Category:Yuanzhang

Yuanzhang are a type of spirit, the god-incarnations of the Constellations. While all gods shine in the sky, if most faintly, the Constellations are patterns of stars which move together and gleam brightly enough to be easily recognizable... though each star within them is a god, these patterns are themselves both a celestial phenomenon and a spirit of the Celestial Bureaucracy, the former known as the Constellation and the latter as the Yuanzhang, though the terms are oft interchangeable even amongst savants.

The Yuanzhang are ancient, for the Constellations predate even the Loom of Fate, and though they serve beneath the Five Maidens some whisper that they were amongst the first spirits crafted by the Primordials, which perhaps explains their strangeness.

While the positions they occupy receive salary and respect, the politicking of Heaven doesn’t see gods attempting to take the constellation purviews, nor the constellation-gods working for promotion upward to new posts, no more than gods would attempt to usurp Venus as Maiden of Serenity in the hierarchies of the Bureau of Destiny. In fact, the Yuanzhang are found listed both as functionaries and as part of the panoplies of the Division heads.

In addition to their role as symbols of rank, the constellation-gods must tend to the paperwork of their purviews, providing the stipends for the god-stars who form their patterns, exchanging reports with the Pattern Spiders of the Loom of Fate as the movement of its threads shifts the stars of the sky, and approving the petitions of Astrology passing across their desks.

As opposed to gods who might fall or see their purviews vanish, it is thought that there is no way to truly destroy a Constellation or its Yuanzhang. The individual stars of a constellation have moved and even fallen over the history of Creation, but always new ones are found to take their places, the Yuanzhang seeming to know intuitively to whom they will make an offer few gods would refuse. The events of the Usurpation, however, revealed for the first time that the constellation-gods were not eternal… the attempt by the Sidereal Exalted to manipulate The Mask had many grave effects, amongst them the transformation of the constellation’s Yuanzhang into something entirely different from what it had been before.