Whenever I step into a new city, the first thing I ask is not “who do they worship?” but “who sits on their version of the council and how are those seats contested?” Mortum Caelum never settled for a single pantheon; it prefers councils that breathe, bicker, fracture, and reconcile in maddening cycles. Some cultures carve the council into orderly hierarchies, others treat it as a loose alliance of powers, and a few insist the gods are simply masks for principles. I keep notebooks for each, not because I’m greedy for trivia, but because every council decision ripples straight into mortal politics, redrawing the cartography I sketch in Mortum Caelum.

The oldest stories swear the gods walked beside us, settling disputes with thunder and shared cups of wine. Over centuries they receded, and priesthoods filled the silence with liturgy, philosophy, and carefully curated rumor. Each era layered more abstraction over the same bones: direct manifestation gave way to temple protocols, then to councils obsessed with secrecy, and finally to an age where no one agrees whether the gods are still present at all. I track those shifts because they explain why two neighboring cultures can invoke the same deity and mean completely different things.

I treat the council as a living institution, not a static pantheon. It has factions, agendas, exiles, and opportunists who would happily trade portfolios if a mortal cult offers enough leverage. That fluidity keeps the world’s religions from freezing into monoliths. It also means every story that touches divine power has to account for politics as much as piety, through the orders cataloged in Orders and Hierarchies and the competing voices cataloged in Hands of Authority. The gods may be eternal, but their coalitions never are.