In the age before forgetting, divinity was simple. Gods came from belief, from bloodlines, from stars that whispered names into chosen minds. They were shaped by myth, tempered by sacrifice, made whole by the weight of their own stories.
But the world did not stay whole. It fractured under the weight of knowing too much. Science explained away the storm. Satellites mapped the heavens. History turned sacred texts into annotated curiosities. Faith shrank not into silence, but into bureaucracy.
It began with regulation. The Divine Licensing Authority was formed in the wake of the Great Disenchantment, a metaphysical recession triggered by the collapse of belief economies across the world. Miracles, once wild and unaccountable, were now permits. Prayers were traceable. Gods were indexed, categorized, and managed like volatile assets.
The Faith Index measured the worth of a god not by thunder or awe, but by data. Belief was an algorithm, and divinity a service tier. A high-index god could perform regulated miracles. A low-index one might fade into mythic dissolution.
Divine Active Zones—DAZs—were established as spiritual containment fields. In places like Halcyon Crown or Umbral Wharf, gods were allowed to operate under state oversight. Outside those zones, unsanctioned miracles were treated like spiritual terrorism.
In this new world, the gods were not all ancient. Some were forged by corporations, crafted from social media worship, built from machine faith or ancestral reconstruction. Divinity became modular. If enough people believed in a thing with coherence, the world would answer with a spark of sentience.
That was the rule.
Until something broke it.
It happened in Umbral Wharf during the eclipse ritual—a minor lunar shadowing, barely worth note. The Wharf was thick with spirit-traders and miracle-mongers, a mosaic of ancestral pantheons stitched together by desperation. The eclipse came, and for one moment, the prayer markets fell quiet.
A girl dropped her offering in the canal.
Time buckled.
Not in a thunderous rupture, but in a quiet double-beat. A second passed, and then again. Some would later claim it was a software glitch in the prayer-tracking system. Others whispered it was a Penumbra ripple, the breath of a death god stirring.
But in the alley behind the submerged shrine—between a shuttered relic vendor and a broken halo grid—something unfolded.
Not born. Not summoned. Not prayed into being.
It arrived like a word never spoken. Like the weight of all things unchosen.
A figure.
No name. No sigil. No myth. Just a presence—a silhouette of identities that shimmered and collapsed, a body that refused to fix into meaning. People walked past it. Some blinked and forgot it immediately. Others paused, overwhelmed by sudden grief, or awe, or the memory of a dream they had never dreamt.
One man, a former priest turned relic peddler, clutched his chest and fell. His soul did not rise. It shattered—hundreds of ghost-fragments fanning outward, each one echoing a life he never lived. In that moment, the Faith Index hiccupped. Then it screamed.
No registration. No domain. No ancestry. No algorithmic anchor.
Just a hole where a god should not be.
And from that hole, Vellum stepped into the world.