How the God lost His Name, and the Khanid Their God

Author: Elsebeth Rhiannon

Original post: https://forums.eveonline.com/t/storytime/201045/72

Entry for YC124 New Eden Capsuleer’s Writing Contest in the Prose category.

This is an obscure legend I learned in Amo, retold in a party. I believe it is originally Nefantar, but I might be mistaken. Pretty sure this one’s also heresy, even if such myths are not intended to be taken literally as truth. Such is the nature of these origin stories.

How God lost his name, and the Khanid lost their God

Alright, so, this is a party for those who fight the Evil God, no? So I figure I will tell you something about the Evil God.

We, I mean, most of Minmatar people, who follow the Matari ways, we recognize there are many gods and spirits. Infinite numbers even. Everything has spirit in it, so you cannot even count the gods present in this hall. There’s spirits of hospitality here. The spirit of wine seems to be present, and maybe even those of revelry. Spirits of all the trees and flowers, and guardian spirits of cooks and waiters, and maybe we have an ancestor or two keeping an eye on us, no?

The most powerful of spirits we call gods. Everyone knows the Seven Gods, the spirits of the tribes. So as we each have our spirits and gods, so do the Amarr people have their spirits - their ancestor-saints - and they have their One God.

One thing is curious when you think of it. All other spirits and gods have names. The Amarrian God does not. It is just ‘God’. It is as if we all had names, but we called… if we called Arsia just “Person”.

Some people say that once upon the time, long before the Darkness, the Amarr God was not a particularly powerful one, and it still had a name then. And it was, if not friendly with the other gods it came to contact with, still in contact with them.  On the same planet with the Amarr lived another people, the Khanid. The Khanid, of course, also had their own God, and this God was beautiful and witty and all things anyone could desire in a lover.

The Amarr God fell in love with the Khanid God, but the Khanid God wanted nothing to do with him, and rejected all his offers. And the Amarr God got very angry, and he told his people to go into war with the Khanid people, and they did, and when they won the war, he said to the Khanid God: come be my wife, and we will rule these people together.

And she said; very well, but what will you give me as dower?

And he promised him all the palaces in clouds and all the minds of mortal people and all riches and powers he had to give, but she wanted nothing of them, and she said: I have all those things, and had more before this war. No, give me your name.

The Amarr God was perplexed by this request, but agreed to do as she requested. So they wed, and they had their first night, and when the morning came and the Amarr God woke in his palace in the clouds, he could not recall his own name.

He was alarmed, and he went to his guardian angels, and he asked them, who am I? They were confused, but they answered, “you are God”. He was angry with them, and asked again, “What is my name?”, but they were even more confused and said “You have no name. You are God.”

He went around to everyone he could think of, even showing himself to some mortals. and asked the same question and got the same answer, and it was driving him crazy. In the end he went to the Khanid God, and demanded to get his name back. But she laughed at this demand, and he got angrier and angrier, and in his anger he pulled his sword of God, and he killed her.

And that is, some people say, how the God lost His name, and how the Khanid people lost their own god and became to follow the Amarr’s. Other people tell other stories of how those things came to be.

But all the stories of the Nameless God agree: the loss of the name made God angry, and in search of what was once his he now conquers and destroys.