Ten Sleeping Gods

Ten Sleeping Gods or The Sleeping Gods

The Goddess of Dark Dreams Itzlotl has always been a door in which nightmares and terrors have entered into Mearoc.  She cares not for followers and gains no power from their faith (GM:  She's a primal being that doesn't require faith for her divinity).  For a long time, Itzlotl was content in tormenting sentient beings.  

At some point this changed.  The goddess of dreams became bored and weary of her game.  So, she laid down to sleep herself.  She dreamed a dark dream of The Ending, the destruction of Mearoc, its gods, its people and its world.

It started and ended in one night's length.  Her dream swept up everything and would have ended it all had not luck, or perhaps fate no intervened.  Two foreign divinities from a far away realm were visiting.  One was know as Morpheus, the winged god of dreams.  The other was Xuanth, the six-fingered hand of fate.

As her dream swept up the world, they both were caught up in the dream.  A god of dreams himself, Morpheus summoned his Daimones and moved Erebos, his divine land in an attempt to escape but ultimately failed -- her dream too strong to allow his escape.  Xuanth as well, was equally captured.

As foreign divine beings, they were not as affected as those beings of Mearoc.  They watched the world fade and die until only fragments were left.

Morpheus commanded his Daimones to fly from Erebos, their hands and wings capturing fragments of reality as it shredded into nothingness, using the power of dream to keep the fragments whole.

Xuanth used his powers to change fate, reaching his invisible fingers across the realms of the multiverse to tear holes in reality, opening gates that flooded the fragments with power enough to exist, even if tenuously.  With that power came people, sentients gathered from various reaches of the Multiverse to power the dream stuff that was keeping Mearoc whole.

A balance was then kept, if only a precarious one.  Aware on some minute level still, Itzlotl combated them, releasing her minions to eat and devour the dreams and kill the sentients that came.  The struggle was long and the pace slow but inch by inch, Mearoc pulled itself from her destructive grip.  

In the end, 10 gods, 99 immortals and the greatest mortal to walk Mearoc made a choice.

The Greatest Mortal gave up his freedom to entice, charm and entrap the goddess.  To embrace and hold her tight so she could not escape.

The 99 immortals gave up their Eternity to make sure his grip would last for forever.

The 10 gods chose to surrender their divinity to sleep, to act as guardians and to power the rite that entrapped her, so she could never be free as long as they slept.