I read the world’s religious history the way geologists read cliffs. The bottom layer still radiates with stories of gods striding through market squares, trading favors for loyalty. Above that sits the classical age, temples, priestly guilds, codified rites, where belief hardened into institutions and liturgy became the common language. I can still feel that weight when I enter an archive and smell incense soaked into parchment, and it shapes how I track divine politics in Living Pantheons.

Then comes the fracture: centuries of prophecy, schism, and whispered accusations that the council had soured. Movements splintered, new scriptures appeared overnight, and ordinary households started building altars from desperation rather than tradition. That crisis never ended; it simply evolved. Today I walk through cities where mystery cults share alleys with reformist soapboxes and philosophers host salons arguing whether the council even deserves to keep the name, precisely the tension I pull apart in The Fractured Covenant.

Each era layered new logic over the old without erasing what came before. When I craft scenes, I let characters carry those strata in their bones, a grandmother who still trusts temple law, a scholar who treats the council as metaphor, a pilgrim who waits for gods to return in the flesh. The timeline isn’t a museum; it’s a living argument unfolding in real time, and it bleeds into the ritual calendars in Temporal Mechanics.