Meladrinism

Meladrinism is a polytheistic religion based on the mythos of the deific beings called Meladrin. It is the world's largest religion with its adherents, known collectively as Meladrinists, believing that the origin of creation is due to Ethereal spirits striking down and taking the power of Primal spirits in an age long past, with the twelve strongest Ethereals taking up the mantle of Meladrin and creating the world as we know it as gods. Meladrinsim is culturally diverse, though the creeds of various sects generally hold in common the same creation myth while assigning varying importance to the deities. There is no defining religious text that all Meladrinists follow, rather defaulting to the teachings of the individual deities while revering the twelve prime Ethereals as a whole. Oral tradition, written poems and prophecy, and the various texts of individual religious scholars guide and inform the development of each individual temple.
Meladrinism has existed in its current form since the middle of the Age of Ancients, when various religions of the individual Meladrin came together and merged into the greater Meladrinist belief. The ancestral origin point of the religion is debated but most scholars place the earliest evidence in central Faneshorn. The religion has spread across the globe in the following centuries, gathering followers and absorbing other religions as it goes with many Ethereal spirits being added as demigods or servants to the prime Meladrin. Much of the religion is based semi-mythological events of of deities, heroes, and magical creatures, and the origins and significance of the Ancient races own cults and ritual practices.
While the twelve prime deities are worshiped in all forms of the religion the focus is often shifted based on location or cultural background, with each deity having its own church that operates as an arm of the whole. The largest branches are devoted to the deities Delana and Darsith, while the other gods maintain followings of varying size. Despite a decline in adherence in the West due to the rise of other belief systems, Meladrinsim remains the dominant religion in the region.

Mythology & Lore

The Meladrist mythos first defined the reckoning of Ages that most civilizations use as a basis of their calendars, splitting the time of recorded history into the Age of Forming, the Age of Storms, the Age of Ancients, and the Age of Knowledge. The last of these is the only one with a defined timeframe as it is marked by the creation of the Cinserian Calendar, the solar calendar used by most of the developed world which is itself named after one of the Meladrin.
The Age of Forming Meladrist belief holds that in the Age of Forming there were no solid celestial bodies and no mortal life as we know it, only energy clashing in space. Through the millennia the combating energies developed consciousness and came together to form the bones of the world we now call Senea. The fledgling world was a cold and barren place, devoid of life or light. The war of energy raged on in the heavens and across the fluctuating surface of the new land. Here the energies inhabited the substance of the earth and created new forms and bodies for themselves. The world was broken and reshaped many times over during this period but over time, as the energies became bound to new physical forms, the base consciousness of these spirits developed thought and sentience. The newly physical beings began to wage active war on each other rather than the previous rampage of energy, further evolving to develop emotions and personalities while their shapes continued to change and settle into consistent form. They formed relationships, splintered and came together into two primary groups called the Primals and the Ethereals. The Primals took wild unbound forms of fire, water, earth, and thunder, and thus the elements were brought into the world, drawn toward conflict and chaos. The Ethereals crafted their forms from wild magic and aether that still swirled through the heavens, and became obsessed with taming the tempest and bringing order. The two factions fought for an eternity on the surface of the world and through their conflict and the settling of other celestial forces, new planes of existence and pockets of reality were created in which these beings could fight or take refuge. Though the first plane, the Prime Material plane, was always the prize. Eventually the Ethereals were defeated, being pushed into hiding or destroyed and absorbed by their Primal enemies. The earth had taken on a shape much different than it had seen before, and the strongest of the Primal lords divided it amongst themselves, ushering in the Age of Storms.
The Age of Storms The most powerful of the Primal lords grudgingly split the lands amongst themselves and chaos reigned across the world with no opposition. But the Primals were doomed from their very beginning as their chaotic nature led to constant battle amongst themselves in the quest for more power, many of the elemental beings diametrically opposed. The Primal Lords enlisted armies of lesser elementals to their causes, keeping them in line through force of will and magic, flinging their elementals armies against each other to fell mountains and set seas aflame. During this time the Ethereals waited and grew stronger, centering themselves and finding greater purpose in their beings. The arcane energy that fueled them gained focus and direction as opposed to the wild elemental energy of their enemies. Their personalities became deeper, they took names, and ideas of more defined self and purpose arose. Alliances were formed between them and even friendships, and they crafted detailed strategies for their resurgence. Among them twelve emerged as the most powerful and sentient, and they have become known as the Meladrin, or the Twelve Point Circle. They spent their time honing their powers to more precise ends, separating their magics into different specialties of purpose and crafting intricate wards and gateways between realms. Eventually the time came to strike back at the forces of chaos and the Meladrin set forth, followed by a host of lesser spirits that had attached themselves to one or another of the Twelve. They swarmed upon Senea from their long hidden refuges and were able to contain the haphazard flailing devastation of the Primals and their elementals. They pushed the elemental lords into planar prisons or locked them into the deep places of the world with the wards they’d developed over millennia, and order of a sort returned to the land. The ethereals had changed though as well. They’d learned and adapted through their interactions with the Primals and absorbed some of their energies as well. They took qualities from the chaotic forces and found use for them and love for them. They used this knowledge with their own magics to begin to structure the world and to shape it more to their liking. Thus cataclysmic seas were calmed, roving land masses were settled, ancient flames were brought to embers. The Meladrin took interest in their own domains, though they still held sway over the other ethereals who in turn found their own purposes and became lesser spirits and demigods.
The Age of Ancients Meladrists believe The Age of Ancients was a time of discovery, birth, and wonder. The Meladric deities found great secrets and methods left over from the Primals reign that they began to use themselves; ways of using the elemental energies to new purposes. The most powerful of them, the goddess Delana, gifted life to great forests and amazed her brethren by creating beasts of the earth and the sea, the first temporary mortal lives. The young god Felwen became enamoured with the mortal beings and devoted himself to their moments of passing, and places of rest afterwards. Esoteric Melia tamed the last roving wild magics and set pillars of arcane energy across the world, giving structure to the ever flexing ethereal storms. The half-Primal Cinseranai lifted the prison of her father high in the material cosmos, creating the sun so that light may ever shine across the one world. The Rover Cae-anor devised a cycle of time that might ensure eternal life upon the fledgling paradise. Perhaps the greatest discovery came at the hands of the enterprising god Darsith, as he searched and explored the deep tunnels and mountains of the world to learn of the substances left by the elementals. In a long sealed and forgotten deep he found the Dwergrim. At first he took them for remainders of the lesser earth elementals and set about their destruction, but found they were in fact not the same as those wild spirits of chaos energy. They were more solid. Their shapes did not shift, remaining the constant forms of stone and mineral they were made of, and their minds remained focused, if rudimentary. He took them as his own for study and taught them language and craft, and learned that they had been created by the Primal Earthlord Grondresk to be his servants.Darsith was astounded. A Primal mindful enough to create things of this complexity and stability, and give them life and sentient thought? It was unheard of. Not even his own brethren had thought to give true sentience to anything but the lesser spirits. He took his new children to the others of the Twelve and they were left aghast as well. They watched as Darsith shepherded the new race and taught them, and they began the first civilization. They were not mortal and would not perish by age, as with Delana’s beasts, but neither were they the same as the eternal spirits formed by the cosmos. They could be destroyed, and whatever spirit it was that gave them life would wander until it could be carried to Felwen’s halls of death. Some others of the Twelve set about creating their own pet races to watch grow and shape and to fill the world they’d fashioned. Delana brought forth the elves, a fair and savage people that were closely bonded to the trees and animals she loved as equals. Enrasj created the first dragons and gave them his lust for battle and conquest. Darsith continued his work with the Dwergrim, the First Race, and began to shape them more to his own design, and their line split at some time to become the Dwarves. Persea wrought humans and instilled in them a thirst for knowledge and discovery. Thus the ancient races were born and life as we know it was brought to Senea. Over time civilizations rose and fell, and the races fought and made peace and evolved. New races began to appear with little explanation, their own creations a mystery. The orcs, trolls, enrazi, halflings and more. Smaller elementals began to reappear in the world, either forming spontaneously from nature or finding ways of escaping their prisons. But this was all well with the Meladrin, content to watch and challenge the world and their established order as a grand expiriment. It is believed ideas of good and evil have little sway over the Ethereals, though they maintain their own proclivities toward one or the other.
The Age of Knowledge The Age of Knowledge is the present, and the past nearly seventeen hundred years of recorded history since the First Dragon War. It is characterized by advances in magical and scientific thought, formations of strong alliances and interaction between the races, and a general idea of progression and prosperity. The civilizations of the Age of the Ancients have long since crumbled and been reformed time and again with but a few last bastions of the old peoples, and the world is still wild and dangerous and mysterious. The new powerhouses of the world vie with each other for control and power and peace. The Meladrin are worshiped as gods though they have not played actively in the world for some time, though their religious institutions and clerical orders have become more and more concrete.The lesser ethereals are still active in the world though more quietly and often completely unseen to the mortal viewer. The power of wild elements seems to be slowly rising and scholars and historians see troubling trends in the use of primal magic.

Cosmological Views

Meladrinist cosmology centers on the idea that multiple planes of existence were created in the Age of Forming through the conflict of Ethereal and Primal magical energies. These planes ebbed and flowed into each other until the laws of nature began to be set, solidifying their places in the cosmos. The Prime Material plane, in which Senea sits, is considered the original plane of existence and one which all greater spirits lay claim to. Two mirror planes called the Feywild and Shadowfell, similar yet bizarrely different, sit just above and below the Prime Material. All three are surrounded by the sphere of the Ethereal Plane, a foggy in-between realm of spiritual energy that touches each as well as the Elemental planes and links them. The Ethereal was once thought to be home to the Meladric Ethereal spirits and gods, but has now understood to be a bridge of sorts between the inner planes. Coating the sphere of the Ethereal is the sphere of the Elemental which is made of the adjacent but separate Air, Earth, Fire, and Water planes.
Beyond these inner planes lies a sea of rampant magics, as yet untamed and chaotic positive and negative energies which some scholars believe to be planes in their own right made entirely of raw aether. Past these roiling expanses lie the outer Planes, where the Ethereal's first fled to in their escape from the Primals at the dawn of creation and where they imprisoned many of these elemental spirits in the Age of Storms. There are many outer planes believed to be ordered in various hierarchies depending on an alignment scale of chaos to order and proverbial goodness to evil. The Meladrin and their servants now call these outer planes home from where they watch the Prime Material and the universe unfold, as well as some of their Primal counterparts.
Lastly there is the Astral Plane, which encompasses all creation and is a world between worlds for the outer planes. It is an infinite field of grey nothingness aside from the sparse elements of other planes that have drifted into it. Some believe the Astral is not in fact infinite, and does have an end at a place where creation stops; a place where the Ethereal and Primal energies never reached and thus remains an empty expanse of dark and mystery known as the Void.

Granted Divine Powers

Clerical orders for each of the Meladrin, their servant spirits, and even some of their Primal rivals have been blessed by their deities with divine magics. Within Meladrinism it is most common for an individual to worship one deity above the others and receive their magical abilities from that spirit.

Political Influence & Intrigue

The political power of the Meladric religion is dependent on geography. The various city-states of Faneshorn all have strong Meladrinist ties but have varying relationships with their institutions. Aranthor is a reverent kingdom but is politically separate from most religious matters. Korrindor plays hosts to the largest temple of the Meladrin Persea, and is strongly influenced by the priesthood there. Estia prides itself on freedom from dogmatism but still has a large passively religious population. Other, older realms such as Daleneith and Karaz Dunhelm are entire theocracies governed by the ancient Meladric cults that founded them.

Type

Religious, Organised Religion

Deities

• Darsith
• Delana