayer. It is conducted downward through the devout Star prophets of ideals, each hereditary lineage bound to one constellation and answerable for it.

The Court is the reason the night sky on Nu is legible. Every clear night a mortal who has been taught can look up and read which ideals are still standing. Twelve went up. One of them has been dimming for the better part of a millennium, and a man on a roof can watch it happen.

How an ideal is kept

Each of the twelve carries a doctrine, a rite and a wrath, and the rite is the part with hands in it. At each harvest Kelvon's villages bring the whole yield to one scale and divide it in public, so that no man may claim afterwards that he did not know his share. No oath sworn under hood, veil or helm is binding to Vessar: the face is lowered, named aloud, and looked upon by every witness before the words are spoken. At midsummer a Cormion settlement joins hands in one closed circle, and any who will not take a neighbour's hand must say why before the assembly, and the quarrel is settled there or the dance does not begin. Sethis has the nearest living hand shut the eyes of the dead, never a servant's, and what the dead most loved is burned on the third night rather than kept.

Farun burns corrupted crop in the open where the whole village watches, in a hungry year, when the loss means deaths that winter, and to spare it is heresy. Dolmar has every bridge, gate and load-bearing wall sighted against a plumb line at the turn of each year by a mason who must swear to the reading, and a false sighting is a capital crime in three kingdoms. Halvan's harbours are counted aloud at every dawn and the missing are named, and no crew is written off until three tides have passed, and the lamps burn for all three. Vharun allows no new house to be lit from a new fire: a coal is carried from an old hearth, sometimes for days, and the household that lets it die on the road turns back. Anneth has the name of the dead read aloud from the register on the anniversary, in the hearing of at least two people, and his clerks make duplicate copies of everything and scatter them without explanation. Sollun's companions part at a crossroads when they could easily travel on together, each taking a different road for one full day, to prove the choice is still theirs. Torvath's oaths are taken hand to wrist rather than hand to hand, so that neither party can let go first without the other feeling it. Aurin gives the first work of the household, on the morning after a death, to the most bereaved, and nobody helps them with it.

The wraths are not punishments added. They are the ideal withdrawn, and each has the shape of the thing it used to hold up. Kelvon's hoarder finds his stores full of nothing: grain rots in a dry loft, salted meat spoils under good salt, the cellar empties while the door stays locked, and it is always noticed how thin he became. Vessar's habitual liar is forgotten by his own reflection, then by his household at the door, and dies unrecognised in a town he was born in. Cormion's oathbreaker of fellowship is made unbearable, not hated, unbearable, and he cannot say what he has done wrong because nobody else can either. Sethis does not permit those who will not let go to let go: the beloved returns in dream every night, a little nearer the door each time, and the Dreaming Wound has taken more than one of these.

Farun's curse is fertility. Fields yield triple and the grain is inedible, herds calve twice a season and the calves are wrong, and he does not withhold, he gives, and gives, and gives. What Dolmar's neglectful built stops agreeing with itself: doors that no longer fit frames they were cut for, stairs with one step too many on the way down, and the building does not fall, it stops making sense, and then people stop coming back out of it. Halvan withdraws the boundary, and a swimmer in four feet of water cannot reach air, and his dead are always found close to shore. Vharun grants the slothful rest, and it begins as welcome, a good chair and a warm room and an afternoon that need not be used, and it does not end. Anneth unwrites the falsifier of records: his debts cannot be proven, his lands revert to men with better paperwork, his children inherit nothing because no document says they are his, and he remains alive throughout, and simply stops being able to demonstrate that he ever was. Sollun gives the tyrant exactly what he wanted, every subject and servant and child perfectly obedient and perfectly empty, and he rules a country that answers him in one voice and goes mad in it, and Sollun's priests do not consider this cruel.

Aurin has no wrath at all, which unsettles theologians. He does not punish despair. He withdraws, and the person is left alone with it, and his devout hold that to be the worst thing that can happen to anyone in the world.

The Void Princes

The Void Princes are Dre'mnae, servants of the void, and they are the ones who fed. Their domain is Doom made plural: the thirteen attentions turned upon this world. Twelve and One are their number, twelve princes and the first among equals, Draiji.

They were made at the Dre'malatak. Kald the Primordial Warrior struck Dre'kmar, the emanation of the Infinite Source, and was shattered for all time in retaliation, and in the aftermath the Dre'mnae fed upon what had spilled. Those who fed most heartily, and who then consumed their own brethren, became the Princes, mightier than even the individual stars. What each of them swallowed at that wound is what each of them is now. None of them chose its portion.

They stand opposite the Constellation Court exactly as an army stands opposite an army, and the Caelyrean is the wall between them.

The twelve hungers

Ghida, the Glutted Maw. Ghy'dahmuur was first to feed at the wound and least changed by it, because it was always appetite. It does not hate the living. It does not consider them at all, any more than a throat considers bread. Its cult is the Glutted Table, famine-cults who fast in public and feast in secret, their priesthood eating for the god and tasting nothing. Fields stripped bare in a night with no locust found, cattle gone whole from locked byres, a dry riverbed drunk to the stone. It gives plenty, and the plenty never fills you, and its favoured die enormous and starving. The Engulfer-class Remoulded are its spawn.

Atahr, the Skinless. Ata'khuur alone among the princes covets being seen, because the void has no faces and it remembers having one. It ate its siblings face-first and the faces did not stay down. Its cult is the Borrowed Faces, masked mystery-cults who court it without ever naming it, and the skin-taker that answers a summoning-rite arrives owed a skin. A familiar face wrong by a finger's width. A twin where there was no twin. Dogs refusing a beloved master. It will make you anyone. It will not give you back.

Skarn, the Sundered Crown. Skhar'nuvokh was first to shatter at the feeding, and in its agony it mistook breaking for birth. It holds that unity is the original torment and that the Source suffers because he is one, and its mercy is the hammer. Its cult is the Schism, devotees who carry hammers they never use, because the breaking they serve is not of stone. Mirrors cracking in sequence through a house. A bell that rings its note in two pitches. One man witnessed in two places, both weeping. The Great Shattered are its spawn, and every church that splits and every house that turns on itself tithes to the Crown without ever being asked.

Muraan, the Dreaming Wound. Mur'aanoth drank the Source's memories, the sea of a life already ended, and drowned in them, and it dreams still. Endings offend it the way a loose thread offends a weaver. Its cult is the Undying Dream, and every lich began as its congregant whether or not they ever learned the name. The Dreamt Ones are its spawn: the Lich King, the liches, the shades and the ghasts. It will keep anything you cannot bear to lose. It will not keep it as it was.

Sarkha, the Crimson Bloom. Sarkhuulva took not despair but fertility, the seething mutative aliveness of the Source's flesh. She is increase without design, the tumour's love of tomorrow. She does not kill. She multiplies, and lets arithmetic do the killing. Her cult is the Blight Midwives, plague-tenders who ease the changed through their changing, most of whom began as healers who could not bear to burn a patient, and the Great Blight Hive is her seated garden. Blossoms out of season on corpses. Harvests too heavy for the stalk. Her devout hold the Crimson itself to be her pollen, and she is the only prince mortals have ever thanked.

Ulmog, the Unshaped. Ul'mhogaar came out of the feeding wrong even by the standards of the corrupted, boiling through shapes the way water boils through states. Geometry offends it. The right angle is a fence, and it is the thing fences were built against. It has no cult, because organisation is the one offering it cannot accept, and it is served singly, briefly, and always in the end by accident, by the storm-hearted and the broken-minded. Rooms whose corners will not stay counted. A road that runs differently in each direction. Livestock born inside-out and living. Rain that falls upward in the deep vales.

Voraal, the Drowned Silence. Vor'aaluun fed slowest and took the deepest draught: the eon-long patience of a thing that cannot die. Its hunger is pressure, the slow total embrace that asks nothing of its victim but time. Everything sinks eventually. It is the eventually. Its cult is the Hush, coastal cults who lower weighted offerings and never speak while on the water, and the abominations of the deep that war endlessly with the Warden of the Great Sea are its spawn. Among sailors its worship survives as manners: certain things are not said aboard, and the sea is never, ever thanked.

Vhorzun, the Still One. Vhor'zuun took the one thing the Source was denied, which is rest. It is the cold at the end of every equation. It does not attack. It subtracts, and heat and motion and will are each a debt, and it is a patient creditor. Its cult is the Still Vigils, sects who sit unmoving in remote places until death. Its spawn are the dead zones where nothing rots because nothing lives, and the worst of the ash sea is held to be its work. The vigils are found years later, uncorrupted, faintly cold, and smiling, and the finding is always described the same way. It looked like they had finally stopped.

Nulith, the Unremembered. The Atatari were thieves of memory, and Nulithar became the thief of theirs. At the feeding it ate not flesh but record, the memory the void holds of things, without which things quietly cease to have been. It has no spawn. It has only gaps. Its cult is the Burned Page, archivist-heretics who burn one page from every book they bind. A name that slips from every record at once while the man still lives. The fourth verse of a song no village can finish. A grave visited yearly by mourners who cannot say for whom. The perfect act of its worship is by definition unknown, because it worked.

Vezmar, the Reassembled King. Vez'mahruun consumed more of its brethren than any other prince and the mass of them never settled, so it is a parliament of eaten things straining to be one king. Its law is simple and total: what was joined must rejoin. Its cult is the Reassembly, collector-cells who gather the relics of one body across generations, and the Remoulded Queen and the librarian of the fallen castle are both held to be its shards. Twins born grown-together. Rings that return to the finger. A severed hand that will not stop crawling toward the thing it was taken from. No Reassembly has ever announced what happens when a collection is complete. At least one has completed.

Khoraz, the Flame That Takes. Khor'aazuun fed upon the one thing the Source had never been given, which is belonging. It hungers for connection the way ordinary fire hungers for air, and like fire its feeding is its destroying. Lineage, fealty, godhood and love are all fuel, and what passes through its flame remains alive, and remains alone. Its cult is the Unlit Flame, which keeps no temples, because its liturgy is arson of the soul, performed rarely and at ruinous cost. Candles burning black at the wick's heart. A hearth that warms no one. The sudden causeless certainty of being unloved.

Valgur, the Sorrow Rooted. Vaal'ghruun drank deepest of the Source's sorrow, the anguished terrors and lost loves out of which existence was torn. It is despair as an ecology: grief that takes root, branches, seeds and spreads. It does not cause sorrow. It gardens it. It needs no cult, because grief tithes itself, and the Bone Yew forests are held to be its diffused flesh. Weeping without cause on the forest road. Sap running dark on the anniversary of a battle. Every mourner who cannot stop is an unwitting congregant.

The two Stars, and what the war is over

Neither court is the top of its own side. Above the Constellation Court stands Sagius, the Star of Providence and Prophecy, who is not of Nu and was never born to it. He came from outside, treated with Hyton, and was permitted to tutor his children while their father's attention turned away, giving each of them the thing they lacked. Then he vanished, leaving a warning not to create life, because the final lesson was of life and death. They disobeyed him, and everything since is the consequence. He is venerated rather than worshipped, and rarely by common folk. The Church of Song sits beneath him, and the Court is his.

Above the Void Princes stands Draiji, the Star of Doom, first among equals, whom mortals call the Dark Star when they do not wish to say his name. He is himself an emanation, the outward-turned face of Dre'kmar as Dre'kmar is of the Source, which is why the oldest oaths name them together. He sits upon a Stygian astral throne near the Eye of Dre'kmar, radiating corruptive violet out into the void, and across that Eye the Star of Providence counteracts his karmic influence. The Stygian Cult sits beneath him. He is not venerated in daylight anywhere in the civilised world, and he does not need to be, because he recruits directly and privately. His method never changes. He finds the one who has been refused something, and he offers it. He spoke to Aezithis from within his own blood. He came to Zaona in her desperation, and she gave more of herself than her sister had ever given.

What the war is over is not Nu, though Nu is the ground the two Stars contest. The Caelyrean was not raised as a house for the world. It was raised around the Kairon, the Indivisible: time itself, lying at the focus of the universe, the one thing in creation that cannot be divided, and the world is merely what has grown up inside the shelter. Every defensive pact of the Constellation Court, every constellation held in battle formation across the night sky, exists to keep that single thing whole. The Caelyrean also keeps existence out of the hungered gaze of the Source, and the chronicles agree on one point above all others, which is that the Source is stirring.

The constellation that is failing

Torvath has been dimming for the better part of a millennium. Two of his eleven stars are nearly gone. Historically the oathbreaker was severed from his line, his house, his gods and his own memory of why he had ever cared, and this no longer reliably happens. His lineage of star-prophets has stopped answering letters. His remaining devout will tell you, if pressed hard, that oath-breaking has become fashionable among the great houses and that something is eating the difference.

Something is. Khoraz stands opposite him and Khoraz is ascendant, the one prince currently winning, and its greatest recent work severed a king from his ancestors and his gods and left him infertile in spirit. Its spawn is the black-violet flame. The Pyre burned in this fire, and the Pyre is a rite that severs a soul from its ancestors and its gods, which is Khor'aazuun's whole appetite performed in miniature by mortal hands. It is aimed at Tantis, whose work between the world and the far side of it is the exact inverse of it.

The auction of the star gods

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. That is the whole of the transaction, and it is the only afterlife there is.

The road to it runs out past the moons. On the edge of the Caelyrean, near one of the two, rests the Tantillian, a swan shaped opal ship, and the dead go aboard her. Tantis the Twice-Fated built her to instruction given by a star: sixth born, he could not create as his siblings created, and from him came no species at all, so Sagius gave him instead the knowledge to build a ship and a lute that could sail within the Caelyrean. Aezithis, having knelt to Dre'kmar, was given a shard of foulest Stygian and stabbed his brother through the heart with it, and the murder did not take entirely. Since that partial death Tantis has been condemned to the deck of his own ship, venturing from Nunamnir to the auction of souls and returning, and singing the whole way. The god of song is the ferryman, and he did not choose it.

While a soul has not begun its venture on the vessel it can still 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. He hunts for a thousand and one days. He cannot be stopped, bought off or hidden from, and he is not of the void: he is the star gods' collector, and the auction is his employer. A Void Prince cannot buy the days, a Lich King cannot intercede, and a Remoulded that promises otherwise is lying, and several have.

Souls do not all fetch the same. A Giafe arrives with six thousand years of perfect recollection in it, which is worth something. A soul with a marker on it fetches very little. The Wolken, who do not die, are the only people on the planet the auction has never once received, and whether the Court has noticed the gap is another matter.

None of this is a secret kept by a priesthood, because no priesthood has it. The few who have come back from the auction are taken for mad.

Who keeps which faith

The Court is kept openly and in daylight. For the Nu'uman it is the affiliation of the crowns: Providence has a Clergy that sits as one of the six estates, a Holy City of Hymns at Hylia, sworn adherents called the Providence-sworn, and a doctrine that the regard of the Court can be weighed, which is spoken of as "a Caelatari's measured interest." The Squeesh hold it to be the one library that was never burned, the stars being the pages that stayed up when everything below was lost, and the den-keeper reads the sky each clear night and enters it in the den's book. The Bogish and the Bogaisha keep it under Ollua the Green Moon. The Iziakmar call it the Written Sky and peel star names into their own skin, so that an old Iziakmar is a map of the night. The Thylem, where they know of it, have folded the good moon into it as the one that pulls water. The Thennok keep it on the strength of the only credential that matters to them, which is that they are the ones who see it: every night of their lives, from the roof-walks and the arrow slots and the lantern turrets, they watch it while the households below sleep through the entire performance.

The Princes are kept in cellars and in the courts of the rotten. Nu'uman Doom is sworn to a Prince by name and paid in blood under the dark moon, and its adherents are called the Doom-sworn. The Xacrie worship the Princes and the dark moon, believe in the realms of the void gods, and wish to roam the black skies for eternity. The Torgai faith is the Still Water, and the Prince they serve they name in their own tongue and call in Common the Holder of the Marker, the one who keeps the tally of every bargain ever struck and will call it in. The Torkan clans worship the Prince of the taken thing under a name of their own, Ghar'oth the Full Mouth, and which Prince wears that face is a thing no gullet-man has ever needed to know. The Vultari are aligned to a Prince beneath the Haldornak, and their faith promises no afterlife of any kind. The Pikon believe in few gods and find the Princes fit them best. On the Dead Continent the High Throne of the Lich serves a Prince whose name the Throne does not permit spoken. The Remoulded are not worshippers so much as fragments, and their prayer is directional rather than devotional, a piece calling to the whole.

Some take neither. The Sael'mund pay the star gods and the void gods the courtesy of witnesses and take no side between them. The Ossurn have no interest in the Princes, and Princes' cults that went into the frontier looking for recruits came back with nothing and, in two cases, did not come back. Most Thojar are atheists, and they are the only people on Nu of whom that is true as a majority position.

The halls that are empty

Under all of it runs one fact that the shrines do not have. No worldly god keeps a realm of the dead. The Nu'uman temples promise halls and describe them in loving detail: the Sunlit Field, the Hall Beneath the Waves, the Hunting Ground, the Quiet Orchard of the good moon. Every one of those halls is empty, and the priests describing them will never learn it, and neither will the households paying for the telling.

This is the whole of the advantage the void faiths hold. The Princes keep real realms and can raise a soul into them, and unlike the worldly gods they can deliver what they promise, which is why their cults keep winning converts in a world where the shrines of Tantis and Orton promise afterlives that do not exist. The doctrine the Lich Kings preach is the one thing in the religious landscape of this world that is not a lie. A person who signs with a Prince is being told the truth about the destination and lied to about the terms.

The Do'urssan promise nothing at all. The pit takes the common dead and the mountain takes the noble, and that is the whole of their teaching on the matter. Having promised nothing, they are the one people on Nu who are not lied to by their own religion.