The Littlest Goddess in Pachinki

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

The Palace Gods live in decadence in an isolated and incestuous land above the mortal planes called the Palace. They do not eat and will live forever, provided they stay within the gardens of the Palace and consummate their industrial godhood occasionally with domen, an opium that they believe purifies blood.

Adult Palace Gods are almost entirely women, but birthrates of boys and girls are about equal. At the onset of puberty, boys can enter rituals to become female gods, but sexual pleasure will stain their transition and thus romentet (as they’re called in god-tongue) will never maintain blood parity with female Palace Gods. Boys who enter sexual acts or allow sexual thoughts will not transition correctly and instead be consigned to serfdom for the rest of their lives (and in the impurities of their blood, they will be dead by forty).

The intersection of the Palace hierarchy and immortality mean that adult Palace Gods are terrified of deposition by younger generations. Older gods will often take an oath of chastity or, failing that, attempt to sabotage the blood purity of god-children to ensure they do not grow up to threaten their positions of power. Adult women often enter relationships with boys for this reason, which will prevent their transition and rise to power and instead grant them mortality. Young girls, however, cannot be dispossessed of their powers so easily. Homosexuality is strictly forbidden in the Palace, and so girls are often tricked into destroying their potential in rituals known as bloodfits.

As inhabitants of the Palace do not need to eat, it means that they do not consume the souls of other creatures. According to their own tapestry myth, their spiritual veganism has come to be a core lifestyle on which godhood is predicated. Young goddesses are often curious about mortal pleasures like food and body functions, and so particularly manipulative adult gods will trick them into eating meat and thus consuming the soul of another creature. After the meat is consumed (the quantity rarely matters, so long as the goddess in general understands they have eaten it), their sin is revealed to them and that knowledge sparks a spiritual crisis in the young goddess that collapses their powers and their physical presence in the Palace.

Where they go is unknown to anyone still living in the Palace — to those unfortunate girls tricked into bloodfit, they find themselves in a land not quite Pachinki (the mortal planet) or the Palace (the central harbour for gods). Instead, there exists a realm constructed of young gods’ ideas of what mortal life might be like, complete with the idealism and fear of the unknown beyond their Palace lifestyles. They begin to breathe for the first time — a terrifying experience to a goddess previously unused to it — and will experience weather, texture, and sunlight for the first time. Their clothes will suddenly have weight, and their wings are now vestigial relics of magic-aided flight. Many girls simply pass out, unable to deal with the shock of reality.

Most stories here end happily though, in a trend unusual for Pachinki and the Palace. The in-between world these goddesses find themselves in is constructed of their hope and curiosity of Pachinki, too. Green pastures of stunning colour and flower-meadows straight out of their wildest fantasies are never far away. A community of ex-goddesses actively look for new girls and help them integrate into the material world. With time, the Palace life simply doesn’t compare.

Uloah, pictured here, is one of the most recent goddesses to be tricked into committing bloodfit. She was unwittingly fed her own pet peacock, and ended up in the salt lakes of the in-between realm. Any god trying to eat for the first time is a messy affair. After a day of desperate tears and despair as she wandered aimlessly, she came across two beautiful goddesses about her age in Palace clothes. They took her to a village with homes made of long grass populated entirely by her kin. A life of pressures and treachery in the Palace was replaced with the simple pleasures of quiet agriculture and play.

So why is so much of the magic of the Palace Gods predicated on myth and tradition? After all, it is not a potion or gemstone that strips goddesses of their power. The truth of it, understood by very few and acknowledged by fewer, is that the Palace Gods are sustained entirely by their own myth, with no future or past.

Princess Torah, the revolutionary ex-goddess that would eventually liberate the mortal Pachinki from the Palace, said as such in her early writings:

The Palace Gods are not gods because of bloodlines, despite their insistence. They will tell you it is hereditary, and that blood is colloquial for purity, but they are misunderstanding their own myths. They preach immortality, but can be slaughtered like failing livestock if you’d only realise it. They are not gods because they are better equipped to employ ancient magic, or because they have unlocked the secret of eternal life. They are gods because they’ve fallen for the fiction that sustains them — they are monarchs because they believe in the monarchy, they are cruel because they believe in cruelty, and they subjugate because that is how they’ve read the elaborate tapestry their ancestors constructed. So when Princess Moswen, my martyr and humanist sister (rest her soul), descended to the human people and addressed them universally without regard to race or subcontinent, she called the Gods what they were — tokens writing simultaneously their past and future, failing their own present. Waxen, pastel nepotists misunderstanding their fiction as constitution.

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Pachinki isn’t a normal constructed world. It has its own canon. It is a creation of Tzipora, who is the character utopia of my worldbuilding project. Soon after she moves to Vekllei, she’s pretty friendless and surrounded by pulpy paperback novels. Pachinki is sort of a worldbuilding project within a worldbuilding project, and it belongs to her.

you can check my reddit profile (and there’s a follow button there now, because reddit is Facebook) for more posts about Vekllei and Tzipora. This isn’t the last you’ll see of Pachinki, not by a long shot!

www.vekllei.city or insta fer more. I love questions. tahnk