THE OLD GODS

Once, Vergoldetestadt's Pantheon was a snarling host of spider-queens, dusk-reapers, and storm-sowers.

Now they're but a sterile simulacrum of transcendence.

Where Raptoraem honors The Blessed Five — ancient deities of Flesh, Strength, Shadow, Threshold and Time  — Solarium has scrubbed them down and sanctified them as smiling icons fit for tax ledgers. Where once they demanded blood, now they bless tariffs. Where once they spoke from the mouths of oracles, now they beam from stained-glass pulpits above civic halls.

​Small wonder Solarium sees no difference between sanctum and sheepfold.

To the Synod, they are one and the same.

They call the Blessed Five pagan relics—too carnal, too chaotic, too unclean. Their tales crawl with filth and flame, with lovers who bleed for each other and gods who won’t stay on the page. The Synod insists such stories rot the moral marrow of Solarium… though they have yet to burn them all.

They did try, once.

On Bloody Sunday, when red-robed Keepers torched the Spidershrine and butchered the faithful at their looms, the city learned what holiness costs. In the aftermath, the Synod declared the color red sacred—the tears of the gods—and forbade its use by commoners. Only the Synod may wear it now.

Yet Raptoraem’s defiance endures.

Red color bleeds through murals and market stalls, in ribbons, in pamphlets, in scars.

No decree can scrub the red from Raptoraem’s veins.

The Blessed Five still whisper through gutters and grates, stitched into songs, graffitied across walls. Every prayer, every oath, every sin still carries their hue.

The Synod may own the dye, but the people own the blood.