From the Ascent of Blessed Air, a sacred text of the Lirian faith

At the heart of the chorus of the birdsong, the swirling beat of the wings, there is silence. There is singleness and fixity of will. There is the temporary melding of sentience, the synthesis that allows the gods to come into our world, that allows the rawness of divinity to be known and named among us.

It is this birdsong that levelled the great chain. The chirping of unlicenced printers. The whispering of novel gods, distinct from the tricksters who had ruled us since the usurpation, the ancient bait-and-switch. The true multitude of gods, who fly and sing as one and separate again, in that Eternity beyond perception’s doors.

The music uplifts the birds to a higher reality, where all thought of personal gain is lost in the harmony of the music, the symphony of the flight. They know where they are going. Forwards. Into the future. A world without chains and towers. Where knowledge and the names of things set us free.

Through history, Liria the Wise has always wandered. Before Liberty granted her the Temple and the capacity to serve us openly, they were a vagrant, out on the road. Her only sanctuary came from the birds who nested in the roadside hedges, and the occasional charitable souls who refused to heed the laws of the chain-kings. But to those who would listen, Liria would speak. With a smile in her eyes, always with the sense that she might not really mean it, plausible deniability, the jester’s grin. But with seriousness at the heart of it, as the ephemerality of birdsong masks its unfaltering, transcendent intent.

One day, Liria arrived at the Temple-House of the Seven Smiling Tempests (who go unnamed and unmourned), and requested shelter. At this, the Tempests cackled aloud with mocking glee. The nerve of the creeping, crawling commoner. They sensed their divinity immediately, of course, her strangeness in human form, but this only made them laugh the harder. What god would choose to come here in rags?

One of the Tempests suggested prison.¹⁾ Another, the headsman’s axe. But a third, cannier about their image, and looking for something to break up the monotony of power, suggested a game. Should they win (and there were seven of them, all resplendent with the power of the storm), she would languish in the prison for the rest of days. Should she win, they would give her a place to rest.

Liria refused the Third Tempest’s terms.²⁾ She demanded to be able to name her price. Confident that history’s course was already set, the Tempests did not have to consider long.

The trickster gods loved little more than games of chance. The rush of feeling that came from the temporary leaning into the uncertain, the unknown, only to dance back again with a lordly guffaw as they claimed yet more, and more, than they had had before. Before they learned of microtransactions and gacha apps,³⁾ they played games face to face.

The rules of this particular game are not speakable before the uninitiated. But of course (for on what parchment or breath would we be telling this tale otherwise?), Liria won.⁴⁾ They named their price.

There was one special thing above all others that the trickster gods had and the other gods hadn’t, the thing that let them speak to the world and keep the vast, true-hearted majority silent. This was their Names. These Names brought with them the power of internal coherence; the ability to fly with one voice, rather than be pulled apart into endlessly sub-dividable concepts. For the uprising to succeed, the People needed this gift. For the gods to creep one by one into the knowable world and to lead them to freedom, so did they. Liria taught the method, showed the way.

One by one, at first, and then in irresistible symphony, the birds began to sing. Soon their voices became a bonfire, a burning away of the false knowledge of the old world, and, phoenix-like, Endring was born, the new bird with a song to last the ages. A song none could be unconvinced by, for its logic was inexorable, simple and pure as the singing of the bird by the hedge-row, who had offered a feeble wing to a divine traveller with nowhere else to rest.

Six of the names Liria won (and with them, the deeper secrets of her knowledgeable and her triumph) are not knowable to those outside the Temple of the Blessed Air. One is granted to new initiates, the lay-siblings who receive our aid, and are given space for peaceful contemplation. For those who begin to work in the sacred crafts of book-making, printing and manuscript illumination, or the sacred care of guest-friendship and bird-tending, more unravel, along with deeper harmonies of celestial music, which cannot be heard by the untrained ear. The Trickster Gods are ever watchful, to reclaim their Names from those who falter on the path.