Wild God
Wild gods, most often known as ‘Wild Mothers’, are the gods of the wilderness, of regions untouched or undeveloped by Humanity. It is said that they are ancient gods, conceived by the will of the Primordial Gaia. It is said that they were tasked with overseeing the far peripheries of Creation, where the Primordials rarely moved and the [[Wyld] crashed against the shores, where the wild and untamed landscapes shifted with the waves of Chaos so that they would not break. There, these gods were watchful for any crack, the encroachment of the unreal into the real, the Fair Folk who sought to slip into Creation through its untamed wilderness... and the transformative dreams of expansion glimmering in mortal eyes as they looked out over emptiness.
So it is said.
It is certainly known that during the time of the First Age, the Wild Mothers were to the Bureau of Nature as the City Gods to the Bureau of Humanity, standing at the head of the local pantheons, the Spirit Courts for the region of their purview. To their divine superiors would go reports, of course, but as Humanity expanded they increasingly fell under the authority of the Solar Deliberative. The Princes of the Earth had a far different approach to Creation’s stability than the one of old, one that abandoned the gradient of stability which was the wild lands in favour of melded artifice of Essence and interconnection of economy to raise walls at Creation’s borders, and deployed the might of Sol’s Chosen to march beyond and bind the chaos beyond to their will. In this new world, the place of the Wild Gods was far different, their domains reduced to nature preserves (some small, some vast indeed) and regions where the rulers of Creation wished be sure the flows of essence to their treasured manses would not be disrupted by a peasant growing his fields beyond their proper place. In these regions the wild gods continued to watch for the Fair Folk, and also for the spread of the undead, while ensuring that those humans seeking to develop the landscape did so with the proper licenses and authorizations.
The Usurpation may have ended a Golden Age for the Solar Exalted, but it began to birth one for the wild gods. Some say that the Lunar Exalted who withdrew to the edges of Creation saw more than the Sidereal Exalted and Dragonblooded who remained that without the new ways of the Solars the old ways would return… it is certainly true that the duties and inclinations of many Lunars meant they had allies amongst the wild gods. The Dragonblooded Shogunate was able to maintain the ways of the Solars for a time, but their alliances with divinities were based upon the practical concerns of war and production, both of which meant encroachment on the domains of the wild gods rather than cooperation.
And then came the Great Contagion. The plants and creatures of the wilds perished en masse just as the mortals of the cities, but in the aftermath that wild life did what it had done for generations, it recovered and adapted to quickly restore stability to Creation, while the human populations increased far more slowly. Many Wild Mothers who had found themselves regulated and pushed back suddenly ruled instead over vast domains where human habitations and infrastructure were unknown or buried beneath the roots, and with those domains came power as local gods were forced to bow to the Mothers of these Wild Courts.
The Wild Mothers of today are divided into two camps. Those in the hinterlands of the Threshold oversee vast wilderness domains, a source of great power which they guard jealously against the encroachment of Humanity… those who wish to construct new settlements or roads are required to supplicate them with prayer and sacrifice lest they suffer the wrath of the god, and of the packs of elemental Dogs of the Unbroken Earth which the Mothers accumulate to serve them. These Wild Mothers often also have alliances with the Lunar Exalted of the Silver Pact, the gods and Exalts working to suppress encroachment of the Wyld and Fair Folk into their domains… though it is not unknown for some wild gods to make arrangements with the Fae if they serve to keep mortal interference with the wilderness at bay.
On the Blessed Isle, there can be found wild gods who take a far different approach: those few Wild Mothers who oversaw the largest and least-manicured hunting reserves of the Isle continue in their duties, but under the rule of the Scarlet Empress several of these who oversaw lands in the Imperial River Basin were offered greater domains, cooperating with the Thousand Scales to do as they had done for the Solar Deliberative in keeping the lands between the Imperial Mountain and Imperial City free of development which might disrupt the flows of Essence. At the insistence of the Scarlet Empress, the wild gods of the Imperial River Court received an increased share of worship in the Prayer Calendar of the Immaculate Order... with Her Throne now empty, some within the Order call for these gods to be reduced to their proper allocations and pushed from the heart of Creation out to their proper place at the periphery.
