Mana, Goddess of Beauty

"In the fullness of time, all things have the potential to become beautiful."

While far from the most powerful deity, it can be said without question that Mana is the one that has made the strongest singular influence upon The Eye. She takes a leading role in the history and subsequent unification of the Golden Empire of Arrboth, and remains its primary subject of worship to this day. Bright, optimistic, and cheerful, it is said that she represents all of the positivity of Light, and that she is primarily concerned with spreading joy and beauty to the world. Depending on who you ask, however, her character can prove to be more nuanced than what her worshipers would claim.
One thing that helps clarify Mana's nature is her origins. While she appeared late within the Age of Essence compared to other gods, leading many to believe she is a younger divinity, the truth is that she is much older, dating back to the Age of Illusions. According to interviews with certain elementals of Light, she was so thoroughly shocked - some would go as far as to say disgusted - by the coming of beings of flesh and blood that she stopped interacting with The Eye for centuries. Such negative emotions are antithetical to her, and her detractors believe she will go as far as to eliminate any ugliness or negativity in the world given the chance.
This opposite extreme misses just as much nuance, if not more - after all, if her stance was as simple as that, why did she not seek to destroy mortal life early on, while the elemental civilizations were still fighting against it? Many theories have arisen to reconcile these views: perhaps it was only the vulgarity and struggle of early mortals that she could not stand, and when civilization started to show its promise she became more willing to interact with it, or, perhaps, she simply was not permitted by the other gods to commit such atrocities. With many Darktouched, Tieflings, or mere practitioners of certain forms of magic facing persecution within Arrboth, it can be hard to believe she is as good as her followers say.
Still, it may well be that her more zealous followers paint such a violent view of her principles rather than her supporting such extremes herself. Another crack in the purely negative theories is that she is known to support the potential for things that are base or uninteresting to become beautiful, and that only things that truly lack this capacity warrant destruction. It may also be that she takes a divine view on this potential; death is not truly an end with the cycle of reincarnation, and it is not too farfetched to believe that she might consider a clean, swift death and second chance to be preferable to a life that will only make the world worse. It is these very tenets that her followers are often known to abuse, but there is good reason to believe she may not support them, given her periodic blinding of the most bigoted and intolerant Golden Emperors, a dire punishment that prevents them from ever witnessing beauty again.
Rather than an individual domain within the Realm of Yore, Mana is said to travel between the Dreamlands and the Plane of Light, leading some to believe that she may be an avatar of The Observer on High itself along with her Light-centric tenets. She also has another aspect that cannot fully be attributed to Light, however, and that is the aspect of mania and madness. Artistic inspiration and visions can take far darker turns at times, and it can even be said that the former cannot exist without some degree of insanity. The muses that serve as her retinue within the Dreamlands are hard to call anything besides aberrations, and even the most classically beautiful angels sometimes have to be careful in their appearances to mortals. In some ways, it can be said that merely being stricken with blindness is a lenient sentence compared to what she may truly be capable of.

Divine Domains

Beauty, Music, Dance, Art, Expression, and, to a lesser degree, Potential and Possibility.

Divine Symbols & Sigils

Stained glass is extremely common in Mana's iconography, and as such it frequently adorns her churches and cathedrals. Light itself is also a common symbol of her presence, and as such, buildings dedicated to her often glisten and shine to the point that they border on gaudiness. Her priests frequently carry a stained glass idol of a beautiful bird or angel as a holy symbol, though the designs differ depending on their individual preferences and sects.

Tenets of Faith

The primary tenet of Mana is to preserve and add beauty to the world. She has significant overlap with The Observer in these regards, though she puts a greater emphasis on the creation of works of art, increasing the beauty of what already exists. Officially, her tenets regarding the destruction of ugliness only extend to that which actively removes beauty and goodness from the world, though different sects in Arrboth interpret these tenets in very different ways.

Physical Description

Identifying Characteristics

To say Mana is beautiful seems almost tautological for an Aeon of that very concept, but her appearance can be defined more specifically than that. She always appears with long, brightly-colored hair and eyes, of hues that most mortals would not naturally possess, and while her method of dress is frequently just as vibrant, she has sometimes been said to be wearing a plain painter's smock when she appears. More prominent, perhaps, is the aura that accompanies her, of which only the white, wing-like tendrils of light are visible to most mortals. For those with deeper sight, however, the maddening nature of these wings is revealed, a multicolored tapestry of beautiful possibilities yet to come, which only converge in these blinding tendrils. Some say that one can see their own possible futures in those wings if they can stand to look at them for long enough - and if Mana herself allows them to even make the attempt.

Divine Classification

Deity, Aeon