The Gods

"We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"

### The Arbiter

The Arbiter is the most powerful, but also one of the most silent of the gods. Some regard him as the king of evil, whose spawn plague the world, while others see him in tandem with the Angel, throttling the Korbaal power and thus preventing catastrophe. He is the primary figure that negotiated with the Angel to prevent both our worlds from being destroyed, and allowing the gods of Korbaal to take bodies on Pohm, under his strict regulations.

The Arbiter's attitudes appear mostly of stability and cautious movement. He is not cruel nor kind, not lazy nor impatient. He does however possess a controlling nature, and is the only one with a total veto on anything entering Pohm's sky that's not the Angel's work. He is therefore, the arbiter and judge of all Korbaali on Pohm.

The Arbiter has no functioning body on the world at this time. The Tomb of the Mountain King in northern Aiula is said to contain remnants of the only known instance of the embodied Arbiter, however it is as of yet, unexplored by speaking peoples due its occupation by the Great Hive. Instead the Arbiter exists in orbit of Pohm, pulling strings and governing the Gods.

### The Hive King

The Hive King, sometimes known as Foramica, among many other names, is a Korbaal god who uses offspring of his body to build eusocial hive-kingdoms with division of labour and instinctive organization. Foramica may have several of these kingdoms operating at the same time, however a hive only prospers, and may only last in the long term, when he is present. This is because he is both the creator and the absolute ruler of these hives, having borne their queens and given them what they needed make workers. When his queens die, however, the hive dies with them, unless he is there to make another.

The queens resemble enormously fat giants who carry hundreds or thousands of young at a time. These young come in many different forms. The most common, born as mature adults are the common workers, who are of relatively low intelligence, but enormous in number, and reckless in behaviour. They are at the absolute mercy of the officers, who are highly nuanced and intelligent, born only partially developed and raised similarly to hominid children. These officers make up the primary stand-in for a bureaucracy, and exhibit absolute authority over all but the queen. Very similar in appearance to the officers are the soldiers, who, like the workers, have lower amounts of independent thought and intelligence, however unlike the workers they exhibit enormous discipline and restraint, more so than any hominid soldiers could hope to achieve. There are also the huge colossi, who are small in number but perform large scale tasks, the travelling bishops who maintain consistency in their hives, and the diverse auxilia, along with a myriad of other minor castes that make up the hives.

### The Father of the Forest

The Father of the Forest is a relatively elusive Korbaal god who resides primarily in the northern mountain woods of Ro. He is one of the primary cultural deities of the people of Ro, as well as the Skaya people. He is known for appearing either as a man, typically old and bearded, or a tree, of any local kind. He also often appears in a form somewhere between the two. It is believed that as a god of Korbaal, he made a bargain with the Angel and thus is able to transform into, and came to Pohm for the sole purpose existing in peace as, a tree. He is often considered the most passive of all the Korbaal gods.

The Father of the Forest has no minions or thralls. He is able to tap in to Uali network, and thus able to influence and communicate with certain powers, however this is almost entirely used for simply pacifying the area around him. Long before the Angel came to the minds of the northern barbarians, the Father of the Forest made a pact with them that still stands today, for Chyrenes to protect the sanctity of the woods and select lumber with care, and in exchange the Father would provide help and wisdom to those that needed it and in times of hardship. This pact assists in ensuring that with his unique ability to shapeshift, likely assisted in creating by the Angel, he and his neighbours are not disturbed by lumberjacks. While had on multiple occasions appeared publicly as a man to fulfill his side of the pact, he currently resides as a large clonal tamarack in the deep woods beyond the mountains, in a very comfortable slumber.

## Old

**Replace aera with something less cliche muthafuka**

There are two types of gods on Pohm: those resembling men or monsters, and those beyond perception.

The gods beyond perception are unknown. They are spirits of nature, and elusive wanderers, coming in many forms. They often control the sky, or the harvests, or they may be mere campfire spirits, or souls inhabiting mountains. Most of these probably do not exist, at least not in the form of an underlying intelligence.

Those resembling men and monsters, however; those that could be touched, and who spoke, they are most certainly real.

The oldest, the mightiest, and most widely worshipped is the Angel. The Angel is a member of the Aera who was tasked with the management and protection of the world it orbits. It is a large, amorphous mass of intelligently-designed cells capable of reorganizing themselves into a huge variety of functions and shapes. It can grow organic tissue and generate and design genes to create new life, including disguising itself as organic life, or it can take the shape it has in orbit, a heavily armoured, highly maneuverable weapons platform of planet-destroying capabilities, power-assisted by an internal fusion reactor. The Angel is solely limited by the mass it carries and the time it takes to properly build new structures out of itself. Pieces of the Angel that budded off to perform work on the ground, often called simply uncapitalized angels, are found typically among the Gardeners, and are responsible for the creation of the Ijtal, and the underlying defence against the gods of Korbaal. The Angel in orbit is responsible for the primary defence against Korbaal itself, and stands ready to destroy that world, and a member of its own kin, with it, should their pull power ever be attempted to unleash. As it stands, the great wars of existence that happen with the followers of Korbaal on Pohm are mere proxy wars in the ten-thousand-year standoff between the gods beyond the sky. And a war between the gods themselves would turn the world to ash. It is also worth noting that while it may seem like a cold alien mass, the Angel is fundamentally a person, and as an Aera, is the result of 900,000 years of human evolution.

Opposed by the Angel is a highly intelligent and even wise Korbaali god whom they call the Demon King. Major philosphical debates are ongoing in Roe as to whether or not the Demon King is actually evil, largely due to the fact that his own peoples are almost entirely peaceful unless they were attacked, as was the case for numerous other Korbaal gods. The majority of those gods seek to spread across the world and conquer all they can, but they are believed to be limited by both the Angel and Demon King in cooperation. This is part of the contract between them. The King himself exists as a digital entity within the massive computational power of his world. Created first as a human, and becoming a powerful and absolute ruler on his world, he joined others like him in diversifying the existence of himself, and becoming one with his company's computers. Massive industries were automated, controlled simply by the algorithms and ai that managed it all, along with robot soldiers and drones, engineering spiders, assembly lines, and everything else his company needed. The people that lived under he and the others of his kind were relegated to living in filth, but he is said to have the finest kingdom, and became wealthy because of it. He is, however, also able to make other copies of himself to go and experience things for him, as is the way of the korbaal gods. He is commonly viewed as facilitating the existence of korbaal forces, however he is also regarded as assisting in throttling those gods where trying to stop them entirely would simply fail. The Demon King is the third most powerful entity on Korbaal.

In the bottom of the sinking columns of Korbaal is the Beast, locked in conflict with the Angel of Korbaal for at least six thousand years, and most likely significantly longer. The Beast is the second most powerful entity on Korbaal by a significant margin over the Demon King who lived above, and by a much less significant margin under Korbaal's Angel.