Before I go and post anything, can i get a quick plot summary of what Realiti has done concerning the new planets? And just in general since my last post.
Stonebow has a port, and some of the Daktylios Kingdoms in the middle must have ports connected either to the middle lake or the outer ocean, but none of them are under Yurius's command.
I think it's safe to assume a lot of the important nations mentioned to this point, particularly the Long Tooth (Durbag) Simians and the Stonebow Simians, have ports or harbors of some sort, though they haven't been described in detail. Both nations have navies and trade ships have gone out of and into both kingdoms.
If either of those work under Yurius, you just contradicted yourself. And to balance things out, I am now moving to your model of how spirits work. The idea being that the second generation of nature spirits are more willing to interact with the world.
Well, Stonebow City (or rather, the nation it has evolved into) and Durbag/Long Tooth Forest don't "work under" Yurius, no. They have monarchical governments and are ruled by kings, queens, and senates. Their official religion is that of Yurius, though they worship him to different degrees and in different ways according to their respective cultures and histories. But Yurius doesn't rule them like a king or anything and he doesn't officially have command of their ports, armies, navies or any part of their cities or governments. He could ask them to deploy their armies or suggest that they do so, but the call as to whether it would be done or not would come down to the ruling government, not Yurius. Even if he tried to command them to deploy or tried to forbid them from doing so, they're under no actual obligation to listen to him according to the way their governments work. Yurius doesn't rule or command any nations of his own. He just has the Arbiter's Meadow where his army is stationed. There's a small-ish lake there, but there's not really a port. The spirits he commands, especially those associated with water, don't really need boats since it's not like they can drown or anything, and Yurius can make them a portal to any part of the ocean he needs them to be in, so there's no need for them to have a port to station boats at or deploy into the ocean from. That's why I said he commands no port. As for a second generation of spirits, I never really thought about how spirits are born. I've been working under the assumption that the spirits that are alive currently are largely the same ones that have been alive since the birth of the planet, with the exception of spirits of specific landmarks like cities and manmade objects and such. Presumably those types were born and will die when their physical avatars do, though maybe it won't be that simple. I will be interested, therefore, to see how a "second generation" of spirits will come about.
You mean the government that he directly interfered with by killing a noble and saying that another should be the monarch, who was then crowned? They may not formally "work" for Yurius, but we both know that if called upon, they would say yes.
That was a situation where Yurius was asked to make a judgement because there was an inheritance dispute and, well...he's the God of Justice and part of that entails arbitrating disputes. He didn't simply step in and arbitrarily stick his thumb on the scale just because he felt like it and he could. He was asked to weigh in by the nation having the dispute. If they had decided that they didn't like his judgement and decided to put someone else on the throne, he wouldn't have argued with them. He'd simply say "I told you what the fair and just answer was to your question. It is up to you whether you will do the right thing." He only helps people find justice when he's asked to do so. You can see that about him in just about everything he does, even in his birth: He wasn't born until the victims of an attack were desperate and pleaded with the universe for justice. He didn't interfere in Stonebow's politics until they asked him to help decide who was the rightful inheritor of the throne. He didn't interfere in Khaline's colony until one of the citizens of said colony specifically prayed for help because he and his daughter were being oppressed. After that, he only returned whenever someone else within made a similar prayer. He didn't interfere in the Yammu conflict until one of the Toothed Yammu asked for justice for his people. etc. As for the noble he killed, he did that because that noble was about to murder someone else in front of everyone and Yurius was the only one in a position to stop him. You might say that this was ill done because that person hadn't faced trial and maybe Yurius could have kept his intended victim safe without killing her attacker without a trial. You might be right about that; one of Yurius's faults is that he sometimes lets his anger get the better of him in the heat of the moment. You could also see that character flaw when he killed the raping guards in Khaline's settlement and burnt his sigil into the ground so everyone would know he was there. --- This is an aside and you can ignore it if you want, but I'd just like to state for those who are interested: FYI, there IS a provision in Stonebow's government that allows for people with dispute to appeal to Yurius for judgment when either they don't like the judgment given to them by the justice system set in place by the government OR the question at hand is too difficult for them to answer easily. In this case, the Stonebow government has decreed that whatever Yurius decides, they will go with, no matter what the nobles, the queen, the judges, or the senate think. Yurius did not set it up this way, the Simians themselves did. He plays kind of the same role for Stonebow that the Supreme Court of the United States plays in its country's government. From Yurius's perspective, though, one prayer for justice is much the same as another, whether it comes from an official government trial or from a peasant asking for a blessing or for revenge or for luck or for whatever. It was on this basis that he was called in to solve the inheritance dispute. There's a similar provision in a lot of governments that officially follow Yurius's worldview because all of them are based, to some extent, on Long Tooth's government, which was the first official Simian nation, though some call on him more than others. Long Tooth uses their "Yurius Clause" (for lack of a better term) the least and Stonebow the most, though it is very, very rare for Simians in general to call on him in an official governmental capacity no matter what the country. Okay, now back to relevant matters. ---- As for whether they would agree to field an army if he told them to, well, I'm not so sure myself. If Yurius told Queen Jard, or Queen Lilibet before her, to attack a nation without giving any good reasons, she'd probably say, "Why? War is ugly, my people will die, I'll lose many resources, I stand to gain little, and these people you're telling me to attack haven't really done anything to my country." King Turkdash, or whoever's in charge of the Long Tooth, would probably be even more skeptical because his nation is less pious than Stonebow. Either one would be a pretty lousy ruler if he or she were willing to send his or her people to die on nothing more than the say-so of one person, God or no. Of course, Yurius would almost certainly never command his worshipers to do such a thing in the first place, but it's an interesting hypothetical.
Which tribes? The kingdoms that worship Yurius? Some of them are at war, though not all. There was a civil war about 50-70 years back. All of the kingdoms were under the rule of one emperor, who was of the Long Tooth Kingdom. Some of the other kingdoms didn't want to be part of it anymore, so they declared themselves independent. They've been fighting with Long Tooth and its allies in some form or another ever since. Most recently, the civil war spilled into the lake in the middle of Daktylios, where they fought over the portal at its center for economic dominance of the continent. The Long Tooth won that battle, so they, and their former imperial allies, have a great many more resources than their enemies do at present. The current alliance that Long Tooth, Stonebow, the Dragons, and the Toothed Yammu are trying to get others to join might help to bring the factions in the civil war closer together and put an end to the fighting in time, but that remains to be seen.
@MagicPenguin Well about the new generation of spirits, well the way I see it, since there are millions of spirits in the immortal legions alone, that it works like Shinto where everything can have its own spirit. And there's a heirarchy, there are weak tree spirits, who are controled in turn by the Spirit of the Forest. Zokomod is the Spirit of shadows, and the like. So a new generation of spirits are in my opinion a result of the mixing of Rephlon and Ignus. Nature changed, and the spirits changed with it.
Makes sense to me. With all the new planets popping up, there are probably new spirits hanging out there too. It'll be interesting to see how they will all compare and contrast to the ones that came before them. To be precise, Zokmod isn't actually elementally aligned with shadows. Some people call him, and the other unaligned that make up a large number of his spy network, the spirits of shadows because they're always hiding and listening and acting from the dark, but in actuality he and they have no elemental alignment of their own. There actually aren't any real spirits of shadow, unless you count the dark spirits. Or, they haven't been written about or described yet, anyway. That slot is still open for someone to expand on.
