Cosmology

The truth of Ithasen’s reality is not widely known or accepted. Most of the continent worships what it can see: spirits, their proxies, and the traditions built around them. The Yrialin faith alone holds that behind all of it stands a Creator most of the world does not acknowledge.

Ylelaim

Ylelaim is the Creator. Not a spirit, not a coalescence of Ren, not a force or phenomenon. He is the origin of all things: land, spirits, Ren itself, and the Thuim who walk the earth. He is eternal and uncreated, existing before Ithasen, before anything else was.

The Yrialin faith holds that Ylelaim exists in three persons:

Person	Name	Domain
The Father	Ylath	Truth, Mercy
The Son	Ylual	Redemption, Humility
The Spirit	Ylindis	Faith, Judgement

These are not separate beings or divisions of a whole. They are three expressions of one Creator.

Creation

The Creation Account

The Beginning

In the beginning, Ylelaim was. He made many spirits, aspects of His will, each a coalescence of concept and consciousness. He then shaped the land of Ithasen, and desired to walk and enjoy the earth with others.

He created the Daruner first, bearers of His image. The other spirits saw this and desired to create alongside their Creator. With them, He made six others who bore His image: the Anamor, the Elkyr, the Haqol, the Janim, the Nyl, and the Okoi. These seven peoples together are called the Thuim.

For a time, spirits and Thuim existed in peaceful communion with Ylelaim.

The Betrayal

Among the spirits was Thasatur, made as the spirit of Surprise and Joy. Watching the Thuim receive Ylelaim’s love and attention, Thasatur became jealous. He devised an elaborate plot to capture all of that love for himself, and deceived the Thuim.

In the act of that deception, Thasatur shed his past identity, and became the spirit of Deceit.

Two new spirits were born from that moment: Parthil, the spirit of Pride, and Ingridrid, the spirit of Corruption. Ingridrid’s birth was not merely the arrival of a new spirit. It was the moment reality itself broke. What had been a perfect world became insidiously corrupted at a fundamental level: every living thing, every Thuim, every spirit, now carried a nature bent toward failure, selfishness, and decay. The Yrialin call this the sin nature. It is not a choice or a habit. It is the condition of everything that exists in the aftermath of the Betrayal.

In response, Ylelaim created Morzed, the spirit of Death. Where Ingridrid brought corruption into the world, Morzed brought finality: the limit on how long that corruption could accumulate in a single life. Death was not a punishment. It was a boundary.

Other spirits were affected by the Betrayal as well. Many became fickle and anthropomorphic: making alliances, being deceived, acting as the egotistical gods of mortal myth. They are immortal and cannot die naturally, only be sealed, and they await a restoration that has not yet come.

This is what the Yrialin call the Betrayal. It is the wound beneath all of Ithasen’s history.

Spirits

Spirits are immortal coalescences of a concept or idea: polarities of Ren with amalgamated consciousness. A spirit is not merely associated with its concept. It is that concept, at the level of fundamental Ren structure.

Spirits cannot die naturally. They can only be sealed. Some yearn for reunion with Ylelaim and the restoration of what was lost. Three are inherent Parts of Ylelaim. Others hunger for descent into mortal flesh and dominion over the Thuim. Their desires and alliances shift like those of fickle gods, because that is, in many ways, what they have become.

For a full list of spirits and their associated concepts, see Polarities.

The Three Who Descend

Three spirits have moved from ambition to action. They have gathered cults among the Thuim, and their servants work to bring them into flesh.

Spirit	Domain	Cult
Thasatur	Deceit	The Thousand Tongues
Parthil	Pride	The Awoken
Ingridrid	Corruption	The Black Chalice

Their ambition does not stop at their own descent. The three work to corrupt other spirits: bending their natures, poisoning their alliances, pulling them toward descent as well, to enslave and destroy the mortal plane.

Spirit Descent is the act of a spirit inhabiting a mortal body and gaining physical form. The Yrialin exists specifically to prevent it.

The Cost of Descent

Descent is not a single act. It is a sustained undertaking of such scale that even a wealthy nation would struggle to complete it. Every requirement must be met simultaneously. Failing any one of them collapses the entire ritual.

Resources:

Daruner blood in significant volume, sourced from multiple half-bloods or sustained captivity over the ritual’s duration.
One or more Haqol, whose Harmony polarity amplifies the collective Ren output beyond what any group of Rennim could produce alone. Haqol are nearly extinct and in hiding. Finding them is its own near-impossible task.
A Ren-dense site as the physical vessel for the descent: a Marathat ruin, a natural convergence point, somewhere the accumulated Ren can hold the spirit’s weight.
High-Realm beast cores in quantity, requiring either enormous wealth or a long harvesting campaign conducted without drawing attention.

Coordination:

Rennim whose entire value structure orbits the descending spirit’s domain. Not practitioners who happen to hold a relevant polarity: people whose primary values produce it, whose identity is built around it. They are rare, and organizing them without exposure is harder still.
These Rennim must channel in sustained synchronization throughout the ritual. Any break collapses it entirely.
The ritual must be performed on the anniversary of the Betrayal. But the anniversary alone is not sufficient. Roughly every seven centuries, a rare astronomical convergence tied to the Recurrence law aligns with that date: Ren tides peak, celestial cycles coincide, and the boundary between mortal and spirit becomes thin enough to breach. Outside of that convergence, the anniversary passes like any other day. Within it, the window is measured in hours, not days. The ritual must already be running and prepared to complete the moment the alignment peaks. Miss it, and the next opportunity is another seven centuries away. The Shattering occurred during the last such window, at Year 0, just over six centuries ago. The next is approaching, roughly a lifetime out.

Sacrifice:

Rennim burning out their cores entirely to fuel the final push. The higher their Realm, the more it contributes.
The Haqol present may be consumed by the amplification. The cults do not consider this a problem.

Vulnerability:

The ritual produces a detectable Ren signature from the moment it begins. The longer it runs, the easier it is for the Yliasen to triangulate.
It cannot be rushed. Weeks or months of sustained effort with no guarantee of success if disrupted at any stage.
The anniversary window is fixed and known. The Yrialin watch for it every year.

Yndryr

Yndryr are children born of mortals and spirits who have already descended. They are neither fully Thuim nor spirit, and they stand apart from both.

They advance through the same Realm progression as Rennim, but without the mortal ceiling. A Rennim peaks at Galaxy. A Yndryr may push past it, how far depending on their spirit heritage. At sufficient Realm, they stop aging. A Rennim who senses a Yndryr in Extended or Focused awareness will find something subtly wrong: the texture of their spirit parent’s concept woven into the Ren signature as an ambient quality, not a learned polarity.

Yndryr hearts are required to seal spirits. A spirit is a coalescence of concept and consciousness. Containing one requires something that can hold that concept without collapsing under it, as mortal flesh would, and without merging with it uncontrollably, as another spirit might. A Yndryr heart, at death, crystallizes into a stable intersection of mortal Ren structure and spirit resonance. The Daruner Coalescence polarity provides the binding lock. Without a Yndryr heart as the vessel, there is nothing durable enough to anchor the seal to. This is why sealing a spirit is so difficult: both components are rare, and one requires a death.

In rare cases, a Yndryr may dissolve so completely into their concept that the distinction between them and the spirit of that concept collapses entirely. Two known cases exist.

Lygwithinin is now the spirit of Blood. Before his transformation he was a Yndryr, and the progenitor of the Vethrim, a corrupted race he cannot unmake. He is aligned with Ylelaim and works against the Vethrim, carrying a weight that is not diminished by the alignment.

Lithuin is now the spirit of Purity. Distant from mortal affairs, Lithuin’s traces have been followed for generations by a nomadic faith called the Amber Faith, who wander the borderlands between Shejara and Dosharen.

Faiths of Ithasen

Most of the continent follows what it can see. Spirits are real, and their influence is felt. The Yrialin faith asks people to believe in a Creator behind all of it who cannot be directly perceived, which makes it a harder sell than traditions that point to something visible and tangible.

Yrialin & Yliasen — The Church of Ylelaim. The only faith that holds Ylelaim as the true Creator.
The Order of the Divines — A polytheistic faith worshipping spirits as gods, widespread across the Remnant Continent.
Temple Religions — Regional organized faiths with priestly hierarchies, varying considerably by nation.
The Amber Faith — A nomadic faith worshipping a celestial fire as a divine presence.