This galactically colossal creature is so revered that it has been worshipped as a fully-fledged deity, alongside the Eight Ladies, for as long as the denizens of the world have known of the Gods - forever, in other words.
Sculptor of Planets
The Blue is said to be as old as the universe itself. In fact, the most popular astrobiological and religious theories posit that the Great Whale is the primary sculptor and creator of the universe too. These theories more or less suggest that what we know as planets are actually the titanic refuse of the Blue. The longer explanation is as follows:-
The godbeast drifts interminably through the vast ether, stretching open its jaws at the sight of oncoming nebulae of stardust and debris, and all is engulfed and brought down deep into the gargantuan, infernal, internal combustion cavities within. All is burned, indiscriminately, as fuel. Billowing torrents of billions of tonnes of effluent smoke and ash pour ceaselessly from the blowhole of the Blue - one form of refuse. Another form of refuse is the super-compressed, superheated, planet-sized chunks of slag that are left after all energy has been derived from the celestial fuel.
No-one can be sure how many years it takes for The Blue to consume enough matter to necessitate defaecation, but very rough estimates suggest that a new planet is born once every three-thousand years or so. When a new planet is expelled, the rocky sphere is wreathed in the Blue's effluent smoke. The planet's gravity causes the smoke to cling to it, forming an incredibly dense and inhospitable atmosphere. As the planet drifts away from the Blue - while still being towed along by the Blue's immense gravitational pull - the smoky atmosphere cools, condenses, and falls as a monsoon of soot and ash. The fresh planet is thus fertilised, and life can begin to germinate.
Inestimably Ancient
Thera’s more fantastical thinkers have attempted to make very rough calculations of the age of the Blue. You see, like every aspect of the whale, the strength of its gravitational field is enormous. As such, every extruded planet is immediately swept up in the wake of the whale, as it were, pulled inexorably along by its gravitational undertow. The result of this phenomenon is that each new planet “pushes” the previous one backwards in the gravitational chain, where the older planet continues to be towed, but more weakly than before. It has been reported that the planets appear to become physically smaller the further along the galactic line you examine, with the oldest and farthest-flung planets appearing to be the smallest. This, some say, charts the steady aging and growth of the godbeast, as the steadily increasing size of stool (or planet) over time would appear to correlate with a steadily growing creature.
Another aspect of the older planets is their ever increasing distance from the Blue. The planets drift ever further away from the cosmic caravan as the grip of gravity is loosened, and currently it is believed that there are two “dead planets”: those which have drifted far enough back that they have been cast adrift, released from the undertow entirely. Their distance from the Blue means they no longer feel any of the massive amount of heat that radiates from the skin of the whale. Their age means that the residual heat at their cores has died down almost entirely, leaving only the most feeble of dying embers at the deepest reaches of these planets, warm enough, perhaps, to sustain none but the most stubborn of lifeforms...
The fact that we can merely
estimate that there are two dead, cast-off planets leads to an inevitable conclusion.
If these two planets exist and are getting ever more distant from Thera with each passing second, how can we know how many other dead planets may have already been entirely lost to the ether? The inevitable conclusion is this: nobody but perhaps the most devout of the Blue's clerics will ever know how old the Blue may be, and it is entirely conceivable that the Blue is just about as old as time itself.
Star-crossed Soul
The existence of one celestial whale deity in (or outside of) the world is a marvel. The thought that there may be two would seem impossible, and yet it is exactly this thought which has been foretold as prophecy and whispered as legend for innumerable centuries across all of Thera Paegana. So strong is this conviction and belief in the existence of a second godbeast, known ubiquitously as
The White, that she is also revered as a deity across Thera.
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