The Nine

Ask a hedge-priest in Or where Thalgrin came from and she will tell you he was always there, the way the mountain was always there. Ask a Scholar's Rift theologian the same question and you will be handed a diagram.

The diagram is not wrong. It is simply rude.

Two Parents

Every deity in Iridia is the child of two things that are not themselves deities.

The first is a substrate—a body, a medium, something for a god to be made of. There are only two, and neither was born. Irion is matter that refuses to change: its shattered body is the most permanent thing in the world, and it has no opinion whatsoever about what is done with it. Xal'Zyra is the opposite pole, passage without destination, the folding of space in the Dense. Neither holds a moral position, because neither was ever about anything. They simply are, and they were there first.

The second is a Will—a standing position held by enough people, for long enough, that it acquires weight in The Anchored. This is the law of Becoming working exactly as described: a prayer spoken by millions becomes a god. Will is not invented by any one faction or any one century. It is what happens when a people decide, collectively, how far they are prepared to go.

A god is what you get when a Will is worked into a substrate.

Thalgrin is dwarven duty pressed into a piece of Irion's corpse beneath the Armour of Or. Aurelthys is the doctrine of necessary hierarchy grown into the Eldeviérs Shell. Neither is older or younger than the other in the way a father is older than a son—they are two different answers to two different questions, given bodies in two different places.

The Nine Are Will Without Substrate

The Nine are the standing positions themselves. They are what mortal Will looks like before it is pressed into anything.

This is why they cannot anchor. A deity takes a Scale in order to have somewhere to be, and the Nine have nothing to put there. They are not weak. They are not distant. They are simply bodiless, and a body is the one thing they have never consented to acquire.

The Anchored is explicit about the trade they are refusing:

A few, carefully evade it—knowing that to anchor too fully is to lose all room for change.

Irion did not evade it. Irion anchored so completely that it died, and its death is the ground everyone else stands on. The Nine watched that happen and drew a conclusion.

For the same reason, none of the Nine has a true name. A name is a kind of anchoring—it fixes a thing, makes it addressable, gives it an edge where before there was only a position. Gods with bodies have true names: the Unborn is Benúron, and knowing so means something. The Nine have only epithets, worn like coats and shed when a generation stops believing in them.

The Ring

The Nine are arranged by the question that separates them: if we can influence the world for the better, how far are we willing to go?

They border one another along the edges of that grid, and the borders are not metaphors. The Liberator's position touches the Guiding Hand's and the Harmonizer's; it does not touch the Discordant's at any point, and no argument, treaty or catastrophe has ever made it do so.

The Concordant sits at the centre and borders four. This is why the Fractured Keep is called the Concordant Tread—not because the Concordant rules it, but because the Concordant's position is the only one that touches every quarter of it.

Why Some Domains Float

A god's domain-space on the Tread inherits the character of its substrate, and this is the clearest evidence that the theologians are onto something.

Gods made mostly of Irion get territory: fixed borders, stable ground, a domain you can walk into and out of. Thalgrin's forge-lands do not move. Aurelthys's tiered halls do not move.

Gods made mostly of Xal'Zyra get domains that behave like the Dense does—drifting, folding, accessible only by rare configurations. The Unborn's domain is like this. So is Vexyrra's, which is unsurprising, since Vexyrra was born in the Fracture Realm out of a collision rather than at any Scale at all.

What was once filed as a defect in certain gods turns out to be ancestry. You can read a deity's parentage off the stability of its borders.

The Nine, having no substrate, have domains that barely qualify as places. Vel Hollow cannot be walked into—only whispered through. The Waxed Hollow is sought and not found. These are not territories so much as rumours with coastlines.

Succession

The Tread's old rule holds that when a Scale falls vacant, only a deity whose domain borders the vacancy may inherit it. Under the two-parent model this becomes a double condition, and it explains a good deal of otherwise baffling divine politics:

1. The claimant's domain must border the vacancy territorially, on the Tread.
2. The claimant's Will must border the departed god's Will on the ring above.

A god of enormous power whose Will sits diagonally across the grid cannot inherit a neighbouring Scale, however convenient the geography. A weak god one step along the lattice can. This is why successions in Iridia are so often won by nobodies, and why the losers so often describe the result as a technicality.

It is a technicality. It is also the shape of the world.

Outside the Ring

Three things stand apart from the ring, and asking which alignment any of them holds is a category error of the kind that gets students quietly reassigned.

Irion and Xal'Zyra are the substrates. They were there first, they hold no position, and everything with a body borrowed that body from one or both of them.

Vexyrra is the difficult one, and the theologians of Scholar's Rift have stopped trying to file it beneath anything. It has a body and no Will—the byproduct of two fractured selves colliding in the Fracture Realm, belonging to no parent and answering to no position. The current consensus is that this does not make Vexyrra an exception to the model so much as a fourth thing the model does not cover: not a substrate, not a Will, not a god assembled from the two. Its own page says it plainly enough. It is not the sum of these parts.

So the honest diagram has three figures standing outside the ring rather than two, and one of them is a good deal younger than the argument it refuses to join.

"The gods did not divide into nine. The people did. The gods merely noticed."