Divine Harvesting

Trisurus runs on stolen godlight.

The Consortium does not advertise this. No official document uses the word "harvesting." Internal communications refer to "divine integration" or "sustained planar cooperation." But the mechanism is simple: gods are housed in purpose-built pocket dimensions, fed simulated populations who worship them in earnest, and the divine energy generated by that worship is siphoned into Trisurus's infrastructure.

Origin

Three thousand years ago, Trisurus faced a crisis that magitech alone could not solve. Elemental reactors powered cities. Matter synthesis fed billions. But the sphere itself was showing stress fractures that no amount of arcane engineering could mend. The original god of Trisurus, Harmony, understood what was needed. Harmony volunteered to enter a pocket dimension and sustain the sphere's integrity from within.

It worked. The sphere stabilized. And Trisurus learned a terrible lesson: divine energy does what arcane energy cannot.

When the next sphere collapsed and refugees arrived with their gods, the Consortium saw an opportunity. The useful gods were separated from the rest during evacuation. They were given pocket dimensions of their own. The remaining gods were left behind with the dying sphere, and nobody questioned why some survived and others didn't.

Over six thousand years of sphere collapses, the process refined itself into quiet institutional practice.

How It Works

A harvested god occupies a sealed demiplane maintained by the Consortium's Planar Engineering Division. Inside, a population lives, prays, and believes. The god rules, answers prayers, performs miracles. From the god's perspective, everything functions normally.

From outside, crystalline conduit networks draw off the divine energy and route it into Trisurus's systems. The energy feeds sphere stability, fleet navigation, medical infrastructure, planar gates, and dozens of other systems that magitech alone cannot sustain.

Most harvested gods do not realize what is happening. Roughly 85% believe they are simply ruling a world. The remaining 15% have begun to notice their power draining faster than worship replenishes it. These tend to be the gods under heaviest draw.

What Divine Energy Provides

Trisurus's magitech is extraordinary, but it has hard limits. Divine energy fills the gaps:

• Sphere stability. The primary use. Without sustained divine output, the crystal sphere's degradation would accelerate beyond any anchor network's capacity.
• Gyre resistance. Fleet expeditions into collapsing spheres rely on divine shielding that arcane barriers cannot replicate.
• Travel. Spelljamming speed, cloaking, and safe passage through wildspace all draw on divine sources.
• Healing. The pods handle most conditions, but true resurrection beyond the ten-minute window requires divine energy. So does psychological healing that no pod can replicate.
• Construct consciousness. The awakening process that grants constructs sapience pulls from divine sources, though few researchers acknowledge this openly.
• Planar infrastructure. The 47 permanent gates require divine reinforcement to prevent boundary stress from tearing holes in local reality.

Scale

The current count stands at approximately 52 harvested gods. Five retain their names and active worshipper communities. The rest have been reduced over centuries or millennia to their core Intent: a single concept like Preservation, Endurance, or Mercy. Their original names, personalities, and mythologies are gone. Internal records refer to them only by Intent designation.

The Tiers

Named Gods — Five gods recent enough that their worshippers still remember them as individuals. Harmony, Sarenis, Caelith, Thulmor, and Verdanis. These are the most likely to cause problems, because living communities still pray to them by name.

Intent Sources — The remaining forty-seven. Organized by function into operational categories: Bulwarks, Wayfinders, Luminaries, Restorers, Artificers, Arbiters, Sentinels, Awakeners, Conduits, and Fettered. Maintained by the Planar Engineering Division. Monitored for output. No longer regarded as persons.

Who Knows

This is not a grand conspiracy. There is no shadowy council suppressing the truth. The information is simply classified at a level most citizens never encounter.

The Planar Engineering Division knows. Senior Consortium officials know. Certain researchers in the Sphere Stability Project know. Over the centuries, the secret has leaked upward through government layers, and each generation of officials quietly agrees that the alternative is worse.

From below, pressure is building differently. The gods who have noticed their situation are whispering to their remaining worshippers. Followers of the named gods have begun reporting visions, dreams, and fragmented messages that don't align with what they expect from their faith. No one has connected the dots publicly. Yet.

The Ethical Fracture

The Consortium's position is pragmatic: without divine harvesting, the sphere collapses faster, the fleet loses its edge, and billions die. The math is brutal and the math is correct.

But Harmony volunteered. The refugee gods did not. They were taken from dying worlds under the assumption that survival justified the cost. Their pocket dimension populations worship in earnest, unaware that their entire reality exists to generate fuel.

If the secret breaks open, it will shatter the Interfaith Council, radicalize refugee communities, and force Trisurus to answer a question it has avoided for three thousand years: does a civilization that imprisons gods to survive deserve to?