"Gods are like guides. They give us special titles, and we carry those titles into every encounter with others."
When two believers of the Goddess of the Sea met, they greeted each other warmly and shared stories of their time at sea. Believers of the Goddess of Wealth talked trade; believers of the God of Schemes plotted against one another.
Hostility between gods could also leave their believers fighting tooth and nail, as with the Goddess of Life and the Death Deity, or the Lord of Dawn and the God of Dusk.
Gods connected people. They received faith, while their faithful believers received what they had pursued all their lives after death—entry into a Divine Kingdom and a share in eternal life.
The gods' hunger for faith shaped the world at every moment. That was why Annan, a nonbeliever without a "title," was more reviled than a heretic and was usually associated with chaos.
Annan was lucky. Only a few months after his arrival, the Year of Turmoil began, leaving every believer unable to contact their god. The Tartun Empire was also famously a land of "Barbarians," so no one paid attention to one insignificant faithless Sorcerer.
"Who do you worship?" Annan asked Ingrid on a sudden whim.
"The God of Order and Law."
"I thought so."
Ingrid looked like the sort of person who always had the law on her lips.
Annan's spur-of-the-moment idea was to build a church and cram statues of every god inside. As for what might happen... he had never met a god. How was he supposed to know what they were like? At worst, he could build a separate church for any god who complained, then advertise it: Free City, the City-State where gods themselves had taken up residence. Your ideal Promised Land.
When