Black Veil Annals
The Bureau of Heaven’s Black Veil Annals are a depository of the names of missing and deceased gods, and former positions. The Celestial Bureaucracy as a whole does not officially track promotions within its ranks by any mechanism save the Annals, which can only be accessed by the Unconquered Sun and the Shogun of Celestial Concerns: instead, records are oft updated so that a promoted god has always held their purview, and the tracking of who came before falls to the memories of individual gods themselves, some of which are long but some short indeed.
During the Primordial Era, there was little need to track changes in Divine office, as each office was occupied by a god designed to fill it. Individual objects and instances might appear and vanish, gods born and culled along with them, but this was simply the Celestial Bureaucracy functioning as designed.
The first difficulties emerged due to the unthinking impact of the Wyld, both its lapping at Creation’s shores where gods could war and fall in battle against the Fair Folk, and the callous destruction wrought upon Creation by Wyld’s greatest offspring-foes, the Primordials, to whom gods great and small did fall. When such casualties left positions open, the Most High and his Incarnae would petition their masters to forge replacements, but even the Great Maker Autochthon grew irked with such an onerous task. Creation birthed its own small gods, after all, instead of having greater ones forged why not select a lesser divinity and elevate them to the empty post, until the office left open was able to draw a new god into being to fill it?
The Unconquered Sun shouldered this additional burden, his promotions initially made to those who worked hardest to support him and his unending efforts to defend Creation. As thoughts of rebellion grew, however, the decisions of Sol Invictus began to take into account the loyalty of gods to their lord, and to their creators. The Primordial War and the Rain of a Thousand Stars saw large numbers of posts, occupied by those loyal to the Primordials forcibly emptied, loyalists to the Incarnae moved in to fill them. This turnover was one for which the Celestial Bureaucracy had not been designed, and the ripple effects can still be felt in gods ill-suited to their tasks or the once-unimaginable sight of a Celestial office left without an occupant.
As the Celestial Bureaucracy was not designed to account for promotion and removal, a variety of systems of account had arisen in various departments to record the change of gods and purviews. The end of the Primordial War was more severe, however, for the gods now removed were not just occasional uncomfortable losses but a mass of gods considered by the Most High to be threats to Creation itself, whose names were never to be spoken again, the Forbidden Gods. The Unconquered Sun ordered an account of each god, their position, and their loyalty, the original ‘Black Veil Annal’, and the names of the Forbidden were purged from other records along with their beings. This original Annal, crafted by the Most High alongside the Great Maker and the Five Maidens, needed no corruptable staff as its quills and brushes worked to compile, and when the Bureaucracy settled it continued its work.
Knowledge is power, and the Annals are closely guarded within the deepest vaults of the Bureau of Heaven, where its pages continue to fill with each appointment and promotion. The current Shogun, Ryzala, is said to consult it often, and to have used knowledge from it in her push to force her rival Lytek from his own Shogunal post. The god of Paperwork’s ostensible ally Chejop Kejak has oft demanded access to the Annals for himself, but so far Ryzala has refused.
