I.

What hath man wrought!
    When faced with the question of love
    Or seeking peace with the answer thereof,
Or faced with life peril-fraught,
    Created a god, or several, to satisfy
    Some need to fulfill or deny
        A lacking -
        A slacking
    On someone else's behalf,
    Or his own behalf -
And on the world a question of faith brought.

And when a man, endowed
    With the ability to make his own God,
    Does so with nary a nod,
And finds the god shan't be cowed,
    What does he then?
    And when a group of men
        Make their God
        With nary a nod,
    And cow him easily, rightly
    To them, and find him tightly
bound, what then, with a god bowed?

What then, indeed, should a God,
    Now lesser than his creators, do
    When his creators move to gods new?
Is he then still a God?
    Or is that when God dies,
    Not bloated with swarms of flies,
        But forgotten?
        Not rotten,
    Forgotten and immortal, what then?
    Does he hope to come again,
Rising a second time, perhaps again to be God?

One would hope that the God, being omniscient
    Would realize he was no longer, otherwise
    Might he become destructive? Likewise,
A god, waiting patient
    Could become restless,
    Try to leave his creators breathless,
        Again,
        But then,
    Be pronounced a heretic
    By all but the hermetic
And others of the new God ignorant.

So hence a people divided
    Those of Whispers and those of Nanon,
    Fight to the tooth and fight to the bone,
Until over Whispers Nanon presided;
    And when those of Nanon took
    Speech from the Whispers so as to look
        And not hear,
        They here
    Those of Whispers with
    Supposed powers of myth
Of creation with speech's remnants provided.

So it was before the fall of Whispers that
    Faith of most all lay in technology,
    Remnants of religion lay in astrology
And superstitious fears like the black cat.
    Only after the fall did the faiths
    Of only the Whisperers turn to mysterious wraiths
        And gods,
        But the odds
    That one of the gods was taken more seriously
    Than the rest was small, and not mysteriously,
The small bit of Faith quickly passed as society's scat

Now, it's come that those of Nanon have all but forgotten
    Those of Whispers except perhaps in myth
    Maybe portrayed as consorting with
Black cats or something equally rotten.
    But for the Whisperers, the city
    Of Nanon is very real, also denial of pity
        Of sunlight,
        For sunlight
    Is blocked by the city directly overhead
    And the Whisperers know of only shadow instead;
Only death out from beneath the city to be gotten.

The magic that's spoken of those
    Of the Whispers, is often made
    Out to be more, but because of their stayed
Speech, only whispers remain in quite prose.
    So through the long stretches of time,
    The Whisperers, through long stretches of rhyme
        Can make -
        Only make -
    What they wish, with words divine,
    Benign, or malign,
And in their creations complete trust repose.

So begins a story, often told but never yet writ
    Of a divided people still the same
    And the rise and fall of a god played like a game.
While not true itself, it is truth lit:
    As men continue to create and live under gods,
    What would happen if the gods, at odds,
        Warred and fell,
        Raising hell
    In the process? What would happen
    In a society misshapen
If a wrathful god fell and no one cared a whit?