To that end, the circle of slann invited numerous priests of Sotek to share the legends of their god throughout the decade. They were inundated with stories, from the great saga of Sotek's birth to apocryphal legends of his deeds in the spirit realm. There were cautionary tales, religious anecdotes, even battle strategies recorded and ritualized as tellings of how Sotek defeated a foe with the espoused tactic. The slann listened to all of these stories, their skink attendants inscribing them on stone tablets, and began to decipher them, analyzing their structure, what their purpose was, what they connected to. They communed with each other in the Warp around the temple-cities and told the stories to each other, watching how the soul realm twisted and rippled as their voices inscribed a narrative into its substance.
As the slann delved into more and more detail in their analysis of Sotek's myriad stories, they gradually found themselves identifying several key elements that, put together, formed Sotek fully.
The first was perhaps the most obvious, the identity and personality of the god themselves. This was perhaps the smallest actual part of Sotek or any other god, although it was the one that saw the most interaction with other entities. It was seen in the forms the god took, what they loved, what they hated, by what blessings and manifestations their will was known through. A god was the main character in its own story, and establishing its character was a vital step in ensuring that the rest of its narrative functioned well.
Next was the god's way of being - how exactly a god tended to start their stories informed a host of qualities that would help determine how the rest of their narrative flowed. Whether it was the story of their birth or not, the way they began their stories influenced their character to a great extent - what method of worship they favored was found here, for that was how gods were birthed, as well as the general scope of their personality, aesthetic flavor of their blessings, and most importantly, what variety of god they were. This was to gods as a profession was to mortals - Sotek was a war god, but more specifically he was the god of bloodshed, of berserk wrath that rushed forth and destroyed those who would dare to intrude upon lizardmen territory. He reminded them not to sit in their cities and ossify as the world moved around them, but to go out and destroy burgeoning threats before they could grow.
The final element the slann picked apart was the most broad and basic, but also the most important. It was the foundation of the aetheric construction that was any spirit, the reason their stories were told in the first place. It was the god's reason for being - every story, and thus every spirit, had some reason for existing in the first place, a need in their tellers that they filled. Sotek fulfilled the lizardmen's need for protection against corrupt and evil beings they could not otherwise match. This formed the basis for everything else Sotek was - he was a war god because his story was told through the lens of war. Without this, the rest of his structure would fall apart as it became meaningless personality traits and character details that had no place without the story that framed them.
It was these three principles, the Reason, Way, and Being, that the slann teased from the library of stories surrounding and making up Sotek. They would be the foundation of new narratives, new gods for the lizardmen to worship and sustain. But left without symbolic flesh to cover them, a story to serve as a skin, the bones the slann had made would be of no use, and they had not told any stories in a very long time.
They convened in a temple in Itza that had once belonged to a member of the First Generation. There, awake and aware as they had not been able to be for uncounted years, they shared stories with each other. Initially they were exacting, matter-of-fact recollections of events they had witnessed - a slann would relay the account of how a skink priest serving him had taken Sotek as a god and changed as a result, sharing data on how the skink's soul had fluctuated and grown, showing the progression of the serpent god's blessings in minute detail. Others shared analysis of various jungle species, or of the progress of the newest temple-city's construction. They relayed the bulk of these accounts telepathically, for speaking the details aloud simply generated moving images of the events in question, a waste of magical energy.
They had been fruitlessly attempting to create stories in this manner for well over four years when one of the slann, Lord Krepacl, his mind eager for more productive avenues of thought, gazed upon the script carved into the rock of their chamber that indicated it as belonging to the slann Blotbova. He sighed, and from his mouth cascaded a scene driven by his memory, made of Ulgu and Shyish and minute amounts of all the other winds.
"Lord Blotbova saved my life during the Catastrophe," he began, and his voice conjured up the image of himself as he had been those ten thousand years ago - physically much the same, but with a spirit that any of them could see was immature and meek compared to his current state. The Krepacl simulacrum sat on his palanquin next to many other junior slann, gazing up at a slann that was far larger and wiser-seeming than them.
"The polar gates had collapsed, and much of the Web with them. The world outside of the temple-cities was so suffused with warp essence that we were confined to our Star Chambers for our own safety, and daemons assailed the walls constantly." The miniature slann were divided into stone boxes inside a rough representation of a temple-city, which was then attacked by a writhing tide of monsters, looming creatures with exaggerated features and long, lanky shadows.
"None of our generation knew what to do - we had been spawned only a few centuries before, and there was no precedent for an incident of this scale."
"But Blotbova did."
The large slann in the image reached out with ropes of scintillating light to each of the junior slann, binding them together in a miniature communion. From their chambers they pooled their powers and struck back against the daemon hordes, blasting them again and again with bolts of incandescent power. It was a devastating display of arcane might, but the shadowy monsters kept coming in greater numbers, and soon neared the point of overwhelming the city.
"We could not hold forever, and there was no way to stop the influx of daemons. So Blotbova taught us the means of self-relocation through the ethereal planes, and told us to evacuate to Xlanhuapec. He would hold the warp-hosts off long enough for us to make the transition safely. We refused, because as a member of the First, his life was worth more than all of ours. But he judged otherwise."
The large slann gestured, and his juniors vanished, their own energies unwillingly redirected into casting the teleportation spell. With them gone, the tide of daemons closed in on Blotbova, who closed his eyes serenely as his aura began to charge up with a terrifying glow. The image dispersed in a cloud of glowing particulate, and Krepacl looked up at his brethren. "That moment was important, and I have never forgotten it," he said. "I think this is what stories are - accounts of events have no value to the soul if they lack resonance and meaning."
For a moment, there was silence. Then, understanding bloomed, and the speaking began.
"I once communed with the spirit of my mentor Aztlecl after his death."
"My Eternity Warden carried me out of Quetza when the Xa'kota plagued it from below."
"I witnessed the battle of a Thunder Lizard with a cephalopod from the depths of the sea."
They relayed these snippets of their lives to each other, and as they grew more skilled at conveying what had meaning, their voices sculpted the tales into self-sustaining enchantments. The slann examined these thoroughly, and from the few that stayed stable without outside input, they were able to draw up a comprehensive documentation of what forms of narrative would need to be constructed in order to ensure a healthy warp entity was developed. This knowledge was inscribed upon beaten tablets of gold, and stored with care within the deepest archives of the temple-cities, where the most complete records of the Plan were kept.
Divine Template completed, allowing for the construction of lizardmen gods. New options unlocked.
