Editing New Jhelom (section)

===Entities and Aspects===

; The Maiden Goddesses : In the beginning of all things, there were but three things in this world. Earth, Sky, and the Unbroken Stars. And Earth and Sky did take on the forms of two maidens, whose beauty was absolutely beyond compare, and is only hinted at in the movements and shape of the most beautiful women of our world and times. Each of them bore a son and a daughter, who wed and then had more children, these would eventually become not only the Element-Kin but the Mortal Races as well.
:Where they are now? No one knows. They vanished, and while there are numerous records of their existence, and even more, the Elementals who still exist will swear up and down that she did, indeed, once live. The period of history where they vanished was marked by it's conspicuous lack of any sort of history. Records stop around the time the pair disappeared, and begin again at the beginning of the Elemental War.


; The Serpent Behind the Wall of Stars : The Serpent Behind the Wall of Stars was less than a legend at one point, the bawling of madmen, the screams of nightmares, and nothing more. Now... now he is all to real to those who gaze upward, and see the shifting coils in the movement of the stars. He devoured the Twin Maiden Goddesses, and he tore a hole through the Wall of Stars to do so, leaving it gaping, and open, a blackness that is not natural, that yawns in the heavens high above the moons. There are no stars in the Hole, only the infinite blackness of not-things that never were and never will be, and yet still haunt our nightmares and drive men to despair and madness. The Serpent Behind the Wall of Stars, some say, is the father of all things, and this world is his wife... perhaps he sees us as some kind of infection, to be torn from his spouse, or perhaps this is just the mad justifications of the cultists who seek the approval of his servants.


; Demons : The Demons are not-things that never were and never shall be, and yet are. They are paradoxical things, taking shape from the nightmares of men, delighting in the insanity and terror and vileness they inflict. It is said one whispered into the First Assassin's mind that his wife was unfaithful. It is they who taught the first Numerologist the ways to bend reality, without telling them the cost. It is they who feast on the nightmares of children and forge cunning, soul flaying knives from the petty cruelties of mortals. And it is they who hunger for the day when the Earth and Sky are devoured by their father, once he finishes digesting his last meal.
: The first demons came from behind the Wall of Stars, through the Hole that the Serpent Behind the Wall of Stars left once he bore through the wall to snap up the Twin Maiden Goddesses. They came into the world of mortals, and found the deep places, found the hidden places, where the Elementals who were wise to them could not hunt them for lack of knowing where to look. They peered into the spirit world, and they learned of our fears, and crafted our first nightmares, delighting in the forewarnings they would give us of what was to come, even as they perpetrated them, taunting us with nightmare and dream.
: Demons take on the shapes of impossible and mythical things out of nightmares and fears, and even twisting the most glorious of dream shapes into utter vileness. Some seem to wish to take on these beautiful shapes and evoke feelings of delight, but their true natures corrupt it. Of course, this may be merely another lie told by demons to lower the guard of mortals against them. Common guises include that of Dragons, Imps, Horned Fiends, Half-man/beast monstrosities, and far far worse.

* The legends say that the end times are coming!
*: The servants of the Serpent will doom us all!
*: They will summon the three Agents of the Serpent to this world and they will path the way for their master. The Agents will try to seduce us with the darkest curse: the Unlife. The dead will rise and the nations will fall as they awaken the Serpent!
*;Known Demons :
* The worst and most notorious of all the demons is the one known as Jontayt, the Shadowclasper. He is a real thing, let me assure you. Before his assault from the realms beyond, men go mad, peace is ruined, spirits are broken. The priests will tell you that this is but a tale, but it is true. It is that the Vizier did find a way to protect the Empire from this twisted legend.
*: The Shadowclasper is said to grab hold of mortals' shadows, then bombard them with thousands of whispers until they go mad.
*: If you hear the crying and bawling of the Shadowclasper late at night, sounding like it is coming from nearby, misfortune is sure to befall you before eight days have passed.

; Elementals : Elementals are the closest thing to true gods that have actively taken part in the history of creation. They are family to Mortals, and see us as such, fascinated by our mercurial natures, the paradoxes inherent in our existence, and more than once, they, and their other descendents, have fallen in love with humans and members of other races, and born children from them.
: Elementals are purely their given form. Lord Flame, for example, is Fire. He is not fire given the body of a human, or a personification. He IS Fire. Just as Glass is Glass, and so on and so forth. Elementals are primal things, able to control how others view them, but not what they are. They are the thing, and all that it implies and embodies, both familiar and alien.
: Elementals, by and large, still exist, and they even split themselves into various forms over time. There were multiple "Avatars" of Lord Fire, for example, but they were all Lord Fire, interconnected but independent of one another, while still sharing some semblance of a single will. How this functioned has never been explained adequately to humans, or to any of the Mortal Races, and it is suspected that it cannot be explained to us.
: Almost all the true Elementals left after the Elemental War following the end of Old Jhelom and the rise of the Viziers. A few remain, several are trapped and bound, a few are even in positions of power (it is suspected that one of the Avatars of Flower, if not Flower herself, is the current Vizier's mistress for example, and head of the House of Flowers).

; The Djinn, Iffrite, and Angels : Once Mortality made their sacrifice, and Mortals were born, the other Elementals began to do the same, though, a little less fantastically.
: They took parts of themselves, and made the Angels. The Angels, in turn, took parts of themselves, and made the Iffriti, who in turn, made the Djinn, who were but sparks of power compared to their ancestors, and almost as mortal as Mortals themselves were.
: When the First Murderer slowly corrupted the Isles of Smoke, whether or not he had been truly killed, they became very close with the tribes that would become Humanity, and interbred with them. Even the Elementals, Angels, and Iffrite took lovers amongst Mortal kinds, though they found none so much as amongst human kind, which was diverse as the Elemental Breeds.
: Other races had one, or two, elemental blood lines bred into their stock, and this spread throughout their whole kind. Only Humanity managed to preserve portions of it's population into distinct blood lines, which now make up many of the Noble houses, at least amongst the peoples of New Jhelom.
: These beings are far more common than True Elementals, though it is said that the Angels left to explore the darkness of the skies and moons above. None have since returnd. Iffrite occasionally rule their own islands, or hold positions of power within other kingdoms, while the Djinn are little more than normal mortals who cannot die under normal circumstances. Unlike Iffrite and Angels, who can take sparks of themselves and give them new life, Djinn are the smallest possible spark capable of still being more than the element they represent, as such, they can only reproduce by mixing with mortal blood lines.
*The Elementals that remain are pale things compared to those of the past. They are known as Djinn, and the most powerful of them as Iffrite, and they say, that the ones above them are called Angels. Who can know what is true? All that is known is that those who first forged this world, those whose power fuels the slowly waning magic, are the Elementals, forefathers of the element-folk that now take their place.

; The Afterlife : All souls go into the spirit realm, where they begin to diffuse into motes of ideas, imagination, power, and souls that then are mixed, and recombined, it is believed, into new souls. There is no proof of this however. What is known is that as these motes recoalles, or in the cases of particularly willful souls that are so well crafted, so suited to their individual memories and ideals and powers, that they do not shatter, will "transcend" and disappear from the spirit realm. Some say these go to one of the after lives, others that they are reincarnated. No one knows for sure.
: These things are witnessed by dreamers who have mastered the art of "Dream Walking" that is to say, rather than simply absorbing and witnessing other memories, ideas, and imaginings of dead souls, or of their own soul, they see the Spirit Realm, or Afterlife, for what it truly is.
: All dreams are visions of things that have been, or are to come, or they are reflections of what is inside of ourselves, what we have been, what we are, and what we shall become. Nightmares are the odd ones out, Nightmares are corruptions and warnings, sent to taunt us by Demons, at least, that is the official story.

* The religion of the Empire states that Heaven lies at the core of the Earth, and that hell lies beyond the Wall of the Stars. This is why we bury the honoured dead, and place the criminal dead in the mountains.
* The spirit realm does not feature any actual spirits. Instead it is an afterlife for all, a realm where expectations shape reality and visitors, rare as they are, usually go unnoticed. Spirits become tiny motes of energy, dancing in the radiance of life itself.. but can occasionally be called back, or at least formed into an image, by one with the knowledge or enough desire.