Holy Prayer Tradition / Ritual in Ysireth | World Anvil

Holy Prayer

The gods have not been seen since the Shattering.   No one knows why, precisely, their previously-interactive, highly-responsive deities suddenly became occluded and silent. On Harokin, in the violent shadows of the roaming titans, prayers that used to be everyday and bear tangible fruits are now empty and rote. If there are still gods known by these names, they no longer respond to kinvari on Harokin.   Prayer is, as a result, somewhat out of fashion.   Some are bitter, angry, resentful at being abandoned when their world ended. Others grieve the absence of their creator deities. Others blame themselves for being unable to reach their gods, and some encourage everyone to keep trying, to keep faith even in the vacuum of response.   During and directly after the Shattering, prayer was at an all-time high, and the lack of any answer--any anything--sent the surviving kinvari into spirals of confusion and despair. Where were the gods who had made their race? Were they trapped outside the arcanic seastorms that enwrapped Harokin's shores like a noose? Had they been destroyed by the cataclysm that unleashed mountain-sized creatures into a world far too small for them?   Even deeply-religious communities whose broken shards survived underground and near-starving did not have any immediate answers to satisfy the questions that kinvari screamed into the silence.   Over time, the muteness of the gods was no longer strange. It seemed far stranger to think of gods who could and would speak to their worshippers, who would grant wishes and answer prayers; surely those stories from before the Shattering were metaphorical or allegorical. So much history had been lost that the survivors were deprived of context and facts within a few scant generations after the Shattering. The gods were not the only thing lost to the titans' crushing steps.


Cover image: by Ty Barbary via Midjourney

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