Gods: the ageless rulers of the world

Gods were a race of ageless humanoids with magical powers who ruled over various parts of the world and were commonly worshiped by the mortal inhabitants of the lands they claimed. They did not rule as one people but as several distinct pantheons, such as the Olympians and Titans who held Greece, or the Aesir and Vanir who fought for control over Scandinavia. Within each pantheon, every god filled a certain role, and those roles often had counterparts in the pantheons of other lands. Tyr held the mantle of God of War among the Aesir, while in Greece that same office belonged to the Olympian Ares, until Kratos killed him and took the title for himself.

A race apart from mortals#

What set the gods apart from the mortals who prayed to them was not merely power but constitution. Gods did not age, they shrugged off wounds that would destroy any human, and no disease could touch them. Yet they were not beyond destruction. How a god could die varied from pantheon to pantheon. The gods of Greece could be killed only by godly power or by weapons of divine origin, while the gods of the Norse lands could be brought down by mortals wielding ordinary, non-divine arms.

Among the Greeks at least, godhood itself rested on a form of divine energy carried within the god. When that energy was drained away entirely, godhood went with it. Kratos proved this in his own flesh when he poured all of his godly power into the Blade of Olympus and became mortal once more, a mortality that Zeus exploited to strike him down.

The limits of divine durability were demonstrated most thoroughly by Kratos himself. In his war of revenge against his father Zeus, he killed most of the Greek pantheon one after another, and by the end of his vengeance all of Greece had been left in chaos.

One role in every pantheon#

A pantheon was not a loose gathering of powerful beings but an ordered court, in which each god held a defined office such as "God of War" or "God of Light." These offices repeated themselves across the world, so that a role held by one god in Greece often had its mirror in Scandinavia or beyond. The clearest example was the mantle of war itself. Among the Aesir it belonged to Tyr, and among the Olympians it belonged to Ares. Both offices eventually passed to the same successor, for Kratos slew Ares and replaced him as the Greek God of War, and in the Norse age he came to carry that legacy into a second pantheon.

The pantheons of the known world#

The gods of Greece were the pantheon whose history was recorded in the greatest detail. They were first led by Cronos, who ruled over the Titan gods from Mount Orthys, until his son Zeus overthrew him and reigned over the Olympian gods from Mount Olympus. Their line was long and their members many, but a great part of the pantheon was wiped out by Kratos, and their fall marked the end of divine rule in Greece. A fuller account of their generations is preserved in the record of the Greek Gods.

The Norse Gods were split between two tribes. The warlike Aesir were led by the knowledge-hungry Odin, and the nature-loving Vanir were led by the witch-like Freya. The two tribes warred for control of Scandinavia before an uneasy peace joined them, and their rivalry shaped the Nine Realms for generations.

Gods beyond the known horizons#

Greece and Scandinavia did not exhaust the world's divinity. The Egyptian gods were half-human, half-animal beings who, from what Mimir had heard, ruled with wisdom and humility. Mimir also held that they were many, and not so simple as to be sorted into "good" or "evil." They appeared on a woven mural recording Tyr's journeys, the Eye of Ra marked one of the missing panels of Tyr's triptych, and Egyptian hieroglyphs were one of the three languages engraved upon the Mask of Creation. Of their number, only Thoth was known by name in the Norse records.

Further south ruled the gods of the Maya. According to Tyr's own writings, these southern gods possessed extraordinary wisdom and generosity. Their "Ruler of the Heavens" saw fit to gift humanity with advances such as writing, farming, the calendar, and the sciences. Their "God of Death," by contrast, took great pleasure in torturing expired souls with fire and water.

Fainter traces pointed to pantheons still farther afield. A torii gate and the written character for kami appeared among the records of Tyr's travels, and a three-fold tomoe marked another missing panel of his triptych, while the script of that eastern land was the third language engraved on the Mask of Creation. A Celtic triskelion appeared on the triptych as well, evidence that the gods of that people also existed somewhere beyond the horizon.

Monsters who spread misery#

The pantheons were not sealed off from one another. Tyr, the Norse God of War, journeyed across different realms and dealt with other pantheons directly, and his travels left behind the tapestries and panels that recorded them. Mimir, likewise, possessed prior knowledge of Athena, Zeus, and the rest of the Greek pantheon, as well as of their destruction at the hands of Kratos, which strongly implied that at least particular gods of different lands were aware of one another's existence.

The harshest judgment of the race came from one of its own. Kratos, who had suffered under Olympians and Titans alike, taught his son Atreus that gods cared nothing for their worshipers and that worshiping them was foolishness. "The Gods care nothing for them," he said. "Men should not pray to monsters." When Atreus asked his father why the gods caused so much trouble, Kratos answered that it was simply in their nature, and that the gods would continue to spread misery. Yet even Kratos's verdict admitted an exception. Tyr cared greatly for mortals and preferred pacifism over violence, proof that the nature of gods, however dark, was not beyond defiance by the gods themselves.