Deities, Divinities and Truly Scary Things Pt. 12

Hey Game Fans, we’re taking a look at some world building ideas and concepts for the home setting i run.  If you’ve checked out my other world building articles, this is the setting that focuses on Lakeport and the larger world around it.  Today i’m going to  take a look at one of the more misunderstood goddesses for the setting, Courvail, the Lady of Time. Before i get started on Courvail herself, let me give you a little background for the gods of this world.  

Broadly speaking, the gods divide themselves into a variety of groupings and factions, but the grouping i am concerned about today is the old gods and the new gods.  The Old gods predate one of the most important conflicts of the setting, the Fey War.  These are the gods that originally found this world and shaped it to their designs and interests.  They shaped the great forests and mountains, and populated the world with creatures in their own image.  The first Gods to walk the world were the gods of Giantkind, the Fey themselves, and the three Elder Wyrms.  A few other gods would appear after this first establishment, most notably Ahrimaius, the God of Creation.  These are the Gods of antiquity, and they made the world the way it was, for good or for ill.  

The Fey War began as internal issue between a small fey enclave and their neighbors.  It spiraled out of control to a level of violence and bloodshed that would haunt the old places of the world forever.  At the darkest point of the war, when the Me’Ah’Chin hordes looked ready to take the fight to the Gods themselves, the eldest of the Fey Gods, Grandfather Oak, cast the most powerful magic anyone had ever seen.  He summoned heroes and champions from across time and space to the Garden where Oak had planted his first seeds.  He made them a simple offer.  If they would turn back the tide of darkness and save the world, he would bestow upon the seeds of godhood, and make them the new gods of the world.  

Heroes to the end, most of these people died during the war to liberate the world.  Heroes from thousands of worlds and cultures fought, bled, and died in a distant land to save it from the most terrible monsters they had ever encountered.  When the last battle had been fought, and the dead tallied, less than fifty of the thousands of heroes and champions were still standing.  A few would succumb to lingering injuries sustained in the war, and their number would be diminished even further by a tragic incident.  

The survivors returned to the Garden, and Grandfather Oak kept his word.  Each hero or champion became the living embodiment of an idea or a race.  One by one, the new Gods and Goddesses organized themselves, and set about the work of trying to heal the lingering damage the war had caused.  Some places were never completely healed, and there are distant parts of the world that still think that ancient war rages….but that’s a story for another time.  

Courvail, the Measure

History

Before the War, Courvail was a student of temporal magic.  Through the study of Chronomancy, she learned many secrets of lost magic, and histories long forgotten.  Through the power of time, Courvail spent eons studying magic and learning its secrets.  She was terribly powerful when Grandfather Oak called her to war..

During the War, She spent her days studying the Me’Ah’Chin to see how they functioned and to find a way to break their connection to their victims.  The Me’Ah’Chin were powerful, and grew more powerful when they could consume the essences of their foes.  Courvail developed a technique that would keep them safe, but would destroy their bodies completely in the process.  This severed their connection with the world, and their souls would be lost forever.  Courvail was instrumental in finally cutting off their access to energy, and finally helped to end the war.  

After the War, Courvail turned her attentions to studying the disruptions in time that were caused by the war.  Her powers helped reshape the world and fix a variety of time anomalies and corruptions.  She took Oskar as her husband, and shared him with Gemera.  Together they represent the complete experience of life and death, as measured by time.  

Relations with Others

Courvail is not particularly popular with the rest of the pantheon.  Her impressive abilities with Time allow her to spy on past events and she spent most of her time immediately after her ascension looking into the pasts of the other gods and goddesses.  She loves to gossip, and almost universally annoys everyone around her.  She has a longstanding disagreement with Gemera about which of them is more powerful, and they repeatedly try to best each other with more impressive displays of power.  

Relations with Servants

Courvail has very few servants, and the ones that she does have are responsible for maintaining the health and well being of the time stream.  They are mostly in charge of keeping mortals from disrupting historical events and keeping the temporal anomalies that couldn’t be repaired from interacting with each other, and the rest of the universe.  Her servants are typically a thankless lot, who view their responsibilities to time as vastly more important than their personal loyalty to her.   

Relations with Mortals

Courvail is an essential component of mortal life, as she represents the measurements that all living creatures use to judge the passage of time and the balance of their lives.  Her clergy are historians and clockmakers, with an emphasis on studying history as a predictor of future events.  There are some who think they are attempting to manipulate future events by understanding the past, but this is a very heretical belief inside the church.

Unusual Sayings

“Time is the most equal measure of all”  Courvail views herself as a measuring stick for everyone and everything else in existence.  Studying the eddies and ripples of time, She tracks the progression of reality.