Where is the Goddess Mother?

"She abandoned us, I tell ya... I heard she appeared down in Elvenpass in an Enlightened church!"
"She wouldn'ta done that! Them "enlightened" folk don't honor the gods the way they should!. Somethin' bad musta happened to her"
"She's dead, I'm tellin' ya! Mother Goddess Caronalyn is dead!"

— discussion among True Church believers in Elderkeep

Among the Human Folk, Awakening Day is universally celebrated with simple ritual and extensive feasting, but for the faithful of the The True Church of the Humanar - and especially for those in the city of Elderkeep - this is also the one day every year when the Goddess Mother Caronalyn physically manifests in Elderkeep Cathedral to deliver a message to her children. That is, it was the day... until two years ago when the goddess failed to appear.

Conspiracy Theories Abound

When the Goddess Mother failed to appear to the congregation gathered for the annual Awakening Day offering presided over by the First Among Servants of the True Church of the Humanar in Elderkeep, True Church officials, led by First Servant Robar Bekingham himself tried very hard to suppress the fact. They knew it would shake the faith of their subservient congregations and send ripples of discord throughout the Human community. The official story was that while the Goddess did not appear during the public service as usual, she did appear to the First Servant earlier in the day.

But no propaganda campaign is ever one hundred percent effective. There was a church full of witnesses to the non-event, and not all believed the official explanation. This gave rist to not one, but several conspiracy theories that would rapidly spread out from the Human capital to almost every Human settlement in the world. Among the most prevalent are these:

The Gods Have Abandoned Us

"Surely we've done something terribly wrong" is the phrase on the lips of every believer in this conspiracy theory. Adherents to this belief look at the ordained clergy with a distrustful eye, because the corrolary to the first statement is, "We've been doing what they told us is the will of the gods. They have led us astray!". Church attendance has dropped off since this rumor began spreading. Some have flocked to either the Enlightened Church or the Reformed Church in the hopes that their clergies still had the favor of the gods.

Interestingly, of all the conspiracy theories related to this subject, this one is closest to the actual truth of the situation. (See the "Truth" section below.)

The Goddess Mother is Dead

The root of this theory is that the only thing that could have stopped Caronalyn from appearing on the same day in the same place she has for every one of the past two thousand or more years would be if something terrible happened to her. She must be dead! And if the Goddess Mother is dead, what does that portend for her Human children?

For the past two years, believers in this theory have been attributing any poor crop harvest anywhere... and every stillbirth... and every maternal death in childbirth... to the death of the Goddess Mother. Adherents to a minor variant of this theory - that ALL the Humanar gods are dead - attribute every bad thing that has happened to any human anywhere as proof of their belief.

Another God-War is Upon Us

This theory is a variant of the "Goddess is Dead" belief. It extends the belief that something terrible has happened to the Mother Goddess by suggesting that the terrible thing was the action of a rival god. In most of these theories, it is the Orokar and Reptisssar deities that are most likely to be cited as the culprits, though a few variants believe it is the work of the Goblinar. These beliefs play upon prejudices among some Humans that have existed for millenia.

This theory also has a hidden grain of truth in it, which is explained in the following section.

The Truth

The short, simple truth is that Goddess Mother Caronalyn did appear at the appointed hour on the appointed day - but she did not appear in the Elderkeep Cathedral. Instead, she chose to make herself known to a young acolyte in the sleepy village of Spirit Lake deep in the The Feywood. She has not abandoned her Human children; she has simply decided that she needed a new messenger since the First Servant of the True Church wasn't really paying attention. And the reason that it was important for Humans to start paying attention is that there is indeed the possibility of another god-war brewing in the very near future. And this time, it's possible that Cartyrion will not survive the devastation.

Credits

Banner images by Vinson Tan ( 楊 祖 武 ) from Pixabay

Page background cathedral Image by 5163451 on Pixabay
Page background manor house image by Josef Pichler on Pixabay
Page background hut image by PamelaAndrey15 on Pixabay
Page background forest image by Waldkunst on Pixabay
Character portraits by RPGDinosaurBob on Hero Forge®