One of my favorite aspects of any fantasy story, at least if done well, is the integration of deities. I won’t bother trying to really define what I consider a god since its one of those “I know it when I see it”
type of things. I’ll take them all: HP Lovecraft’s eldritch gods, the thoroughly flawed Greek pantheon, the dreaming gods of Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, the almost accidental gods of Ann Leckie’s The Raven
Tower, or gods who were once mortals—like Kefka from Final Fantasy VI. Beings of incredible power, often tied to either faith, creation, or destruction. They can be good or evil or beyond those descriptors
entirely.
The thing about adding gods to your fantasy setting is you better be ready to acknowledge what exactly their presence means. Even if only lurking in the background they should have their own
motivations, from the love of living creatures they wish to protect to the very basic “I will eat everything when I finally wake up.” Sometimes you can get away with total uninvolvement. A little caper
involving some thieves likely won’t attract the cosmic (though it could be plenty of fun if it did!). The bigger you scale up the consequences of your story, though, and the more the story directly involves the
gods, eventually you’ll need to decide how and when these deities you’ve created react. And if you’ve made them too powerful, the underlying logic of your world can start to crumble.
This was an issue I ran into with the Half-Orcs, my earliest series, whose bones were formed all the way back in high school in an unpublished tale called The Fall of the Citadel. As I both fleshed out the story and raised the stakes, I ended up struggling with a conundrum: when two gods are at war, and both gods have the power to create mankind and shape the land and fill the world with life…why aren’t they still doing that? If you have an equivalent of an Old Testament god who can snuff out all life in an instant with a flood, what prevents them from doing so when some big existential threat appears, especially if that threat is this god’s enemy?
This is why you have so many different types—missing gods, slumbering gods, indifferent gods, gods vowing to not interfere in mortal affairs, and the like. It is fun to incorporate ideas, values, and mystical gifts tied to various gods, but if they’re all powerful, eventually the reader is going to ask why they aren’t doing anything. With the Half-Orcs, I ended up working overtime to explain the main gods’ philosophies as they tore apart the world in a proxy war. With the Keepers Trilogy, I made the one goddess who was able to physically appear to the world be unable to take a life directly by her own hand (getting others to do that, well…another story). In other words, clear limitations that drove the plot, and that the reader could easily understand.
Now comes the Vagrant Gods Trilogy. As the name implies, gods will feature heavily throughout. Given that they walk among their faithful, and even rule many nations, I cannot have them be all-powerful and all-knowing. They’re fallible. They’re bound by more rules. They can even die, and be forced to travel on to the afterlife they themselves promise to prepare for their faithful.
In writing this arose a conflict between explaining the rules of this world and maintaining a sense of mystery. Tell too little, and readers will feel like I’m just making it up all as I go. Tell too much, and I strangle the mystery. I honestly believe knowing everything about the gods, their powers, their limits, and their motivations, ruins so much of their potential. I want these beings, who were manifested by the faith of their followers, to always have that chance to inspire awe. By their very nature, they should be difficult for us to predict and understand. Let them appear as a mighty and beautiful winged lion with crimson wings, but also let them fear the sting of death. And even after death, let them linger, as a presence, as a memory, as an entity desiring to return. Above all, let them surprise the reader with
something wonderful. My favorite chapter of all of Vagrant Gods has the main character, Cyrus, quietly chatting with a friend of his, Mari Ahlai. Mari is a god-whisperer, which means she can draw into herself the essence of gods whose physical forms have been slain, yet whom choose to linger on the mortal plain instead of passing on to the what awaits in the realms beyond life. They can speak through her, and if their death is recent enough, even possess her and change her physical appearance.
In this quiet moment, Cyrus confesses his doubt, his confusion, and his fear of following in his parents’ footsteps. They had been chosen to rule the island by the Lion god, Endarius, but both his parents and Endarius were murdered when the Everlorn Empire arrived on Thanet’s shores. How could Cyrus ever hope to endure when his parents, and the very god he worships, could not?
And then Mari, as a gift, calls to the Lion, and the Lion answers. The quiet library fades away. The carpet below becomes dirt. The walls and the ceiling fade, giving way to the presence of the divine. Around Cyrus appears a sea of grass and a sky full of stars. Across the horizon, a line of trees grows unending. Wind blows, and on it he hears distant singing. Through Mari, the Lion speaks. The god makes
no promises, no prophecies. Instead, he gives Cyrus a message from his parents, whose souls now reside with him. They love him. They watch him still.
The scent of the grass fades. The stars blink away, replaced by walls and a ceiling lit by a dwindling fireplace. It’s quiet, and dark. Something special has happened, but to explain it, or justify it, would
ruin it. That’s why I love writing gods into my novels, for moments like that. When the answer to the mystery means nothing compared to the emotions they provide, and the hope they can instill.
The Fantasy Inn would like to thank David for his guest post! The Bladed Faith, the first book in the Vagrant Gods trilogy, is out now, and you should be able to buy it or read a sample via the Amazon widget below.
About David Dalglish
David Dalglish currently lives in rural Missouri with his wife Samantha, and daughters Morgan, Katherine, and Alyssa. He graduated from Missouri Southern State University in 2006 with a degree in Mathematics and currently spends his free time dying for the umpteenth time in Dark Souls.
You can find David at his website, ddalglish.com, or on Twitter as @thatdalglishguy.
