Tulpas and False Gods: The Madness of Belief:

The gods of Gaiatia are born of reality itself, extensions of existence given form through the Arcane’s ebb and flow. Fire, war, hunger, decay, these things have always been, and so too have their patrons, divine entities shaped by the weight of their domains. Some come into being not by the grand movements of the world, not by the churning cycles of nature or the primal forces of creation, but by something far more terrifying. They are called Tulpas, False Gods, born not of the Arcane, but of us. Faith is power. Not in the way priests preach, nor in the way zealots sharpen their blades, but in something deeper, something real. A mage who studies flame may, in time, wield fire, not by shaping the element itself, but by attuning their soul to its nature, allowing the Arcane to flow through them in that specific expression. So too do the faithful channel their belief into the world. But when enough minds, enough voices, enough lives, cling to the same thought, the same vision, the same fervent prayer, reality bends.   It begins as a whisper. A rumor. A folk tale given reverence in the quiet corners of a dying village. A protector spirit who ensures the crops will not fail. A shadow that watches the wicked from the eaves. A curse that will take your firstborn should you dare to speak its name. Then, the stories spread. A few dozen voices become hundreds, then thousands, then an entire generation living beneath the weight of a thing they have never seen but know, know is real. And then, one day, it is.   False Gods are crude things compared to the great, natural divinities of Gaiatia. Their domains are narrow, specific, where a true god of expression might influence music, poetry, and the shifting of the soul, a Tulpa might be only a god of the harp, of a single note played upon it, of the sorrow bound within its strings. Yet within their narrow existence, they are absolute. They are real because they must be, because they have been made to be, because belief has given them form whether the world wills it or not.   Not all Tulpas are malicious. Some are protectors, guides, entities born from love, from longing, from the simple human need to believe in something that will watch over them. A mother mourning her lost child whispers to a nameless guardian, and soon, those prayers take root. The lost are found, the stolen returned, and an entire city begins to pay homage to a thing that was nothing but grief given a name.   But more often than not, they are something else.   Fear, after all, is the greatest faith of all.   The wretched, the hunted, the ones who have suffered beyond reckoning, what do they whisper in the dark? What do the broken pray for, not in temples, but in the depths of their despair? Not salvation. Not kindness.   Vengeance. Retribution. The end of all things.   And so, for centuries, ancient beings, those who have seen gods rise and fall, those who have studied the patterns of faith and fate, have spoken in hushed voices of something far worse than any warlord, any king, any divine wrath.   A theory. A dread understanding.   If faith can birth gods, then what does it mean when the world drowns in misery?   For decades, for centuries, for ages, the people of Gaiatia have suffered. Not by choice, not by fault, but by simple, cruel existence. War does not end. Hunger does not abate. The powerful feast while the weak wither, and the stars look down with neither kindness nor malice, only indifference. And so, the world whispers. In every city, in every ruin, in every corner of Everwealth and beyond, there are those who no longer pray for hope.   They pray for nothing.   For an end. For a void so absolute that nothing remains, no suffering, no war, no pain, only silence.   And if enough voices cry out for the same thing for long enough, if enough minds are broken, if enough souls succumb to despair and weave their suffering into the fabric of reality… what, then, will be born from it?   Some say nothing will happen, that the gods are beyond the grasp of mortals, that Tulpas are but lesser creatures with no true power over the grand design.   Others are not so sure.   Perhaps the end is already watching.   Perhaps it is listening.   Perhaps it only waits for one last whisper.