Where to Begin?
This is... a rather large topic. I've never had to explain the Shards before. Everyone knows about Them.
The Shards are the remains of a shattered god. They're a broken mirror, with each fragment reflecting a portion of what They once were. Except each Shard is a god unto Itself, no less powerful than what It was before, only now more specialized. They represent different corners of the world filled with collections of functions and concepts. To a Shard, everything It controls is related in some way, but to us, it can seem random.
The more specialized the Shard, the smaller Its corner, but the more extreme It can be. We've always had rain, but the monsoon didn't exist until the Rainfall Shard did. Our anger had boundaries until the Fury Shard. The Power Shard made us more capable than ever, of wonderful and of terrible things.
Partnership
The Shards and the planet exist in partnership. As one grows, so does the other, or both stop growing entirely. When the planet changes, it eventually hits the limit of what the current Shards can allow. This changes the Shards. It pulls at them until it tears one apart in a Schism that shakes the world. The two new Shards are more specific extremes of the original, allowing the world to expand upon their concepts.
Form
Only the Shards' chosen apostles have seen Them, and only through visions. Some Shards take chimeric forms, amalgamations of body parts, sometimes resulting in a humanoid shape and other times barely managing to stay in any shape at all. Over time, They keep the same form but it changes as the concept They represent grows. Eventually, They start to burst at the seams, and whatever logical form They had falls apart.
Myth
Some people say Shards physically manifest as the representations of Their power around us, but that's like saying a sunburn is a manifestation of the sun. It's not. It's more like a consequence of the sun existing. People like to think gods watch over us, or care about us at all, but Shards don't. They simply exist, and we deal with the consequences.
Death
No matter what the movies say, it's not possible to kill or even harm a Shard. They don't have physical forms to hurt, and They're immortal besides. Not even a Schism kills them. Some apostles mourn the loss of their Shard, but the concepts are still represented by the two new ones. Every new Shard is as powerful as the ones before It. Likely only a Shard could kill another Shard.
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