code_of_conquest_dnd/content/lore/cosmology.md

# COSMOLOGY — the Warden and the Seven — status: canon

> The overarching theme of the Margreave: a distant good god, his angels, and
> the seven demon kings who work against him. Public, believed world-furniture —
> all `secrecy: 0`, bodies ship to the client. WHO is possessed, WHICH road is
> bled, are authored later as gated `rumor`/`fact`/`secret` per-town; this file
> never names a victim.
>
> Tone: distant & contested. The narrator never confirms the Warden, never goes
> epic. The war is the hidden engine under the grime.

---

## THE WARDEN — the good god (distant)

```yaml
id: person.the-warden
type: person
status: canon
secrecy: 0
related: [faction.the-sent, faction.the-seven, rule.the-pact]
body: >
  The god most of the Margreave professes, though few claim to have felt him.
  He is called only the Warden; no living mouth speaks his name, and the priests
  who might have known it are a long time dead. What the faithful hold is simple:
  he made the races, he loves them, and he wards the world against the Seven.
  What he asks in return is worship, and what he gives for it is blessing —
  rarely, and never where you can point to it and be sure. He does not come when
  called. Whether that is because he is good and restrained, or absent, or dead,
  is the oldest argument there is, and the Margreave has never settled it.
```

## THE SENT — his angels (indirect, rare)

```yaml
id: faction.the-sent
type: faction
status: canon
secrecy: 0
related: [person.the-warden, rule.the-pact]
body: >
  The Warden's messengers — angels, the Sent, his hand where he will not put his
  own. They do not fight the Seven and they do not save anyone. They ask. A Sent
  one comes to a mortal, names a thing that must be done in the Warden's name,
  and leaves the doing to them; blessing follows the deed, or does not follow the
  refusal. Most people go their whole lives without meeting one, and a fair
  number of those who claim to have met one were lying or drunk or worse. That
  they are rare is either the mark of a careful god or a thin one.
```

## THE SEVEN — the demonic host

```yaml
id: faction.the-seven
type: faction
status: canon
secrecy: 0
related: [person.the-warden, rule.blood-price, rule.possession,
  person.kareth-the-red-king, person.vael-the-quiet-knife,
  person.morren-the-grey-mother, person.ghaul-the-yoke,
  person.ishri-the-open-mouth, person.nuun-the-hollow-choir,
  person.draeth-the-crowned-worm]
body: >
  Seven kings and the armies that answer to them — the Warden's enemy, and the
  world's. They do not want to rule the races so much as end them, dead or yoked,
  it makes little difference to the Seven which. Each king is its own hunger and
  keeps its own kind of war, and they cooperate the way wolves cooperate, which
  is to say until the meat runs low. What they run on is blood: spilled,
  sacrificed, offered. A mortal who learns how to feed them can be given a share
  of what that blood buys. Most of the Margreave believes the Seven are real.
  Most of the Margreave is right.
```

## THE PACT — worship for blessing (the Warden's economy)

```yaml
id: rule.the-pact
type: rule
status: canon
secrecy: 0
related: [person.the-warden, faction.the-sent]
body: >
  The bargain at the heart of the Warden's faith: worship for blessing. Prayer,
  offering, a shrine kept clean, a deed done in his name — these buy his favor,
  and his favor turns fortune a little kinder. A bonesetter, the closest thing
  the Margreave has to a priest, is a mortal who has given enough of themselves
  to the Warden to channel a thread of that blessing into the living — a wound
  closed, a fever broken, a death postponed. The pact is never a receipt. You
  give, and blessing may come, on the Warden's terms and in his time, which is to
  say seldom and never on demand.
```

## THE BLOOD-PRICE — blood for power (the Seven's economy)

```yaml
id: rule.blood-price
type: rule
status: canon
secrecy: 0
related: [faction.the-seven, rule.possession]
body: >
  What the Seven trade in. Their power is not given, it is bought, and the only
  coin is blood — the more, and the more wrongly spilled, the better the rate. A
  killing floor, a sacrifice, a murder done in a lord's name feeds the king it is
  offered to. A mortal willing to strike that bargain becomes what the Margreave
  calls bloodsworn: sworn to one of the Seven, marked by it, and able to spend a
  thread of its power the way the faithful spend the Warden's — a curse laid, a
  hurt dealt, a thing that should not bend made to bend. The blessing side of it,
  such as it is, is that a king does not waste ill luck on its own sworn; the
  price for that mercy is simply the blood, and the blood is never paid once.
```

## POSSESSION — how the Seven reach mortals

```yaml
id: rule.possession
type: rule
status: canon
secrecy: 0
related: [faction.the-seven, rule.blood-price]
body: >
  How the Seven reach across into the world. Mostly it is not the horror the
  stories promise — it is influence, a hand on the scale of a mortal's wanting:
  the grudge nursed a little hotter, the easy cruelty made easier, the appetite
  that will not be talked down. That is the common work, and most of it is never
  noticed as anything but a person going bad. Outright possession — a king
  wearing a body like a coat — is rarer and costs the Seven dearly, and it is
  Nuun, the Hollow Choir, that does most of it; the others prefer a willing hand
  to a stolen one. A possessed mortal is not the enemy. The enemy is the thing
  inside them, and it will spend the body it wears without a thought.
```