Dúréníän

Trope-a-Day: War is Glorious

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War is Glorious: The doctrine of one of the Flamic war gods: Kalasané, Laughing Warrior, Sword of Heaven, Lord of the Two Swords, the eikone of battle, courage, valor, victory through strength, and personal combat, who approaches the whole thing with a degree of enthusiasm that would impress the mythological Norseman or the fictional krogan. You are standing on the edge of civilization, facing down barbarism and desolation! How should that be less than glorious?

(The other one, Dúréníän, Noble Warlord, Grand Master of Strategies, Champion of the Just, the Ice Warrior, eikone of righteous war, battle, conquest, strategy and tactics, and patron of the sentinels, prefers to take a distinctly more sober attitude.

That both of these approaches have their strengths and the perfect warrior exists in a state of dynamic tension somewhere between the two is exactly why they have a pair of war gods.)

Trope-a-Day: Church Militant

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Church Militant: The eikones revered by the Church of the Flame include two war gods, arguably so described: Dúréníän, eikone of righteous war, battle, conquest, strategy and tactics, and patron of the sentinels; and Kalasané, eikone of battle, courage, valor, victory through strength, and personal combat.  Their combined religious order, logically enough, is made up entirely of heavily armed and appropriately deadly templars – and when I say appropriately deadly, I do mean that in the modern age, they’re stomping around in much the same power armor as the actual Imperial Military Service uses.  (No bludgeoning weapons here out of a “commitment to peace”; they are very clear about Coming In War, and Gods Being On The Side Of The Big Weapons.  Also, not terribly keen on converting by the sword – they’re religiously militant, not militantly religious, if you see what I mean.)

They also supply all the military chaplains, which in the Imperial Legions is not a noncombatant position.  If anything, it’s a more combatant position than “legionary”… if one considers enthusiasm anything to go by.

Trope-a-Day: Deus Est Machina

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Deus Est Machina: Done deliberately and intentionally.  When you build a recursively self-improving seed AI, the kind that turns into, in the lingo, a “weakly godlike superintelligence”, then you have to know that you’re committing a willful act of theogeny, right there.  Doubly so when you’re building a collective hyperconsciousness out of shards of everyone’s brains at the same time (see: Hive Mind, Touched By Vorlons), and upload the “souls” (mind-states) of the dead into it.  Lampshaded in internal context when your new e-deity decides the archetypal masks of your mythological deities make nice hats to wear for various pieces of its internal architecture.

Further lampshaded with the God of War-class hyperdreadnought (that’s one better than super).  When it turns up somewhere, it really does mean that Dúréníän, archai-slash-eikone of righteous war, battle, conquest, strategy, tactics, and the sentinel darëssef is taking the field personally to kick your ass.