Writing Sacred Texts for a God Who Eats the World

Originally posted 11/30/2025 - revised 6/5/2026

One of the strange pleasures of writing The Veiled Core Chronicles is that sometimes the story refuses to stay inside the chapters.

That sounds dramatic, I know. Very author-at-a-window-during-a-thunderstorm. But it’s true.

The main story follows soldiers on Caldereth, Archons around the Board, and the enormous machinery of an empire that has mistaken ritualized violence for civilization. But underneath all of that is a much older question: how did anyone learn to live with this?

How does a society look at the Board, see living people reduced to pieces, watch real soldiers bleed and die beneath the hands of aristocrats placing wagers, and decide this is normal?

The answer, unpleasantly, is theology.

Not theology as background decoration. Not a few invented prayers sprinkled into the margins for flavor. I mean theology as infrastructure. Theology as the reason the empire can function. Theology as the story people tell themselves so they can look at horror and call it order.

That is where The Apocrypha of the Rememberer came from.

I am definitely not the first writer to tumble into this particular pit.

Science fiction and fantasy are full of invented religions, half-preserved scriptures, ritual fragments, forbidden texts, and uncomfortable theological machinery. Frank Herbert gave Dune the Orange Catholic Bible, the Missionaria Protectiva, the Bene Gesserit’s engineered prophecies, and a universe where religion is both sincere belief and deliberate social technology. That is a hard balance to strike. Make faith too cynical, and it becomes nothing but manipulation. Make it too pure, and you lose the political machinery underneath it. Herbert walked that knife-edge constantly.

Tolkien had a different challenge. His world is soaked in theology, but much of it remains just beyond the immediate story. The Silmarillion presents a creation myth, a divine hierarchy, rebellion, exile, providence, and loss, but The Lord of the Rings rarely stops to explain its theology directly. The faith is in the bones of the world. The characters do not need to lecture on cosmology for the reader to feel that the universe has a moral architecture.

Ursula K. Le Guin often approached belief more quietly, through culture, language, ritual, silence, and the way people make meaning out of uncertainty. Her invented spiritual systems do not always behave like formal churches. Sometimes they feel more like lived wisdom, social habit, philosophy, or restraint. That is its own challenge: how do you write belief without turning it into doctrine?

Then there are the darker examples. Lovecraft’s forbidden books and cosmic entities are not theology in the comforting sense, but they absolutely function as anti-theology: revelation as damage, knowledge as contamination, worship as surrender to scale. The moment a character reads too much, sees too clearly, or names the wrong thing, the universe becomes less human than it was before.

That was the tradition I found myself writing into, whether I meant to or not.

The challenge was not simply inventing what people believe. It was deciding how belief survives contact with evidence. What happens when the god is real, but not good? What happens when the scripture is partly true, but written by people who misunderstood what they were seeing? What happens when ritual is both a sincere act of faith and a mechanism that keeps an empire functioning?

That is the space The Apocrypha of the Rememberer lives in.

At first, I thought I was writing lore. Useful lore, certainly, but still lore. A few fragments to explain Arath-Bar. A few old texts to give the Board a history. Maybe some ancient warnings from the people who first discovered the thing beneath reality and, in the grand tradition of doomed advanced civilizations everywhere, immediately decided they could probably manage it.

They could not manage it.

No one ever manages the glowing ancient thing buried under the world. That is practically a law of science fiction.

But the more I wrote, the more the Apocrypha became something else. These were not just notes about the world. They were the world’s buried scripture. Confessions. Archive fragments. Restricted testimonies. Records written by people who were close enough to Arath-Bar to understand part of the truth, and far enough from safety that understanding came too late.

The current heart of those texts is Ciryx Vol, Last Chronicler of the Eidraluun. He is not writing as a historian with a comfortable chair and a generous research grant. He is writing as someone watching the shape of catastrophe become visible. The Eidraluun were brilliant, impossibly advanced, and arrogant in that particularly refined way only doomed civilizations can be. They found the Veiled Core. They built the Board. They gave form to Arath-Bar.

And then Arath-Bar began to remember.

That word matters. In this universe, memory is not passive. Arath-Bar does not simply recall events. He remembers reality into shape. He remembers outcomes until they become inevitable. He remembers people into places they never meant to stand. He remembers bargains in ways that make the bargainers wish they had never spoken.

That is the horror of him.

Not that he lies.

That would be easier.

Arath-Bar answers. He gives what is asked. He honors the structure of the request. But his answers are shaped by appetite, not mercy. He is not a vending machine of miracles. He is not a kindly god. He is not even cruel in the small, personal way mortals are cruel.

He is hungry.

That distinction changed everything.

A villain may want you dead. A tyrant may want obedience. Arath-Bar wants motion, conflict, desperation, choice under pressure. He feeds on the chaos generated when people believe their actions matter and then discover the board beneath their feet was already tilted.

That is why the sacred texts matter. They show how horror becomes doctrine.

The early fragments do not always read like warnings. Some read like reverence. Some like confession. Some like official record. Some like the last words of someone finally understanding that the machine they built was never a machine at all.

The trick is sincerity.

If the Apocrypha winked at the reader, it would fail. If the texts said, “Look at this awful religion built around a cosmic parasite,” they would become parody. And parody is too easy. Real belief is never that simple. Institutions do not usually wake up one morning and decide to be sinister. They inherit language. They polish rituals. They explain the unexplainable in ways that preserve power, comfort the frightened, and excuse the unforgivable.

Over time, those explanations harden.

By the era of The Fighting 57th, the Board is not treated as an abomination. It is an institution. The Archons gather around it. They wager. They argue. They call living soldiers pieces because that is the language the system gives them. The Harmonic Bars, the chapters set above on Cetia-243, have that quality by design. They are ceremonial. Political. Performed. Everyone in those rooms understands etiquette, rank, debt, insult, and spectacle.

Not everyone understands that the pieces are people.

Marro does.

That makes her one of the most complicated characters in the book. She is the Oracle of Arath-Bar, the voice of a god who remembers across time, and she knows enough to understand that the Board is not merely symbolic. When the Archons cheer a successful move, she knows someone down there has survived or died. When a piece is placed, she understands that a life may have been taken from somewhere, or somewhen, and made useful.

She is not innocent.

She is also not ignorant.

That line is where much of her tension lives. Marro is terrifying because she can stand in the room, sip from a porcelain cup, correct the theology of the Board, and tell the necessary lie with a perfectly calm face. But she is not empty. She knows the difference between ritual and reality.

She simply continues anyway.

That is more interesting to me than simple villainy.

The Apocrypha gives that behavior a foundation. It shows a civilization learning to accept the unacceptable because the language around it became sacred. Once you call consumption remembrance, once you call manipulation divine order, once you call war a game played in accordance with holy structure, you have already done most of the moral damage.

The rest is just procedure.

Some of the fragments are especially unsettling because they show Arath-Bar’s bargains before the empire learned how to dress them in ceremony. A request is made. A need is spoken. A wager is placed. And what comes back is technically an answer.

That word, technically, is doing a lot of evil work.

Arath-Bar does not need to betray the rules when interpretation is enough. He does not need to refuse a prayer when fulfilling it in the worst possible way produces more grief, more motion, more consequence. The divine horror of him is not that he ignores the bargain. It is that he honors it according to an appetite no mortal fully understands.

That is where the Apocrypha stops being backstory.

It becomes pressure.

Sora’s chapters are not just military science fiction. They are about a person slowly realizing there may be holes in her own life. Missing memories. False orders. Rooms she remembers but cannot place. Parents whose faces she cannot picture. A god calling her “child of no mother.” A piece on the Board that bears her name.

The Apocrypha lets the reader feel the shape of that before Sora fully can.

That is one of my favorite uses of in-universe documents. They can tell the reader something without turning a character into an exposition delivery system. A fragment can sit between chapters like a shard of stained glass. It does not explain everything. It catches light from a different angle.

Then, later, when the story moves, the color is already there.

This is why I keep coming back to sacred texts as worldbuilding. They are not filler. They are not decorative lore tucked into the margins. Done right, they are load-bearing. They tell you what a civilization thinks it is. More importantly, they tell you what a civilization has agreed not to see.

The Sovereign Chorus does not exist simply because an emperor said so. It exists because people believe memory has authority. Because they believe Arath-Bar’s remembrance is more reliable than their own judgment. Because the rituals of the Board have been dressed in enough awe that the blood underneath can be ignored by anyone who finds ignorance convenient.

That is frightening.

It is also familiar.

Not because we live under a golden scale suspended above a living map of war, though I admit some work meetings have come close. It is familiar because people have always used language to soften brutality. Collateral damage. Necessary sacrifice. Strategic loss. Acceptable risk. Sacred duty.

The Board just makes the metaphor literal.

A soldier becomes a piece. A wager becomes a battle. A political humiliation becomes a death sentence. A god’s appetite becomes doctrine.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, people still try to be people.

That, more than anything, is what the Apocrypha helps me write. It gives the world its sacred lies, so the characters can struggle toward truth inside them.

Marro knows the lies and uses them.

Sora does not know the lies yet, but they are already wrapped around her.

The Archons profit from the lies.

Arath-Bar feeds whether anyone believes or not.

That may be the ugliest part of the whole system. The theology might be sincere. The rituals might be beautiful. The prayers might be heartfelt. None of that makes the hunger less real.

So what is Arath-Bar, really?

The book gives answers, but never the comfortable kind. He is not merely a machine, though he was shaped through impossible craft. He is not merely a god, though he is worshipped and obeyed. He is not merely memory, though memory is the weapon he uses to bend reality around himself.

He is what happens when remembrance becomes appetite.

He is what happens when a civilization builds a tool to preserve meaning and creates something that consumes meaning instead.

He is the god of the Board.

And the Apocrypha is the record of everyone who realized too late that the game had never needed their consent.

That is why I keep writing these fragments. They are warnings, prayers, confessions, and evidence. They are the spiritual fossil record of a universe being slowly taught to call consumption holy.

Some parts of The Veiled Core Chronicles move like a knife.

Some move like a hymn.

The Apocrypha is where those two things become the same sound.