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Jane’s Pantheon

Gods and Goddesses

The Waif

euphemistically called “The Waif” to avoid attention

“sacrifices” herself daily to maximizer her power to “protect her people”, this is a lie

actually, a plague goddess who feeds on destruction

her only form is that of the terrifying little girl

goddess of plague, violence, manipulation, unrest, and neglect

Starry Father

human form is that of a Middle Eastern man with amber eyes

sometimes a great desert fox

once threw a handful of sand into the sky and created the stars

sometimes he rides a ship in the desert

diety of protection and divination, stars, navigation, destiny, sailors, and glassblowers

The Woman in the Wood

as a human, she appears as an incredibly tall Asian woman

other forms include that of an ancient tree, a woods witch, and a golden weasel

primarily goddess of fire and vegetation, but also forests, cycles, healing (surgery), funerals, births, and farming

Mother of Hidden Things

A distractingly beautiful back woman with silver chains for hair

also has forms as a massive, dark serpentine dragon, a larget velvet doe blacker than the void, with silver antlers and hooves always followed by fog

goddess of dreams, night, hot springs, cryptids, and thieves 

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Excerpts from Star Culture Notes

A star alter is called a katherzua, or “the burning place”.

Kathurza’s are carved out of one solid stone piece and consist of several square stairs and one birdbath like structure on top. The stone is blessed before carving and must be done perfectly. If any mistake is made, the whole thing must be pulverized and the dust is collected for other things as it is still considered sacred.

Katherzuas are at the center of all Star temples, present in all star houses, and are considered the most sacred of objects in star culture.

These alters are always made of either obsidian or quartz-like stone, with an opalite stone on top that hovers above a bit filled with water.

The stone for Katherzuas used to be transported by a meteorite, and the ground it struck altered to be the temple sight, considered chosen- and sacred space is scared space is sacred space regardless. Until that is, too large of a Katherzua stone was sent to earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Then alternate methods needed to be chosen for transport.

It is a strongly held belief that all Katherzuas are connected.

~

Lovers in star stories never come to happy ends.

At best they die.

At worst… well… you don’t really want to know worst.

Let’s just say that no one dreams of growing up and falling madly in love with anything- not even something as insignificant as a brownie.

~

The Council of the Stillness is a pseudo-monastic order made up mostly of starkin, though it is open to beings of all species. These individuals are said to be both blind and deaf, communicating with the outside through oracles, and some variations of a braille and BSL type system. Their goal is mediation in order to “feel the turning of the universe” with themselves as both edge and center, inside and everywhere at once. Only those without the use of all their senses are said to be able to purify their minds enough to reach this state.

Theoretically, they seek the best in themselves and in each being- and focus on ways to call forward that version of ourselves and our world.

However, no one has heard from or seen the Council of the Stillness or any of its members in millennia so they are now largely regarded as a myth.

~

Court Color Code:

Stars wear white

Elders wear cream or gold

Nobility wear blue

Polaris wears black

Weavers wear grey or silver

Terrestrials wear variations of brown or reddish-brown

Blinded stars wear purple

Old stars are considered honorarily wise and wear gold sashes with green broaches

Mother and Father stars wear gold sashes with blue broaches

Members of the mysterious Council of the Stillness wear red… but no one has actually seen one of them. So they are probably just a myth.

Celibate stars also wear red broaches

~

Regarding weather in the Sphere:

“It depends on where you are.”

“If you’re in the court proper, or one of the populated areas, they’re quite warm. not all of them are hot exactly, but the kind of warm that makes you feel comfortable with the idea of slipping into warm water, or out of whatever you’re wearing with the assurance that you won’t be cold. This is carefully balanced, most of the time. Some stars, of course, choose to bring parts of their auras with them so that they can be exceptionally warm if they desire, and so the areas around them are usually warmer, but you might not notice unless you have contact directly with their skin.”

“In the outer regions, the spaces between constellations, districts, houses- these places are very cold. On the outer edge, its like autumn but as the glow of the court fades you walk straight into winter, where the warmth is provided only by warm furs and sudden cracks of life energy in the cosmos. There is almost no rain, and no snow, no precipitation of any kind, but there is wind. Wind storms and soft breezes all around the sphere. And a certain dull roar that is its own weather. Like the scraping of a glacier, or the roar of a waterfall of large even the moon would look small in comparison. I do not know what makes the sound, but you feel it. Everyone does.”

~

There are lots of kinds of beings in Salma’s world. These generally fit into a number of certain categories- categories which introducing one at a time is no longer working for me. So, as best I can list them, here they are.

starkin (stars, weavers, etc.) shadowkin (this includes most traditional monsters- demons, ghosts, vampires) humans earthkin (these include furies, dryads, fauns, earthgods, shifters, elves…) waterkin (mermaids, nyaids…) other (magical peoples) deathkin (reapers, soulcatchers- this type is also called soulkin) beings of the ultimate (this is pretty much angles- anything that serves the ultimate deity)

~

There was once a civilization devoted to the stars in what is northern Africa.

They had high rates of interaction with the race, and developed the summoning rituals- but at a cost.

A summoning was done incorrectly and a blinded star was summoned stella en aura (that is, in aura- the aura being the fire part) and the whole of the civilization was burned away in an instant, leaving only hundreds of miles of desert that remain today.

Citizens who were traveling recorded the event and the rituals but these were lost to time.

~

The reason that love and death share a word in Salma’s language is that in the ancient understanding, true love was an act of death. That is, to love was to die.

Not in a physical sense, but rather in the sense that to truly love someone required the death of one’s ego in the putting of that other first in all things, or death of one’s own selfish desires or choices. This caused love to be defined as a “self-death”, which was later then shortened and lost in understanding over the years so that love and death were simply the same word.

By the time of Polaris’ take over, and with the wealth of knowledge she destroyed in order to hold power, this was all that remind. In order to keep her tight grip on a people who were very difficult to control (especially when they were bonded to each other) it was in her best interests to spread the alternate understanding that love, in fact, was an act of death itself and to be feared and avoided at all costs.

~

If combined with the right herbs and incantation, the blood of starkin can treat and relieve even the most severe of sunburns. Including those of vampires.

This however is mostly lost knowledge, and most vampires aren’t keen to try anyway.

~

Star children typically grow up in the nursery, where they are overseen by the Virgo stars. These women are then also their first teachers in most cases until the children go to court and then their constellations.

However, since the Virgo stars are strictly maidens and can not nurse, they employ a group of weaver wet nurses.

It is a fact not talked about in a polite society that these women are considered the lowest in the star system, slaves who never leave the nursery building and often have very short lifespans.

~

Blobfish are the result of a failed attempt to breed mermaid by some very, very drunk stars.

They woke up the next morning, screamed, and threw them in the earth oceans so no one would know.

But everyone already knew.

~

The Thousand Mirrors Ball used to be held yearly in a rotating star house. Every year between the high holidays of the Equinox and the First of April (Before you ask- no, I don’t know what it is, they haven’t told me.) it was done to allow the free mingling of starkin and humans. Usually invited were everyone’s favorite humans, world leaders, artists, academics, explorers… the best in every field and culture were brought together for a night. When the first world war broke out through a series of stupid decisions the court put a hold on this as a public sign of disapproval. When it went on to kill almost an entire generation they ended it in a sign of disgust. Secretly though, it continued in smaller scales and secret for a few more decades until there were not enough weavers to organize it efficiently. 

~

Starkin often use “the dreamer” as an oath the way humans do wherever we would use a name or approximation of one.

~

There is no banishing spell for starkin.

There are a few summoning spells (though these are ill-advised and have burned at least one great civilization off the face of the earth) but those same priests or magicians who managed to learn or write those spells never quite figured out how to send the being back home except to have it go on its own terms.

There is an opposite spell to one such summoning, however, it is not a banishing spell so much as a rite of abandonment. Its sister spell was concocted to create binding relationships between specific beings and groups of people. The rite of abandonment is meant to break these bonds, but the result is much like a messy divorce. Best possible scenario the being leaves and the group loses all rights and protections provided by them. Less positive outcomes include an untethered being wandering around causing trouble, or the overpowered version of a temper tantrum.

It’s much safer to just hope they forget about you.

~

To starkin, nothing quite inspires terror like the threat and wonder of antimatter.

The History of Antimatter:

Once this was a form of dark power that was available to any who had the discipline to harness it. The star mothers were careful to keep an eye on those who were practitioners and had an appetite for destruction.

Since the first and second antimatter wars though, and the following rebellion, the use of antimatter had become only more and more restricted and difficult to learn. In this age, it is only the stars of the Virgo constellation that are trained in the use of this.

The Uses of Antimatter:

There are two main uses for antimatter magic- that to create antimatter from matter, and that to channel antimatter. Both of these today have only dark uses, while they may have once had positive applications these have been lost to history (see the Age of Excess in star history).

The act of antimatter creation from matter requires an intense amount of energy and is the ultimate execution as it is a sort of unbeing that removes a star from the nebular cycle and misplaces the soul (if a soul is to be had). Antimatter is believed to keep some form of feeling and while it has no control of itself as an entity seems to have some sense of itself. New antimatter has been known to sometimes act like an animal in pain before it collapses into itself. Fear of becoming antimatter is enough to enforce much of the law of Polaris’ reign.

The second use of antimatter magic is that of channeling antimatter. This is how a practitioner forces antimatter to interact with the material world. This molds matter to your will through a burning process and can be done artificially through the use of channeling gloves enchanted by an ancient starkin whose name has been lost to history. Only a few such pairs of these gloves exist, and all known pairs are in the possession of Polaris’ inquisitors or the Virgo stars. More than anything in this age, this form of antimatter magic is used as a form of torture (to varied ends). This again inspires great fear in most of the starkin population. It has been noted that this form of torture does not always or even often leave scarring. The lack of scarring only makes it easier to deny it’s existence in the court when convenient or to be sure who is a victim or if or rather of some other horror.

Antimatter and Celibacy:

It has been widely noted that the use of magic in any universe requires both sacrifice and discipline. This, of course, takes different shapes in different worlds and in regards to different magics. While it may be possible to harness the power of antimatter through blood sacrifice or some other form of magic, it was a matter of practicality and elegance that led to celibacy becoming the mode of sacrifice in the early days as it could be practiced alone, required no approval or scrutiny from overseeing powers, and was found to be just as powerful as other solutions. This was taught to youth seeking to learn the art (though this may once have been in regards to temporary celibacy, the histories are largely missing) and as generations passed on the favored method of harnessing the inner power then became the only method. (This is probably better though as in the antimatter wars if it had been known blood magics might have sufficed the death tolls might have been alarmingly higher while they were already far too many to be properly accounted for or justified.)

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The Lady Ophelia- Death as the Maiden- A Dawn Star

They called her a goddess of spring, and the poets immortalized her.

They called her a priestess of love, and the world forgot her.

They called her madness, and the world fell in love.

Whatever they called her, she rose new each morning. And whatever they called her, death came to collect her from them at the end of the day, dragging her down into the inky darkness.

The Lady Ophelia was a great beauty, a princess even among the matriarchs of the stars. She loved many people in her day, but her true love was a dark star who would come for her each night.

Once, she loved a prince of Denmark. A foolish boy with a taste for blood and jealous nature. He enchanted the walls of his castle to keep her for his own and repel the dark star so that they could not run away together. Kept apart and away from the light the Lady Ophelia fell ill, and came to hate her prince. The men of his castle tried to convince her to reject the dark star and appeal to the prince’s good graces, but to no avail. The illness slowly turned to weakness and delusion, and the Lady Ophelia fell out a window and into a moat where she drowned.

Now outside the walls of the castle, the dark star came for his lady and when he found her dead he wept and swept her away to the cave of the great kathurza. Once, the stars would set their dead on fire- to be unmade and made anew. When the flames engulfed the Lady Ophelia though, it was said they came from the air itself and burned until the morning. Daylight came, and with it, the life back to the drowned maiden.

They say that somewhere in the world the Lady Ophelia still dies every night, living as different women, different rebellious queens of day. And that every morning her dark star is there when she rises again, hanging on her arm.

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The Children of Mara and Phobetor

The dream road is a dangerous place.

Once patrolled and governed by weavers, many of the more dangerous creatures were corralled, banished, or warned against. However, as folk traditions and weavers died out the most dangerous things bided their time, waiting until they could overwhelm dreamers with impunity.

The most dangerous creatures are the shapeshifters- dream demons that feed off the negative emotions of other beings, ingraining themselves into the lives of others by impersonating people that belong there and sucking the life out of their victims. They have been known to leave the dream world and to become outwardly violent if it serves their often mysterious ends.

Trust no one.

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The Sleeping Beauty

(Based on the Original fairytale- you can listen to here - ep 119)

In the time of the great star grandmothers, a matriarch called Aurora came down to earth to spend time with humanity. While she was there she came into conflict with an Other who put her to sleep with a cursed fiber. Her kin were horribly upset and laid her in her enchanted sleep in the Cave of the Kathurza. There she slept for one hundred years until she was stumbled upon by a descendant of the Other who had cursed her, an evil king who took advantage of her vulnerability and left her with child. Months later, her kin assisted her to birth twins even as she slept. One of the children grasped her finger in such a way that the enchanted fiber became visible to the gathered kin, and upon its removal, Aurora awoke in great love and terrible fury. Aurora smote the king and all his fellows and ascended to the sphere with her new children, Argyro and Aurek, the first weavers of dreams.

~

The first dream weavers were the half-human children of Aurora called Argyro and Aurek.

These twins were what the sphere today would call “natural weavers”, or weavers born from a star/human union. Natural weavers are typically more powerful than boralian weavers (weavers like Salma, born of two stars but conceived under the auroras on earth), but boralian weavers are more closely tied to the great dream road, meaning it is easier for them to travel the liminal spaces.

Argyro and Aurek called upon the power of all the great star mothers to create the great dream road in the eather. They knit together all in-betweens in order to create a place of rest, refuge, and revelation for all beings, to be forever guarded by their own kind. Even life and death themselves were traversable in the great liminal place that was the dream road for those who had the skill and courage to navigate it.

As the number of weavers lessened, there have been fewer beings to manage the dream road and as a result, it has become only more wild and more dangerous over time. Many things that populate the dream road are liars or dangers pretending to be something they’re not.

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Bluebeard

Bluebeard is one element of star lore to which human lore has stayed remarkably faithful.

The main difference is that in the star interpretation of the story, Bluebeard is a star who has come to earth looking for a suitable wife after becoming dissatisfied with the matriarchs of the celestial sphere. He, however, was a very cruel man, and one with very hard expectations of his wife:

dazzling beauty, purity, unquestioning loyalty, submission to him in all things, and the ability to run a household.

Towards that end he devised a test by which he would court a woman he believed desirable and inevitably earn her favor- after all, he was handsome, rich, powerful- and striking with his outlandish naturally blue beard. If she passed preliminary tests, they would be married, and she would come to live in his home. He gave her the keys to the house, but ordered her to keep one door always locked and never to look inside- this was his final (and perpetual) test of submission and loyalty. If his wife obeyed, they would remain married. If not, he would kill her and keep her body in that room.

Failures mounted, and so did the tales of the man with the blue beard. Eventually, the town disappeared (or was killed) and Bluebeard found himself alone with his manor in the woods, stealing maidens from other towns. However, because of one thing or another, none of his wives lasted very long.

His last wife was, however, a kin woman in the seventh generation- diluted, but favored in the court for her powers and beauty. She too opened the door but managed to get away with the help of the celestial courts.

This brought Bluebeard to the attention of not only the humans (who formed a mob to go after him), but of the matriarchs, who had him collected and imprisoned. When the humans got to his manor, only the carnage he had left behind was there to say the man with the blue beard had ever lived in that place.

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Scorpius- The Scorpian

The house of the scorpion is a dead constellation.

It is very recently a dead constellation, as recently as the purges after the second antimatter war. Recent enough to be in memory for some of the stars. Before this, it was a constellation full of life and intensity, populated by prophets and warriors, witches and saints. The kind of people who would walk through fire for their cause nevermind the burns. This is a powerful tool when it is your ally, but as your enemy, it may be your downfall.

While the constellation was subdued in the wake of the war Polaris saw the threat that it would always be and made plans to destroy it before it could become a problem.

Thus she sent her most monstrous children to burn it to the ground, slaughtering everyone in the constellation regardless of age, position, loyalties, or even if they were simply visitors that night.

They say that the light that still shines from these stars is created by the ghosts of that horror.

~

There are empty constellations.

Once full of life and culture, now the groups of stars are dead- victims of cleansing, political intrigue, and age.

Some of these have simply been removed- we humans chalk this up to “light pollution”, but the truth is we are looking for auras that have burned out. Others have been left with empty, untended auras because it would be both terrifying and embarrassing to just see sections of the sky go dark- so Polaris just lets them burn.

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Lyra

There are musicians, instrument builders, and then there are those obsessed with recording. The stars of the Lyra constellation have a passion for audio recording. Everything from speeches, lost languages, animal sounds, garage bands… if you can hear it, the Lyrists are making vinal of it to add to their more than impressive library. They’ve used other kinds of recording over the years, and keep trying to develop something more modern, but try as they might they keep going back to records. There’s just something about it that makes the sounds feel right.

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Toucana

As the stars dabble in creation and bioengineering, they create things that they love… and things that don’t work out very well. Sometimes these things intersect. The constellation known as Toucana is known as one of these places, a bird sanctuary for tropical creatures that can not survive on earth because of their “novel” structuring. The only earthbound birds in this sanctuary are toucans- also star creations, with beaks that have a bad habit of becoming problematic. Here though these and all the creatures are loved and cared for regardless of their problems and how much star power is needed to keep them going.

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Monoceros

Monoceros is… well, they’re the stoners and dealers of the stars. Their love of drugs is unrivaled, even in the celestial sphere. These stars prefer to grow and mix their own drugs and do so with great care, having bioengineered thousands of new compounds over the millennia and further refined them over and over until they were perfect and came in as many different strands as their hearts could ever desire.

Strawberry weed is their favorite by far.

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Sextans

The stars of the Sextans constellation have cultivated for themselves a steampunk paradise. Believers in both the elegant and the industrial, these beings put equal work into developing new mechanicalness and fashion while also repurposing the best of victorian era ingenuity, celebrating that hope and creativity by augmenting it with the best of star knowledge. It’s said that there isn’t anything that the Sextans stars can’t invent or improve- and that may be a legend, but so far no one has been able to disprove it.