Lore · The Six
The Six Living Gods
They are not distant, and they are not abstractions. They are present, mostly planet-sized, and they are trying to align the galaxy.
About the runes
The runes are mortal-made. Nobody was handed them. The peoples of the galaxy drew them as the symbols of the religion forming around the Six, which means the marks are a record of what mortals decided the gods were.
They escalate in stroke count, and that escalation is the order: line, then diagonal cross, then triangle, square, pentagram, hexagram.
The Six
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Ceta'Canaashen
A planet-cetacean
Grants order and alignment. It reads you.
The god is also a place. Entire species live on its back — chiefly the Ganorok and the Surok — and two of the other six ride it with them.
It has not been taking visitors for long. Long enough, though, that foreigners are expected to make the pilgrimage from the south pole to the north and back.
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The Liquimetal God
A metallic, amorphous planet-core
Intragalactic connection, technology and communication. Answers in static and fragments, deliberately hard to parse.
The Sephir built machines to commune with it before they built anything that could cross the distance between stars. The faster-than-light drive came second.
It answers. Whether an answer helps is a separate question — it speaks in static and fragments, and it is hard to parse on purpose.
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Trael the Greatmother
A great golden wolf — an overgrown golden Cani
The irrational, mystical counterweight to Ceta'Canaashen's order. She speaks with warmth, and with words.
She sits at the opposite pole of Ceta'Canaashen's head, which is the arrangement in miniature: order at one end, everything order can't account for at the other. Of the six she is the one who speaks plainly, and warmly.
Her children are the eternals. An eternal appears either as a child of any species — a borrowed young face it liked — or as pure flame. They are the same being. Cross the child and the face burns off.
In the war between Ceta'Canaashen and the Korribak, Trael ordered her eternals to set fire to the atmosphere of Korribak Prime. Afterward she replaced the air and regenerated the bodies of the roughly one Korribak in a hundred her eternals judged righteous. She is not a gentle god. She is a warm one.
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Bukaga
A planet-sized fungoid mass
Envelops, studies, and reprocesses.
What Trael did to Korribak Prime with fire, Bukaga did to Korribak II by envelopment. Everyone there — Korribak and enslaved Sylvari alike — was taken in, studied, reprocessed and returned.
They came back emotionally enlightened. They also came back subservient to him. Both of those are true at once, and the setting does not resolve which one matters more.
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Caelith
Banshee queen of an all-but-dead civilization of dragon-riding magi
Spirit and ancestry.
The civilization she is queen of is the Sylvari, and it is all but dead because of what the Korribak did to them.
She was borne out of that. A god made by an atrocity, ruling the dead of the people it was done to.
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Alaaga, the Stone Dragon
A stone dragon
Empress of Matter and Force. She weighs you.
She gifted the Ganorok and the Surok, and she rides Ceta'Canaashen alongside Trael.
She is enthroned at the north end of the Plains of Agonar, where she commands her armies against the hordes pouring out of the planet's dark side. That is not a metaphor for anything. She is on a throne, at the north end of a field, running a war.
How they speak
The gods can talk to you, directly, and they do. They do not always use words — one may answer in a feeling or a vision instead, and leave you to work out what you were just told.
Trael speaks warmly and in sentences. The Liquimetal God answers in static and fragments, and is hard to parse on purpose. Ceta'Canaashen reads you. Alaaga weighs you.
The Seventh
There is a seventh god. He is the reason the other six are aligning anything — the force they are aligning against.
He has a mark, and it is a seventh mortal-made sigil, drawn to denote him exactly as the six runes denote the living gods. No sigil in Galanova is divine or pre-existing. People drew all seven.
He is not a faction you bargain with. Chaos is an existential tide, and given enough time it devours everything. It does not arrive as an army; it spreads as a network.
Where mortals channel his power the dimensional barrier thins, and things come through that were never from here — Orcs and Grekin, arriving as strays rather than as warbands, and getting mistaken for locals.
The tide connects.
His sigil is not drawn on this page. Its design is genuinely undefined in the universe bible, and inventing one here would make it canon by accident.