Ascended heroes

Ascended heroes are those (former) mortals who have become resident in the Astral by trading their mortality for a dependence on worship. They serve as "gods" to many of the cultures.

Rules

1. Ascended heroes can only be in one place at a time; they cannot create avatars. Thus, if they are destroyed anywhere, they are destroyed everywhere. That said, powerful ascendants have backup/contingency plans to preserve themselves. Killing a powerful ascendant is hard.
2. Ascended heroes can only interact across planar boundaries with mortals that worship them--there must be a pre-existing tie, voluntarily established by the mortal.
3. Ascended heroes cannot annoint clerics, they can only teach spells and enter into pacts.
4. The power of an ascended hero is directly proportional to the worship. Without worship, they must find another source of power to continue existence (ie become a devil or an angel or a demon).
5. Ascended heroes can be proactive and can discriminate based on style of worship
6. Ascended heroes are influenced by their worship and become the thing that their worshipers believe they are.

Consequences of These Rules

Worship of ascended heroes (generally called ascendants, since many are not heroic) tends to be much more localized and uniform than worship of the Congregation. It is rare that worship extends outside of a sub-region or nation (except via those who learned to follow them). Those that worship ascendants also tend to be much more singularly devoted than those that worship the Congregation or revere kami--the dependence of the ascendant on the quality and fervor of worship means that they structure their cults/churches to focus the worshippers on that ascendant instead of spreading the faith. Generally, the churches are henotheistic--they accept the other ascendants and gods as real entities and only rarely proscribe their worship, but focus their worship on their patron. The less-powerful ascendants tend to gather cults rather than outright churches (the big distinction is how open the worship is).

Without clerics (who inherently have independence from the church structure), ascendant cults are even more dominated by the structure of the organization. All of their power is taught as "mysteries" and cannot be taken back from heretics and apostates, which means that culling and careful selection is vital for success. This also works to keep the organizations small and compact.

Schism in faith is the worst nightmare of most ascendants, as it literally causes internal dissonance. They care less about political schisms, as long as they don't lead to differences in faith...which means they still care quite a lot.

Incarnation

Ascendants, unlike the Congregation, can incarnate relatively freely on the Mortal, as long as they're doing so near a body of worship. This involves creating an aetheric body (like any summoned creature). Doing so is costly (both in initial cost and as a substantial drain on their power), however, and leaves them exquisitely vulnerable. They also can't interact freely with their non-local worshipers while incarnated. As a result, very few ascendants do so.

There are whispers of ways to mortally reincarnate an ascendant, letting them inhabit the body of a mortal worshiper. This is considered heresy and an impossibility by most churches, however.

Becoming Ascendant

The two primary requirements for ascension are (a) a significant worship base and (b) substantial strength of will. While it is theoretically possible to ascend before mortal death, such plans are significantly more difficult than post-death ascension, because of the interference of the flesh.

Living mortals can be worshiped, and that does grant some power. But mortals struggle to capture that worship in any meaningful way. Post-death, however, the aspected aether flows freely and the more "extended" nimbus can properly absorb it. This phase requires either a huge volume of worship or a lot of care--there are many predators and beings that would like to catch that aether for themselves, usually by devouring the ascension-bound nimbus. Once enough is gathered, the second phase can begin.

To properly ascend, the mortal spirit must find a path into the Astral. As a bare spirit (nimbus + spark), this process is extremely dangerous. The spirit must have enough stored aether to survive and then to survive offering their spark to the Great Mechanism in exchange for a fragment of a True Word, a Name. This latter part is excruciatingly painful, as one has to rewrite their entire essence to match their new Name.

Some more loquacious ascendants have likened it to throwing yourself naked off a cliff into the sea and assembling a working ship out of the air itself.

Notable Heroes

• The Queen Ascendant
• Nocthis
• Shadow-sun, formerly of the Congregation Deceased as of 254 AC.