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Vhoda's Sacrifice and the Myth of Cosmic Motherhood

In Thesha, creation didn't start with a word or a war. It started with longing. Vhoda, goddess of the void — She Who Walks Between the Stars — was alone. How long she'd been alone, no one can say. But something stirred in her, something aching and nameless. So she followed it. She let that yearning crack her open. She tore herself apart, not in rage, not in defeat, but in love. And from that final unraveling, everything else began.

Vhoda's sacrifice wasn't some grand performance. It was quiet, total, and final. She didn’t shape the world with her hands or speak it into being. She bled it into form. From her came the Calonnar — twelve shards of her own light. From her came the world, time, mortals, all of it. She gave all of herself, and in doing so, she vanished. No voice, no temple, no face. Only stars, watching.

And her sacrifice was not an act of duty — it was love. Fierce, boundless, bone-deep love. The kind of love that gives everything without needing to be seen. And in that way, Vhoda mirrors something deeply human. Across history, how many mothers have given their bodies, their names, their dreams, their silence, just so their children could have more? Vhoda is their divine echo. If she had to do it all again, she wouldn't hesitate. Not for a second.

There is no divine ego in Vhoda. No demand to be praised, no need for recognition. Her power is not dominance but devotion. She is the mother who starved so her children could eat. The mother who stayed behind in the burning house to make sure they got out. The one whose love did not elevate her, but emptied her out so others could rise. Thesha was made in that image. A world born not of violence or conquest, but of longing and grace.

Thesha is a world made of love and longing above all. Its bones are forged from the ache to hold and be held, to know and be known. Vhoda didn't just create a world; she loved it into being. And in doing so, she wrote a kind of sacred memory into the sky — not a name, but a silence. Not a monument, but a constellation of care.

There are echoes of her in other myths. Tiamat. Ymir. Gaia. But Vhoda's story has a stillness to it that sets it apart. Tiamat was slain. Ymir was carved. Vhoda chose. She consented to her own undoing. There's something terrible and tender in that. A divine blueprint of motherhood as the act of giving pieces to yourself to those you love.

And the echo of that first sacrifice? It keeps ringing. The Calonnar followed her lead. During the Sundering, they gave up their bodies too. Not out of obligation, but out of devotion. It's the rhythm of Thesha's sacred: to protect is to vanish. The Luminarium teaches this without saying it outright. Its leader, the Luminarch, rules in silence. Veladriel forbids bloodshed. The gods speak in absence. The light bends, but never breaks.

What does it mean that the mother of all things is silent? That she watches but never answers? It leaves a mark. Her name begins prayers, but her face is never carved in stone. There is no shrine to Vhoda, only sky. And yet she’s everywhere. She is the ache, the hope, the presence behind presence. To believe in her is to believe that silence can be love, and that sacrifice can be holy.

In a world of hungry gods and broken saints, Vhoda gave us something else. She gave us the stars. She gave us the world. She gave us a myth not of dominance, but of devotion. Not of flame, but of quiet, enduring light. She made a cosmos out of her own undoing. And that, more than anything, is what holds Thesha together.

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The Trickster’s Threads: Branoc, Fate, and the Choice to Disobey

Branoc doesn’t bind. He tempts.

He doesn’t give orders. He leaves the door ajar and watches who dares to open it. He is the god of fate, yes—but not fate as prophecy or prison. Not a single road with blood written in the cobblestones. His kind of fate is messier. Stranger. Threaded through everything. Tangled. Half-invisible. Waiting to be pulled.

He lays the paths. But the walking? That’s always up to you.

In Thesha, fate isn't a line. It's a snarl. A knot. A whole web of almosts and maybes, spun tighter than most people care to see. Branoc is the god who weaves that web. Trickster. Oath-twister. Patron of crossroads and bad ideas that feel like freedom. The god of what might have been, and what still could be, if you just veer a little left of the story they wrote for you.

He knows every version of your life. Every vow you might break. Every betrayal you’re one choice away from. Every loophole hidden in a curse. But he doesn’t shove you. He doesn’t seal your fate. He lays it out like a puzzle, smiles, and lets you ruin yourself, or save yourself, with your own two hands.

That’s what makes him dangerous. He doesn’t control you. He makes sure you see how much power you actually have. And then he leaves you with it.

Some people hate him for that. Say his riddles lead you into traps. Say his threads pull you into ruin. Maybe they do. But Branoc isn’t about safety. He’s about possibility. He’s the breath before you speak. The silence before you choose. The moment you realize you can still run.

He doesn’t hand out answers. When people pray to him—Tell me what to do—he stays quiet. Maybe tilts the scales a little. Maybe shows you something you missed. But he’ll never pick for you. He’ll just remind you: you always had a choice. Even when it didn’t feel like it. Even when the gods themselves said otherwise.

He is a liar, yes. But he is the most honest liar you’ll ever meet. He never tells outright falsehoods. He doesn’t need to. He trades in almost-truths. In silences. In clever phrasing and the space between what was said and what was meant. You won’t realize the trap until you’ve walked into it smiling, and you’ll still swear he never lied.

Among the Calonnar, Branoc might be the most dangerous. Maybe even more dangerous than the Gwaeduin. Because he doesn’t demand obedience. He doesn’t take your name. He lets you make the wrong choice, and then makes sure you understand why it mattered. The Gwaeduin devour. But Branoc? Branoc leaves you intact, just rearranged. Just aware.

His worship isn’t about obedience. It’s about cleverness. Survival. About wriggling free from the noose with a laugh still in your mouth. He doesn’t reward purity. He rewards nerve.

To Branoc, free will isn’t a comfort. It’s a blade. And if you’re brave—or desperate—enough to use it, he’s already watching.

The Calonnar might guide. The Gwaeduin might devour. But Branoc waits in the middle of it all, thread between his fingers, amused and patient. Not because he knows where you’ll go, but because he knows you’re the one who has to live with it.

Fate, in his hands, isn’t a leash. It’s a dare.

And free will? Free will is the knife you carry to carve a door where there wasn’t one.

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To Love the Threshold: On Branoc, Tywelwen, and the Divine Union of Opposites

If love is a form of recognition, then what deeper recognition exists than that between Branoc and Tywelwen?

He is the trickster—god of contracts, fate, lies, luck, riddles, and thresholds. She is the veiled one—goddess of death, grief, the moon, silence, solitude, and mourning. He spins the thread. She cuts it. He writes the loophole. She guards the gate. And between them lies every impossible thing that somehow still exists.

They shouldn't fit. But they do.

Branoc is movement. Pattern. Possibility just barely out of reach. He slips through cracks that shouldn't exist and leaves doors ajar where walls were meant to stand. Tywelwen is stillness. The sacred hush after the last breath. She holds the weight of what was lost and chooses not to look away. He is the whisper of what might yet be. She is the ache that says: not this time.

But here's the truth—he never forces the gate. He never shatters the silence. With her, he waits. He listens. He doesn't fill her grief with riddles. He sits beside it. And Tywelwen, for all her solitude, lets him stay. She lets him linger at the edge of things. Not to steal what she keeps. But to hold space with her.

They are both creatures of the in-between. One foot in order, the other in unraveling.

Branoc is the reason there’s always a choice, even when the world says there isn’t. Tywelwen is the reason every choice matters.

Resurrection doesn’t happen because of mercy alone. It happens because of them. Because he lays the thread across the void and she—only sometimes—decides not to cut it. That agreement is rare. Sacred. It costs them both.

Their love isn’t soft. It isn’t loud. It’s sharp. It’s holy. It lives in the breath before the answer. In the moment the veil trembles but doesn’t break.

He doesn’t try to change her. She doesn’t try to hold him still. They don’t need to fix each other. They just see each other—and in that seeing, they make space for what should be impossible:

For the dead to rise.

For the story to be rewritten.

For silence and speech to share the same room without tearing it down.

They’re not opposites. They’re not contradictions. They’re a covenant.

And because of them, Thesha still has its in-betweens.

Still has its loopholes. Still has its miracles.

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A standard Watchlight edict, circulated in shrine districts and border towns. Most copies are read once, folded carefully, and tucked behind holy icons—just in case.

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Tangled Paths: Free Will and Divine Intervention in Thesha

In Thesha, the gods are not silent. They are fractured, refracted, outlawed, or worshipped—but never absent. Their influence winds through the world like roots through soil: hidden, tangled, and impossible to fully cut free from. And yet, people still choose. They still love, betray, grieve, burn, rise. They still carve stories into the dark with bleeding hands and call it their own.

This tension—the pull between divine interference and mortal agency—is one of Thesha's most persistent hauntings. A thread pulled taut through time, stretched across every altar and battlefield, woven into the bones of every saint, rebel, and revenant.

The Luminarium would have you believe the gods do not command, only illuminate. That the Calonnar are refracted lights, not puppet strings. That Vhoda gave herself up so the world could learn to choose for itself. And maybe there's truth in that. The Luminarch, after all, rules in silence. Even the gods who still answer do so sparingly, in riddles and flickers, not thunder. Light may bend, they say, but truth must not break.

But in practice? Choice in Thesha is often an illusion dressed in holy light. A carefully constructed story of freedom, where stepping outside the lines is called corruption.

The Watchlight does not punish doubt. It categorizes it. Names it. Measures your soul for cracks. There are right ways to grieve. Right ways to speak. Right ways to want. Step beyond that, and you’re not defiant—you’re diseased. Refracted. Twisted. A danger to the Pattern.

Which is a bitter irony, isn’t it? That the Calonnar themselves are called refractions of Vhoda’s light—pure, divine fragments—but when a mortal bends the light in a way the Church does not approve of, it becomes heresy. Holy if you’re a god. Dangerous if you’re not. Same word. Different weight.

Even the gods are bound. None may trespass another's domain. A priest of Goleuwen may mend flesh, but cannot ease the grief it leaves behind. A servant of Tywelwen may call a soul home, but cannot soothe the wounds it carried. Each gift is incomplete. Each god, restrained. This is Vhoda’s final command: no one god may hold the whole. It is her last safeguard against tyranny.

Because they could. The Calonnar could bend the world if they wanted to. They could unmake minds and rebuild mortals to fit the shape of perfection. But they don’t. Not because they lack the power, but because they remember. They remember what Vhoda gave. What she gave up. And they will not unmake the freedom she tore herself apart to give.

To dominate would be a betrayal of everything she was. So instead, they wait. They speak in signs. They guide with open hands instead of clenched fists. Not because they are gentle. But because they are bound by love, by grief, by memory. By her.

The Gwaeduin, on the other hand, remember nothing but their own hunger. They clawed their way to godhood not by reverence, but by ruin. They do not wait. They do not ask. They take. Their blessings do not guide; they consume. Their worship reshapes you until there’s nothing left but reflection and ache. Some call that power. Some call it freedom.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Between them. Always between.

Some still try to walk their own road. The Wayfarers serve no god, no crown. Their names are earned, not inherited. They choose who they become. But even they carry charms. Even they whisper prayers when the dark stretches too wide.

Even the Revenants—those pulled back from death by Tywelwen’s mercy—are shaped by divine hands. They walk with borrowed breath and bones that remember the grave. But their love, their fury, their refusal to be silent? That is their own. That is where free will burns brightest. In the places the gods cannot reach.

Maybe that’s the real truth of Thesha. Free will isn't gifted. It isn't easy. It isn't clean. It's what you claw back with your teeth. What you protect even when you don’t know who you are anymore. It's the part of you that won't kneel.

The gods may light the way. But the walking? The walking is ours.

And sometimes, the most sacred thing you can do in a world full of gods is whisper, bloodied and breathless: "No. Not like this. I’ll find another way."

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An Introduction to Divinity

In Thesha, the gods are not distant.

They are memory. They are the blood and bones of their domain. They are the soul of it. They are the true embodiment of life, death, war, etc.

The Calonnar

The Old Gods. The Refractions of the All-Mother's Light.

Twelve vast deities, born of Vhoda, the All-Mother, who tore herself apart to create the world. Each god is a facet of her, a truth made flesh, now spirit.

When the new gods rose, they gave up their bodies to save reality.

All that remains of them are crystals — the Gods’ Graves — that rise like mountainous monuments across the land.

To worship them is to seek balance.

The Twelve

Goleuwen (GOH-leh-wen) – Light, healing, life. The Starlight Maiden.

Tywelwen (TUH-well-wen) – Death, silence, resurrection. The Veiled Lady.

Marenwen (MAR-en-wen) – Storm, sorrow, sea. The Sea-Mother.

Curhydd (KUR-hith or KUR-hidd) – Wilds, protection, fatherhood. The Forest-Father.

Branoc (BRAN-ock) – Fate, lies, magic. Lord of Crossroads.

Cynden (KIN-den) – Craft, flame, inspiration. The Enduring Flame.

Talaric (tah-LAR-ik) – Wealth, power, kingship. The Golden Judge.

Madwen (MAD-wen) – Knowledge, strategy, language. The Silent Strategist.

Daerwyn (DARE-win) – Earth, harvest, autumn. The Earth-Binder.

Cariadwen (KAR-ee-ad-wen) – Love, longing, spring. The Heartweaver.

Morcant (MOR-kant) – Rage, vengeance, war. The Bloodwrought.

Gwirwen (GWEER-wen) – Law, order, mercy. The Immaculate Balance.

The Gwaeduin

The New Gods. The Reforged. The Forbidden.

Once mortals of Ilmathûn, they seized divinity in a moment of utter betrayal to reality itself, causing the Sundering through bloody sacrifice, ambition, and ruin.

They are not worshipped. They are survived.

Each one reflects a sacred fracture — hunger, silence, wildness, wrath, etc.

The Luminarium calls them heresy. The Watchlight hunts them.

The Nine

Saevha (SAY-vuh) – Secrets, betrayal, severance. The Knife Between Oaths.

Amhar (AHM-har) – Conquest, supremacy, violence. Tyrant of Tyrants.

Edaris (eh-DARE-iss) – Delusion, prophecy, obsession. The Lord of Mirages.

Isareth (ISS-uh-reth) – Mourning, loss, memory. The Hollow Saint.

Caradoc (KAIR-uh-dock) – Desire, devotion, self-erasure. The Lord of Longing.

Cyralaine (SEER-uh-lane) – Complacency, silencing, false peace. The Gentle Lie.

Halvren (HALV-ren) – Rot, plague, sacred decay. The Rotting Saint.

Avarisse (AH-vuh-riss) – Blood, vengeance, seduction. The Crimson Queen.

Marrok (MAHR-ock) – Instinct, fear, transformation. The Howl Unbound.

The Gwaeduin Triads

Not all heresies come alone.

The Gwaeduin are not worshipped as individuals in most surviving cults these days. They gather in patterns. They whisper in threes.

The Watchlight calls these configurations Triads: trios of divine corruption whose domains feed and amplify each other like a closed circuit of rot and radiance.

Each Triad reflects a specific spiritual infection — not just in what they offer, but in how they twist the soul. They’re more than theology. They’re emotional ecosystems, echo chambers of distorted desire.

Here’s how the Luminarium classifies them:

The Triad of Hunger

Caradoc. Avarisse. Edaris. Obsession, vengeance, unreachable perfection.

These gods seduce rather than command. Their cults appear as salons, dream temples, or blood-kissed performances. Their followers lose themselves in beauty, longing, and the ache for what can never truly be possessed.

Watchlight Codename: The Scarlet Spiral

Common Symptoms: Mirrored eyes. Devotional madness. Fixation without end.

The Triad of Stillness

Cyralaine. Isareth. Halvren. Grief, sedation, sacred rot.

These are the gods that offer comfort — and then smother you with it. Their worship is found in hospice cults, plague-choked shrines, and temples that promise peace at the cost of the will.

Watchlight Codename: The Quiet Bloom

Common Symptoms: Waxen calm. Forgotten names. Rot beneath still waters.

The Triad of Severance

Marrok. Saevha. Amhar. Rebellion, instinct, righteous violence.

This triad burns like wildfire. Their followers are rebels, oathbreakers, and berserkers who believe their bloodshed is holy. Wherever law breaks and loyalty twists, they are near.

Watchlight Codename: The Broken Crown

Common Symptoms: Golden eyes. Sacred scars. Blade-blessed treason.

The Gwaeduin don’t simply corrupt individuals — they reshape entire belief systems. The Watchlight doesn’t hunt gods. They hunt contagions of worship. And the Triads are the deadliest strains.

So when three names are whispered together in the dark, you run.

Or worse… you listen.

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a return, soft and unfinished

It’s been a long time since I used this space.

Some of you might remember when I was trying to build a game by myself — and how quickly that started eating me alive. I had the world, the vision, the ghosts. But doing it alone burned me out. I disappeared. Quietly.

For a while, I thought that might be it. That I’d just lost whatever made me capable of making anything.

But lately, things have started shifting. Slowly. Unevenly. Not in some grand, magical way — just… finally getting the help I should’ve had a long time ago.

And that help? It’s been changing me. I’m not fixed. I’m not finished. But I’m healing. And healing means I can return to the thing that’s been waiting for me for over a decade.

Thesha.

A world where gods remember. Where devotion can undo you. Where memory is sacred and nothing stays buried for long.

It’s the story that lives under my skin. The one that never left, even when I did.

It’s a world that’s gone through many versions and names — many failed attempts to shape it into something that actually matched the thing in my head.

But now, finally, it’s forming into something real.

So I’m back here now. Not to perform. Not to hustle. Just to share. To make. To remember.

You’ll find:

lore fragments and divine profiles

worldbuilding notes and rambling

thoughts on storytelling, belief, and the slow work of returning

maybe some unhinged things about gods, obsession, and the psychology of being known too deeply

and whatever else leaks through the cracks

If you’re still here, thank you.

If you’re new, welcome.

If you’re also trying to claw your way back into the work that made you feel alive, I see you.

Here’s to building slowly, softly, sacredly.

Thread by thread.

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Every third night, at the witching hour, it crosses the fields by the radio tower.

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being a symbolism enjoyer should humble you because at the end of the day no matter how eloquently you articulate it youre essentially saying "i love it when things have meaning"

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i know it's been 10 years solas, but where is that masterwork armor i gave to you

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OSHA eat your heart out

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best comment award

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Rook meeting Assan.

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Rip to everyone on this site who didn't realise they were following sleeper dragon age fans. The fandom is awakening from its deep slumber.

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who would win: a god of ancient power, impossible to destroy, ruthless in his exactness and drive

OR

osha violations

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*flirtatious and menacing* Hey baby.., I couldn’t help but see you across the room and notice that you were…. . doomed by the narrative

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I’ve known about Davrin’s baby griffon for five whole minutes and if anything happened to it I would kill everyone in Thedas and then myself