Gods’ Graveyard

[ History | Discovering the Gods’ Graveyard | Faction Interference ]

A History of the Gods’ Graveyard

A conversation recorded in front of a new exhibit about the Gods’ Graveyard in Sigil’s Musée Arcane. Narrated by philosophical archaeologist Magnum Opus.

Now I know what you’re thinking, cutter. “Another one? I thought the dead-book of the powers was in the Astral Plane?” Well, yes. And no. Just hold your hezrou for a moment and I’ll explain.

The Astral is indeed the place where most powers end up. Anubis, the Guardian of the Dead Gods, watches over them there and makes sure their divine cadavers are respected. Except for the ones where he doesn’t. But I digress.

The dead powers of the Astral might be corpses—albeit ones large enough for gith to build a city on—but they still harbour residual divine energy. Chant goes they’ve ended up there for all sorts of reasons; some were killed by other powers, some drifted into obscurity, some ended up there by their own hands. But they were all powers at the time of their untimely demise, and that’s why Anubis is bound to protect them.

However, the God’s Graveyard of Nether, now that’s different. In this case, a bunch of powers ended up getting dead-booked and didn’t make it as far as the Astral. Now the jury’s out about all the fine details here—and this is why there are factioneers from Sigil crawling all over the place as I speak. But the fact is: The gods buried had all their divinity removed from them, before they died. This meant at the point they were written into the dead-book, they were no longer powers—and thus Anubis has no dominion over their fate.

The blood who did it was Ma Yuan, Killer of Gods.

Ten Gods Fall: Perfecting the Fine Art of Deicide

Nobody’s really sure where Ma Yuan came from, or even really what he was. He manifested as a four-armed, scaly reptilian beast, who’d tower over most giants. This is a long time ago mind, although not so long there aren’t elves who’d remember, I bet. I’d call him a titan were it not for that tyrannosaur-head. Most likely he was some sort of titanic-kaiju-demon. In any case, they say that merely laying eyes on Ma Yuan was enough to would trigger something primal in a berk—not just fear, but that instinctual kind of terror that screams “predator” in a language older than words.

Whatever he was, he also possessed a powerful artifact which could turn into any kind of weapon he desired. It was shaped like triangular stone, and his favourite trick was to make it to mirror a weapon that was being used against him, only he’d wish it twice as strong. My research suggests that the thing was carved from the first lie that was ever told.

Ma Yuan truly wasn’t just another power-mad destroyer looking to add notches to his belt. Ancient legends tell that he was created deliberately, in order to prevent complacency among the gods, as a reminder that even divine beings can bleed, die, and ultimately be forgotten. But this turned out to be a terrible mistake.

Here’s where things get darker. See, Ma Yuan didn’t just kill gods—he harvested them while they still drew breath, maintaining their divine consciousness throughout the entire process. Using techniques that would make a velstrac interrogator drool, the god-killer perfected methods that stripped away their divinity piece by piece. Those arms of his weren’t just for show. First he’d grab his victims with all four of them, and drag them across the planes to his secret cavern realm in Nether. Each arm could reach into different aspects of divine essence simultaneously. While one grabbed the power’s connection to their worshippers, the second would grasp the concept behind their portfolio, while the remaining arms ripped away their divine memories and finally extracted their god-spark itself. The screams, they say, could be heard across Nether and even into the Outlands—a cosmic wail of divinity being flayed as Ma Yuan consumed their hearts. Each god he killed made him stronger, and each divine essence he absorbed only made him hungrier.

Through his blasphemous rampage across the planes, Ma Yuan systematically hunted down powers he’d identified as weak or superfluous, and slowly the scale of his atrocities became clear to the other powers. First to be slain was Lei Zhenzi. The thunder god’s weather magic was torn from him while divine lightning still coursed through his veins. Several more minor powers were consumed, and I’ve found some clues but I’ve yet work out all their identities.

An Unprecedented Alliance

While Ma Yuan was carving his bloody path through the lower ranks of divinity, something unprecedented happened—an alliance between the Celestial Bureaucracy and and demon lords. See, Anubis, the jackal-headed guardian of the dead, found himself in an awkward position—gods weren’t supposed to be butchered and devoured like cattle, and worse, it was happening on his watch. While there was little he could do for those who’d already been written into the dead-book, with his psychopomp head on, Anubis realised that Ma Yuan represented a threat to the very concept of divine death.

Now, Anubis wasn’t fool enough to think he could handle this alone. Seeing how Ma Yuan was targeting mainly powers from the Chinese Pantheon, and suspecting that Ma Yuan had been created by high-ups of that pantheon in the first place, he enlisted the help of the Celestial Bureaucracy. He knew it would take more than divine might to tackle Ma Yuan though, for the god-killer has already proven himself no match for powers, and Anubis knew better than to get close enough to trick him. The wise old jackal knew though that Ma Yuan’s fellow demon lords were watching his rampage with concern. As the god-killer grew in power, the Lords of the Abyss knew it was only a matter of time before he came for them too.

The plan was audacious and risky. First, Erlang Shen, the three-eyed power of water, justice and demon hunting, would allow himself to be defeated and consumed, along with the trickster child-god Nezha. The thinking was by presenting such a tempting meal, Ma Yuan might be tricked into overstretching himself. Perhaps working together, the two powers would be able to escape death and survive inside him, for a time at least. Well, Ma Yuan fell for the trap, gobbled up both powers, and manifested a third eye of his own.

Feng-Tu: The Trap is Set

Feng-Tu, the 300th layer of the Abyss, wasn’t chosen randomly as the site for Ma Yuan’s defeat. This forsaken realm served as the Chinese pantheon’s underworld, complete with its own bizarre spirit bureaucracy. The Chinese demon-power Lu Yueh had established a citadel on a forked of the River Styx called How Nai-ho, entered through Kuei-Men-Kuan (the Gate of the Demons). The layer’s saturation with the essence of death created the perfect environment for containing a blood as dangerous as Ma Yuan. The spirit-choked atmosphere would dampen his senses, the miasma of the Styx would hamper his mental faculties, and the Abyssal nature of the realm provided Lu Yueh with a home field advantage.

The chase had lasted for years across multiple planes, with Ma Yuan’s growing might making him increasingly difficult to corner. Tou Mu, the terrifying goddess of the North Star, had been watching Ma Yang from her flying chariot, relaying the god-killer’s every movement to her allies. Ma Yang’s growing powers allowed him to slip between planes like smoke, while his reptilian cunning helped him stay one step ahead of the hunters. This is where the eye of Erlang Shen came in. Shen sent visions to Ma Yuan of the underworld realm Feng-Tu, and how it was governed by a weak demon power. Making it seem like the visions were prophetic, Ma Yuan was shown how he would conquer the realm and become Lord of Feng-Tu.

Drunk on stolen divinity, Ma Yuan fell for that trick too. Arrogantly arriving through the Gate of the Demons expecting another easy harvest, the god-killer found himself facing not just Lu Yueh, but also his unlikely allies who were lying in wait. Li Jing, the Heavenly Pagoda-Bearer, trapped Ma Yuan inside his magical pagoda. This contained the god-killer for long enough for Nezha, the son of Li Jing, to burst from Ma Yuan’s gullet. Adding in the combined might of the three-headed, six-armed demon Lu Yueh, and the foresight of demon-hunter Erlang Shen, the god-killer was finally overpowered and bound in silver chains.

Too mighty to kill, the allies instead imprisoned Ma Yuan in the Wells of Darkness, the 73rd layer of the Abyss. The god-killer’s triangular stone went missing along the way—chant goes it’s the key to releasing him from imprisonment there. I believe that Lu Yueh stole it in the scuffle. They say, never trust a demon lord, after all. The stone holds the essence of ten murdered gods, making it both incredibly valuable and incredibly dangerous. I reckon that Lu Yueh obsesses over it to this day, trying to understand the divine extraction techniques Ma Yuan perfected.

Well, that’s the tale I heard anyway. Alas, I cannot prove a word.

—Magnum Opus, philosophical archaeologist

Discovering the Gods’ Graveyard

Recorded from a deep-dive interview with Leir the Explorer, who briefly visited the Gods’ Graveyard on his exploration of the Planes of Cordance. He told me later that he regrets his inquisitiveness.

When I arrived at the fringe of the Graveyard, well, you don’t so much step into it, you descend. No matter which direction I walked, itwas always downwards. The land warped before me like the plane’d been throttled by a pair of unseen hands. The air was dense, silent, heavy even—as if countless unanswered prayers were pressing down on me like an impossible weight. This place is a wound on the plane which may never heal.

The terrain around bore the scars of struggle and death. It was somehow even bleaker than the rest of Nether—which is saying something, believe me—the blasted wasteland was littered with the weird remnants of what I now know were godcorpses. If I’d realised at the time there’s no way I’d have stayed. These weren’t the intact and (mostly) serene bodies you’d see gently reposing in the Astral, oh no. This was a visceral landscape—spines that shape mountain ranges, ribs forming bridges of bone over chasms that I still echoed with thousand-year old screams. The cracked husk of what might’ve once been a sun god formed a volcano, that dribbled radiant ichor instead of lava, more like a burst boil than an eruption. The name ‘God’s Graveyard’ really doesn’t do the place justice cutter. Gods’ Charnelhouse, more like. I saw evil trees growing out of a titanic petrified skull, their branches bearing fruit that wept. There were obelisks of frozen blood jutted from the mud like insidious tombstones, radiating death. Or maybe they were fingers. Forgive me for not stopping to check.

Above it all, the skies hung low and bruised with dense purple-grey stormclouds, flickering with flashes of sickly silver. They bled rain that wasn’t wet with water, but each numbing drop that touched my skin brought the flash of an unwanted memory. It was like being doused with ice-cold regret.

The Baigu Cave

Not far from the ridge of the Graveyard, half-buried in a landslide along with the hollowed-out torso of some unidentified power—I found the Baigu Cave, what I now believe to have been Ma Yuan’s sanctum and killing field.

What might once have been a natural gorge has since become something other. Twisting stalactites of charred bone grinned like enormous teeth where the cave yawned open, and the air within was colder than anything I’d encountered on Nether, even in the Tsardom of Silver. It was laced with the scent of scorched incense and coppery blood.

Inside, the walls pulsed faintly, as though stained with phosphorescent anguish: pinkish, twitching veins glowed with ghostly light. There were symbols carved into the cave’s wall that hurt to look at. Not mortal glyphs for sure, they were sigils ripped from Ma Yuan’s victims: divinities mutilated and scrawled with sharpened bone. I’m no wizard, but there were spells written there, ancient magic that no mortal should know.

And in the very lowest crypt-chamber, I found an altar slab carved from the jawbone of Lei Zhenzi. Inside it, surrounded by sharpened teeth, Ma Yuan laid each subsequent god-victim and performed his unholy vivisection. The earth was scorched black around it, even the undead moss curling away in disgust. Better believe I got out of there as fast as I could, cutter.

The Death of Magic

Something else I noted. Within a mile of any of the god-corpses, divine magic just stopped working completely. Now as a card-carrying Athar—yes cutter, they give us cards now—that doesn’t affect me a jot. But it’s still worrying enough to mention. They say that prayers fall flat, just hanging there in the air. Holy symbols lose their gravitas and their weight. They say that servants of gods who dare come too close—archons, proxies, even balors—feel like their guts have been ripped out as they lose their connection to the divine.

Arcane magic feels different in this place too—it works, but crookedly. Shadow magic and necromancy thrives here, though, like fungus on a fallen tree. For me, this is more proof that divinity ain’t natural, just an infestation of belief.

No one knows really how this place came to be. Maybe Ma Yuan carved it into being through repeated acts of divine murder. Or maybe, it always existed, just waiting for the right blood to come along and wake it up with divine ichor. Whatever the dark of it, the Graveyard is like a dark promise: that gods can not just wither and die, but they can be killed.

—Leir the Explorer

Faction Interference

Given the proximity of Nether to the Gray Waste, you’d be forgiven for expecting that Sigil’s thinking clubs would stay away. You might be surprised then to learn that the planelette has become quite the hot topic to study amongst Guvners, and the Athar, as well as a training ground for Sensates, Sinkers, and the Bleakers. The plane has spawned a new sect, who call themselves the Umbral Gardners—although everyone else calls them the Deifilers. This is because all of the these factions want to control the Graveyard…

Athar

You’d be unsurprised to find out that Athar have a vested interest in Nether, and its status as a gathering place for powers who’ve seen better days. These philosophers reckon that this proves that powers ain’t eternal, or immortal, or even as important as some berks seem to think they are. When the chant about the Gods’ Graveyard first reached Sigil, the Athar believed it was fate that they would eventually relocate to Nether. Factioneers came to Nether to observe, document, and learn who or what the dead powers in this corpseyard were—which all seems rather respectful, if you were to ask my opinion. It didn’t last. These days, it’s a rare Athar who is willing to visit the plane, and even after all this time, the Graveyard is mostly uncharted and unknown. Factioneers who do visit either tend to return quickly or are never seen again. Officially, the Athar don’t speak about why. The chant goes however, that they found Something in the graveyard that terrified them. The smart jink is on it being something to do with the fabled bogeyman of Nether that legends say defeated the so-called ‘god-killer’ Ma Yuan.

Bleak Cabal

The Bleakers have a stronger presence in Nether than most other factions or sects. Missions to the Gray Waste require hardcore Bleakers, but the despair of Nether isn’t quite as dangerous to a cutter’s very existence. Sure, there nay be little reason to believe in a future, to live for some higher purpose, or to go out and make a name for yourself. However, even the Bleakers acknowledge how difficult it is them to live in Nether while attempting to set up kips, soup kitchens, and various other tactics they learned in Sigil.

The leader of the Nether operation is factor Zeth (prime human wizard and former cleric of Arazni [she/her] / Bleak Cabal / CG) a former priest of Arazni the Unyielding. She lived on a Prime world called Golarion until a rift opened up in the Mana Wastes, and she was unlucky in being caught up and swept away. She eventually ended up in Sigil where she tried to commune with Arazni, but when she received no response, she realised she’d been cut off from her power. Her faith was shaken, but the Araznian ideal of doing whatever it takes to survive stuck with her, and she threw in and joined the Bleak Cabal. There she found a new purpose, in helping the unfortunate, and a fulfilment she’d not had in the priesthood. When she heard the discovery of Nether and the Bleakers seeking volunteers to establish an outpost in that plane, Zeth was one of the first to step forwards—whenever asked why she always said something just felt right about it. Perhaps it was Arazni working in mysterious ways after all.

Since then, Zeth has taken on the role of helping the unfortunates of Nether—a burden she’ll surely eventually Perish from. Currently the Bleakers are building an almshouse in the burg of Last Chance to act as their base of operations.

Heralds of Dust

The Dustmen are intrigued by the Graveyard. They’re trying to figure out if powers can undergo the True Death. Perhaps the state of existing on Nether is a process whereby they are shedding their attachments to the multiverse. However, with all the other factions clamouring to investigate the Graveyard it’s become difficult for the Dustmen to get an look in.

Doomguard

The Sinkers have latched onto the idea that Nether is a plane of entropy. Everything there will end eventually, but the problem for most Sinkers is the process is going far too slowly. Sure, it will slowly put cutters who live there into the dead-book, rot the buildings, and decay the environment. The Graveyard is also a big draw for them, as it’s already proved its entropy can defeat even powers—but many Sinkers want to see results sooner rather than later. As always with the Doomguard, there’s internal conflict in the faction. As usual, the Sinkers who believe entropy is plodding along right on time oppose the impatience of their more eager colleagues.

Deifilers

It turns out that particularly ambitious members of the Athar, and accelerationist Sinkers have found common ground in the God’s Graveyard. The Umbral Gardners—called the Deifilers by their detractors, although they’ve started wearing this name as a badge of pride—are just a nascent sect, but they have been recruiting new members rapidly from both factions, especially as their members succumb to the Perishing effects of Nether.

The Deifilers believe it must be possible to strip away the divinity from the self-proclaimed powers. Their sectol, a former proxy of the Gaulish power Cernunnos, is called Katurix (planar half-fey-human ranger [he/him] / Deifilers / CE, formerly CN). This ambitious blood leads the sect’s efforts to find ways to extract any remaining energy from the remains they dig up from the Graveyard. They are attempting to find a substance which can weaken a power, or perfect a process to extract divinity directly themselves. Amongst their more successful experiments is the Apotropaic Garden.

More chant on the Umbral Gardners here…

Canonical Sources: Deities and Demigods [1e] p40; Dungeon Magazine #140 p64 and Fiendish Codex 1 [3e] p139,146 (lore confirming god-killer Ma Yuan is now in the Wells of Darkness)

Source: SGreen, Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: The legend of Ma Yuan is based on lore from the Fiendish Codex I [3e], blended with stories and characters from Fengshen Yanyi, a 16th century Chinese novel in the shenmo genre, featuring the cannibalistic demon Ma Yuan. The literature Ma Yuan did not kill gods, although he was suitably awful—I believe the the god-killing part was an invention of the Deities and Demigods [1e]. The Fiendish Codex gave a few lines about how Ma Yuan ended up in the Wells of Darkness, which I’ve expanded upon here. The Deifilers are a homebrew sect created by SGreen. More information on the Planes of Cordance can be found here.