The Einar¶
Contested
This page is named in the open question Einar: Elder Gods or younger gods. It follows the 2026 Cosmology Revision, under which both generations are Einar; the older readings are kept under Earlier accounts.
"Einar - The Gods, origins unknown but they are not originally from Terrun." — the Overview of Gods
The Einar are the gods of Terrun: immortal intelligences who came to the world from outside it, subdued the elements, built the planes mortals live on, and have fought one another for the pieces of their own creation ever since. Every god a mortal prays to is an Einar, a being raised by an Einar, or a pretender who has got hold of something the Einar made. The word covers both the first generation, the Elder Gods, and the Younger Gods who overthrew them; it is also used of the Younger Gods alone, and the oldest sources use it for the rebels in particular.
Origin¶
The Einar are not native to Terrun. Before their coming the world was an Elemental Chaos in which "great elemental lords shaped, played and created on the Material Plane", and the only true natives were the Elementals and the Eldritch who are believed to have ascended from them. The arrival of the Einar ended that Primordial Age. The newcomers claimed dominion, the elementals resisted, and the Primordial War followed. Allied with the Eldritch, the Einar won, imprisoned the Primordial Elementals, and built the Fae and Material planes on top of the raw elemental energies they had brought to order. Where they came from is not recorded. One account says only that "Kalar ... brought the Einar to Terrun"; another that "intelligences separated themselves from the Void and in the process created the Astral Plane", becoming the Astral forms of the First Ones.
Those First Ones were vulnerable in a way the gods no longer are. They were wandering souls, "beings whose form and soul are in one location", and so could be destroyed outright. During the Primordial Wars the Einar created the Ethereal Plane to separate form from soul, protecting themselves and their minions from utter destruction. That separation is the foundation of every afterlife on Terrun (see Death and the Afterlife).
The Einar have no soul in the mortal sense. Their immortal souls do not reside on the Ethereal Plane, and where they do reside is unknown. The One God theory, blasphemous to most priesthoods, holds that the Einar are for the most part different faces of a single Einar soul, and that the Ethereal Plane itself may be part of it. Sharuvas, the Divine, who came from another world, is the known exception: she appears to have an Einar-like soul of her own. The Einar also have no empathy for mortals as a matter of nature. The Elder Gods "see living creatures as toys, playthings or at best tools"; it is the Younger Gods, attached to the creations of Kalar, who "see morality through a humanistic lens".1
Elder and Younger¶
The Einar of the first generation are the Elder Gods. There were hundreds of them. They did not get along, and were held to "some level of civility" only by Izhtari, Queen of Astryssil and ruler of the gods, who had taken the Throne of Law by murdering her husband Tamariel, the High God who first sat it. The Elder Gods made the elder races, among them the Eldritch, the Giants, the Faeries, the Dinosaurs, the Ventari and the Dwarrow, and used them as pawns against one another.
The Younger Gods are the faction, led by Kalar, that broke the Throne. The quarrel began over the Demons. When the Demons arrived, the Einar split over how to meet them; Izhtari banished those who were not with her from the Astral Plane, and a group of Einar led by Kalar made a pact with four imprisoned Primordial Elementals, broke into the Astral, and shattered the Throne of Law. Its shards, "numbered now in the hundreds", passed to the Einar who claimed them. These became the Younger Gods, and the Elder Gods were not killed but usurped: their powers greatly diminished, most banished or weakened "to the point of being little more than demi-gods", and the most dangerous imprisoned in prisons Kalar built. Those prisons have been failing since the Age of the Dark Sun, and the Awakened Gods who have left them "generally despise each other as much as they do the other gods". Seth'Arax has been fully awake since 721 SM of the Fifth Age.
The oldest surviving account of the split says that all the Younger Gods were once Elder Gods themselves, and that "not long after, they split due to disagreement into the 3 factions of gods (light, dark and twilight)". The three-faction scheme is described under Earlier accounts below.
The Throne of Law and the shards¶
The Throne of Law was forged at the end of the Primordial conflict "to govern both Inner and Heavenly Planes". It settled the Elder Gods' squabbles by granting "uncontestable dominion to 12 High Gods of the Einar", and it redirected the energies of Terrun into a new Astral Realm under Einar control, which the Eldritch counted as the theft of their greatest source of power. When Kalar's faction shattered it, the Throne became the Astral Shards, and the shards are what make a god a god.
A shard is not a tool. "An astral shard is a living thing with its own will. Not quite alive, but definitely not inanimate." Each is dedicated to some part of creation's purpose, its Domain; a god who works with its intelligence is stronger, and one who works against it is weaker. Bending a shard to one's will "takes time, willpower, energy and compromise", which is why new shard-holders are vulnerable and old gods "can become very powerful as they allow their personalities to blend with their shard". The 2026 revision sorts every shard into one of five Astral Domains, Matter, Creation, Life, Thought and Union, with Kalar the Creator standing at the head of all five; the deity pages and pantheon overviews give the roster.
Ownership of a shard follows the holder's lifeforce, not their presence. If a holder's material form is destroyed, another being can claim the shard by entering it and performing a ritual, known only to the Einar, at the Shard's Nexus; the ritual takes a full astronomical cycle, and in most cases the original owner's form has regenerated in time to disrupt it. A god who loses a shard this way is relegated to the rank of an Ascendant, usually a Fallen one. The Einar grant lesser shares of a shard by Astral Contract (see Astral Contracts); worship itself is such a contract, which is why "the gods compete for mortal followers and attention".
Not only Einar hold shards. Several Primal Dragons, Pravustiratel among them, became "the first non-Einar to possess Astral Shards" during the God Wars; the Seven Hells are shards repurposed as prisons and now held by the Archdemons; and the smallest fragments, Astral Dust, make Demigods of their holders.
Pantheons¶
The 2026 revision divides the Younger Gods into four pantheons by whom they patronise, and the wiki follows it:
| Pantheon | Patrons of | Head |
|---|---|---|
| The Kalari | humankind | Kalar |
| The Rakkarim | wild races, orcs, goblins and dragonkin | Rakkar |
| The Dark Gods | chaos and destruction; "they literally seek the end of the world / complete reordering" | Necatus |
| The Unaligned | the lesser races, beasts and niche causes; "the 'Lesser' Gods" | none |
Two further groupings are products of the Fifth Age. The Sancturi Pantheon is the Dark Gods under Sancturi names, headed by an Ascendant of Necatus; and the Elder Gods, now Awakened, are a pantheon only in the sense that they are listed together, since they despise one another. The Divine stands outside all of them.
The states of a god¶
A god's form is an immortal form: "permanent and immutable", reforming at the god's anchor point whenever it is destroyed. "There is no known way to stop an immortal from reforming in this way." What can be done is to capture the spirit, splitting the soul's energies between several spirits and weakening the god each time. The sources name four states a god may be found in.
Awake. A god in full possession of form, spirit and shard, able to commune with its high priests and act in the world. Few of the Younger Gods are awake in the Fifth Age; "most of the Younger Gods are dead or sleeping".
Sleeping. A god whose immortal body has reformed but cannot be invested with a spirit, "since they lack the energy sufficient to fully manifest". Repeated capture of the spirit is believed to be what puts a god to sleep. A sleeping god's followers can still draw some power from it, but its high priests cannot commune with it. "Only one Immortal is known to have ever reawakened from this state: Rakkar." Kalar himself slept for ages before his death, and it was his sleep that let Necatus begin transferring his shards away.
Dead. A god who has lost not only its form but its dominion: "due to some event, they lost control over that domain to another Einar, and have been replaced". The spirit remains "powerful, intelligent and knowledgeable", but "without their physical form and without their astral domain, they are but a faint shadow of their former glory". How many gods are dead is a matter of scholarly debate, "some say no more than a few dozen, while other believe there were hundreds". The Fifth Age Kalari are all dead gods in this sense, and "provide no active guidance or power to their priesthood", though "they are still worshipped to a surprising degree".
Riven. The Sancturi name for the Kalari and Rakkarim after the fall of Kalar, used with contempt: "You are a Riven-worshipper!" The Riven Gods, "what is left of them", are also called the Dead Gods and, by their faithful, simply the Kalari. Arya, Khardas and Rakkar formed the Riven triumvirate in the Sancturi Age, still distrusting each other "but try (with some difficulty) to work together". Riven priests were hunted and executed in the Great Purge, and their worship made a crime.
The Elder Gods have a fifth state of their own: imprisoned by the Younger Gods, and now Awakened.
The Godswar and the Death of Kalar¶
The gods have fought one another since the Throne was broken. The God Wars of the Age of Magic saw the Izhtarus, the faction that wished to restore the Throne and undo Kalar's changes, gather shards one by one, and many gods, including Kalar, "committed to the endless sleep". The 2026 revision describes the war that followed as the Godswar.
The Godswar "started by the Dark Gods. Necatus discovered a way to transfer sharding away from the sleeping god Kalar. Like a floodgate, this has begun a contest between the gods who are now almost universally fighting over the unguarded shards of Kalar." It split the Kalari between those defending Kalar's shards and those who, believing his fall inevitable, took from him so that gods sharing his goals would end up with his power. The war ended in the Death of Kalar and the Age of the Dark Sun, when the sun itself darkened into "a beacon of suffering, corruption, decay and madness". Orandos, Kalar's brother and Lord of Light, had been sheltering him and failed; sensing his own destruction, he sacrificed himself to empower the moon and to split his shard and Kalar's into thousands of fragments, distributing them to his followers and Ascendants "so that they might bring some measure of light to the living and also in the hope that they will be able to piece them together again before the Dark Gods do". Those bearers are the Scions of Light. Without them light sources gave a tenth of their former luminosity; "the scions of light become bastions of hope and survival for the population". The war and the age it ended are History's to tell; the deity pages record what each god lost.
By the Fifth Age the Younger Gods were "a dim shadow" of what they were. Many of their Ascendants fell against the Awakened Elder Gods, and the surviving Old Gods banded together under Necatus as the Night Gods for survival. Then the Divine came, displaced Arcantus, killed Arya, and took most of Kalar's old shards. "The age of benevolent deities passed with the death of the Riven Gods (who saw the races as their children). New and old deities expect a lot from their followers and especially their priesthoods."
Earlier accounts¶
The 2015 Compendium and the 2019 Overview of Gods that was converted from it group the Einar differently, and the 2019 document already carries the author's note that the grouping "is no longer correct". Their scheme, kept here for the record:
| Compendium grouping | Members |
|---|---|
| The Einar, the Gods of Light, the Kalari | Kalar; Quitas, Arya, Vana, Khardas, Lattia, Orandos |
| The Dark Gods, the Rakkai | Rakkan (Rakkar), Necatus, Uaros, Pyri, Nefia |
| The Twilight Gods | Tarus, Moros, Nefia (2015); "they will ally themselves with the Kalari or Rakkai based on their own objectives" |
| The Destroyer, the Mad God | once an Einar, "his name is unknown, forgotten or hidden" |
| The Dreamers, the Sleeping Gods | Cordia (Rakkai), Erolan (Twilight), Astrin (Kalari), Kalar |
| The Dead Gods | unrecorded; "many scholars believe that the Arch-demons are actually Dead Gods who have managed to regain a physical form" |
In this scheme the Dark Gods and the Rakkai are one pantheon, "Einar which have taken over domains which once belonged to Kalar and/or embraced the dark sides of their domains", and Kalar is "credited with creating Terrun, the planes and planting the first seeds for all life". The 2015 Compendium also places the Elder Gods' overthrow before the three-way split and says the elder gods "were not killed, but their powers were usurped ... (still considerably greater than Demi-Gods)". The 2014 regional notes call the Einar "younger gods" and name Kalar as Izhtari's firstborn and favourite son, whose rebellion began over a rivalry with Zatan and Zatan's creation of the Demons.
Two older documents on the Demons equate the Einar with the Elder Gods, calling the Nephilim "fallen Einar (The Elder Gods)"; the 2019 Dwarrow note has the Elder Gods arise as "the new gods" after the Einar's victory over the elementals. The 2022 Nature of Magic also writes "the Einar (The Elder Gods)" of the gods who arrived before the Age of Titans, and names Tamariel a High God whose chosen were the Eldritch. The 2015 Compendium describes the Elder Gods' Astryssil as "the name for the Ethereal plane when it was smaller and only contained the city of the Gods".
The 2015 Compendium has a different account of the gods' first servants: the Einar created the Ventari, "a super race of guardians to manage everything", who fractured when some followed Rakkor while most stayed loyal to Kalas; the 2014 phylogeny makes the Ventari the first humanoids, "created in the image of the Einar", and derives every later people from them.
Gap
No source gives the Einar's own name for their homeland, the number of Einar who arrived, or a count of the shards beyond "hundreds". The twelve High Gods are nowhere listed. The sources do not say how the Einar of the first generation differ from the Younger in nature, only in power and allegiance.
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The soul, spirit and form of an Einar, and the One God theory, are treated in detail under Souls and Spirits. ↩