The pantheon
Every god the books have named, by tier. The full pantheon page adds the family graph, the sponsors and the mythology.
The pantheon
- Grull war · first named book 1 — The god of war: child of Taranis and Apito, a trueborn heir to the Celestial Ascendency with 'an angry streak as long as a horse's cock', worshipped by donkeys and other equine creatures, and by mantaurs, who paint themselves blue. Level 250, sanctum-tier. Carl's gauntlet can summon him by accident; Prince Maestro of the Skull Empire sponsors him, and drove him in the Death Challenge on the fourth floor. His sister and arch-enemy is Pawna, the goddess of peace.
- Eris chaos · first named book 1 — Goddess of Chaos, who by the Krakaren's card wants nothing to do with the collective; one of 'the big ones' the Cookbook says are always sponsored; and, in Samantha's telling, 'even Eris was pissed' at Emberus the time he destroyed a whole country over a drunk's dropped torch, waking a volcano and covering the whole world with lava.
- Apito the oak; mother of all gods · first named book 2 — The Oak Mother, wife of Taranis and mother of Grull, 'the mother of all gods', worshipped by the elves and by the sixth floor's high elf queen, her Chosen Daughter. The Butcher's Masquerade is her holiest sacrament and her spell: she writes the guest list, delivers the invitations herself, sets a celestial peace seal that feeds any breaker into the Nothing, and grants a boon to a host who gets through the night without violence — which, Signet says, has never happened. At the end of book 5 a memorial crystal bears her name, which should be impossible for a living goddess.
- Mana Genita lost children · first named book 3 — 'A pretty obscure one' — the goddess of Donut's Enchanted Tiara of Mana Genita, made 'in honor of all the lost children of the world', which removes the automatic hostility of her worshippers. Mordecai has never met her: 'There's thousands of them. Gods, I mean.'
- Nekhebit vultures; the scavenger mother · first named book 3 — 'The long-forgotten goddess Nekhebit is both jealous and terrible': when the elf mothers abandoned her for Apito she cursed the high elf court's seed, which is the Fae Diaspora — every elf and fairy breed. Katia's Enchanted Repeating Crossbow of the Scavenger Mother of Mothers, female-only, was her gift to her last faithful guardian.
- Taranis thunder · first named book 3 — God of thunder and regent to the Celestial Throne; the eldest of three brothers, father of Grull by Apito. In bubble 543 he is the larger, yellow sun that strolls the sky for twenty-two hours, chased by his red brother Hellik, whom he dismisses with the sandstorm before he rests. Emberus, his youngest brother, thinks himself the better candidate for the throne.
- Pawna peace · first named book 4 — The goddess of peace, Grull's sister and arch-enemy, known by her potions: Pawna's Tears, five levels to any skill, and Pawna's Cries, three, with a shelf life — both spent on the sixth floor raising Donut's stripping spell to fifteen for a god. An ursine cleric swears by her; Samantha slanders her.
- Hellik sun and life · first named book 4 — Emberus's twin, god of Sun and Life, the red brother who, in a dromedarian's telling of bubble 543's sky, chases Taranis and catches him four hours before dark — 'quite obsessed with killing both Emberus and big brother Taranis' — and the obvious suspect in Geyrun's murder, who was in council when it happened; Carl's god quest is to kill him.
- Algos pain · first named book 4 — The god of pain, chosen for Maggie My by a Skull Empire scroll because her race cannot worship Grull; the god her Celestial Grenade would have summoned on Carl. 'He would kill everyone in town in seconds.'
- Enyo — · first named book 4 — A goddess whose nuns developed the Celestial Grenade during the first enlightenment, 'back when the gods had to compete for worshippers': a nun would drop one in a village and Enyo would arrive for sixty seconds.
- Emberus sun and ash; fire · first named book 4 — God of Sun and Ash, level 250, youngest brother of Taranis and twin of Hellik: blind since he plucked out his own eyes when his favourite son Geyrun was murdered, 'one of the most unhinged of all the pantheon', a locked god no sponsor may buy this season. He walks through the Lacuna shouting for his dead son's puppy, and becomes, by Carl's choice on a falling biplane, Carl's god.
- Geyrun — · first named book 4 — Emberus's favourite son, murdered by an unknown hand while Hellik sat in council; the day he died his puppy Orthrus was sucked into the Nothing. Carl's first god-quest is to find out who killed him and why; the high cleric at the Emberus shrine in Club Vanquisher has details.
- Kuraokami — · first named book 4 — The goddess Crawler Sinjin worshipped — 'Worst decision ever' — sponsored by a male soother who treated the worship as his own; Sinjin's Cookbook note on missed devotions, debuffs and smiting comes from her.
- Ysalte hopelessness and insanity; once dirt, then tears · first named book 4 — 'Ysalte, the Vinegar Bitch': a god one of the escaping feral gods began to summon during the bubble escapes, 'an extinction-level event for this floor and the next'; the Syndicate blocked the summoning and some, not all, secondary summonings after it.
- Psamathe's mother — · first named book 4 — The unnamed multi-armed god who was sleeping with the same king as her daughter, promised to kill Psamathe if she ever got out, and instead tears the demon Slit in two on the sand outside bubble 543. 'She never keeps her promises.'
- Hehaka — · first named book 5 — Named once, as the god who uses the beaver god Capa as a hat. A throwaway from Samantha that sits beside the book's central mechanic — a god worn over a driver — and shows gods doing it to each other.
- Diwata trees, squirrels and forest rats · first named book 5 — A minor nature goddess, 'a low-rent Apito' in Mordecai's phrase, vengeful, worshipped by the sixth floor's dryads, who changes sex and gives birth to ordinary life — a power the pantheon dislikes. Carl breaks her temple at Alucarda and becomes an Enemy of the Church; summoned by the dryads and sponsored by Circe Took, she is born from a hunter in a church, cures Vrah as a male mantis, and is held on the floor as a birthing female by her own spell until Laundry Day strips her off her driver.
- Inpewt the undead; Children of Inpewt · first named book 5 — A god whose name the squished bear: mortals crushed by an arriving city become undead Children of Inpewt.
- Eileithyia childbirth and female pain · first named book 5 — A name in Samantha's half-remembered account of where Diwata came from — 'Something to do with the Vinegar Bitch and Eileithyia' — after which, sniffing at Katia, Samantha tells her she has her scent.
Minor and banished deities 3
- Samantha a minor deity · first named book 4 — Psamathe, a minor deity banished to the Nothing by her father for bearing a king's child, half of whom escaped into the nearest naiad vessel — a sex doll of the fictional bard Lika — and now lives as a talking, immobile, latex head with fangs, a barrette reading 'Wet for you', and one refrain: 'I'm going to kill your mother.' Hired as the personal space's trainer. Her child is a sand ooze; her mother is a god.
- Yarilo lust · first named book 4 — 'The banished god of Lust': a child of Taranis who, drunk at the first Butcher's Masquerade, tried to force himself on another god's familiar and was banished to the Nothing by Apito for breaking the seal of peace — the offence that ended the party and made it a sacrament. Ghazi tried to reach him there; Psamathe answered instead.
- Capa beavers · first named book 5 — 'There’s a beaver god in the Nothing […] Capa or something. He’s a fuck.' Another god, Hehaka, wears him as a hat, which he dislikes and can do nothing about, so he is always crying. The whole of what the book says about him.
Demigods outside the pantheon 1
- The Night Wyrm suffering · first named book 3 — A name on a ring: the Enchanted Night Wyrm's Ring of Divine Suffering, Frank Q's revenge, 'for the discerning Crawler Killer', whose owners, Mordecai says, are the first the sixth-floor hunters track down.
The feral gods 1
- The feral gods the beasts from before · first named book 4 — 'The gods from before. The immortal beasts who roamed the heavens before the pantheon banished them into the Nothing and created the world. Their banishment has driven them mad.' A closing Gate lets one through on the opening side; other gods hate them, and each has a two-in-three chance of drawing a real god after it. The party's first opening, from the ocean floor to Pandinus, let Geyrun's puppy Orthrus out of the Nothing; fifteen hundred escapes loosed more.
Demons 2
- Kimaris a demon · first named book 2 — A charred glass case from Miss Quill's collection in the magistrate's office, holding a plush armoured man on a black horse, tagged Kimaris: the most valuable thing in Carl's inventory when it is sorted by value.
- Slit a feral minor demon · first named book 4 — Level 200, 'one of the many demons captured and tossed into the Nothing during the original Ascendency', a harem demon who wanted no part of the royal drama and took Samantha's talk of her king to be about hers; her sister is Gash. She comes through the decoy gate in the sand and is torn in two by Psamathe's mother.
Creatures of the pantheon 2
- Cerberus gate guardian · first named book 2 — The three-headed dog said to guard one of the stairwell exits on the twelfth floor; Orthrus's grumpy older brother. First named in a system joke about gate guardians of history and myth.
- Orthrus juvenile gate guardian · first named book 4 — Geyrun's two-headed puppy, Cerberus's kid brother, 'the universe's goodest boy', sucked into the Nothing the day his master was murdered and loosed into bubble 543 at level 10; a world quest put a million gold on him. Returned to Emberus by Carl and Donut, which is how Carl gets a god.
Figures of doctrine and stage 3
- The Oak Fell Apito's antichrist · first named book 2 — The elves' tree goddess and her antichrist. Three separate stories about angels, an oakwood anklet from a dead crawler, and a cat with an award-winning derriere become, in the minds of nine city elves, the end of days. Mordecai says this is twelfth-floor stuff.
- Lika a fictional bard · first named book 4 — A half-naiad trobairitz — a bard cleric under a vow of celibacy — the heroine of a series of Larracos stage plays, never real, 'very loosely based on a minor deity'. Ghazi loved her; the sex doll made in her image is where half of Psamathe now lives.
- The Midnight Epicure the Caprid Who Devours the Sky · first named book 5 — A fable used to terrify children across the universe — eat your dinner, or the Midnight Epicure will come and eat it, and every child — whose symbol, a caricature of an adult caprid, became a ward against night evils; a patch on Carl's jacket.