All-High God

Entities known as Gods, as the All-High Gods, as God-units, or as the Gods of Dellah, allegedly became active in the universe in the 26th century. They were viewed as a threat by the Great Houses, who struggled to understand them, and there were several contradictory accounts regarding their identity, origins, and agenda.

Nature

Powers

The Gods of Dellah could take over and possess beings in the form of a religious fervour. They fed on belief and, when deprived of that, each other. However, they had no power over artificial life like Synthoids. (PROSE: The Mary-Sue Extrusion) Chris Cwej told Christine Summerfield that "space [went] funny around the Gods" and "the usual laws didn't work properly". (PROSE: Dead Romance)

Individuality among the Gods

The "Gods" did not seem to act as a single unit. Cwej's employers believed that the Kings of Space who ruled the planet at the core of Sphinx-space were "rogue Gods". They believed that the Kings of Space had their own agenda, distinct from the Gods who took over Dellah and Tyler's Folly, and that they could be bargained with as a bulwark against the other Gods. They were even willing to go so far as to arm the Kings and their Sphinxes with time travel.

Hearing rumours that the computer at the heart of the society of the Homeworld, where they kept all the minds of their dead, was itself sentient and had logically predated the Houses, bringing them into existence to craft a false origin story for itself, Christine guessed that the computer might itself have been a God. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

Origins

Christine Summerfield theorised that the universe of Dellah and Chris Cwej was a bottle universe, and the Gods were Great Houses from the next universe up, trying to escape a war. (PROSE: Dead Romance) I.M. Foreman thought that the Time Lords of her universe were evacuating into her bottle universe, and she noted that, outside of their home continuum, their powers were "almost godlike". (PROSE: Interference - Book One)

However, according to several accounts, the universe Christine entered, and where Cwej was active as an agent of the Houses, was indeed the same universe in which the bulk of the War against the Enemy was fought. (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire) Cwej believed that the Gods, at large, might be "parts of the universe‘s framework" and "might have been there since the beginning of time". The Great Houses knew of their existence prior to their takeover of Dellah and Tyler's Folly, but had simply never expected them to wake up or at least show themselves in these ways. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

Cwej later discovered that the group of so-called "All-High Gods" who had taken over Dellah were actually the Ferutu. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)

Relationship to the Enemy

Christine Summerfield witnessed Chris Cwej going on various missions on behalf of the Homeworld trying to find time-active allies in the universe in expectation of potential all-out war with the Gods, due to their belief that the "All-High Gods" beginning to take over planets in the 26th century was only the Gods' first move in a universal takeover bid. She saw that the Houses had begun to recruit soldiers from the "lesser species" and upgrade them through regeneration. (PROSE: Dead Romance) These events, including Cwej's involvement, resembled early stages of the War in Heaven as told in The Book of the War, which the Great Houses fought against a powerful and unknowable force inimical to themselves, which they usually called simply "the enemy". The War predictions known to the Interventionists who would later become the Celestis depicted the future enemy as "just as 'divine'" as the Houses themselves. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Hearing it said that "nobody [had ever] ever come back alive" from Sphinx-space, Christine Summerfield wondered if "the Gods kept sending back dead bodies, with little notes attached", (PROSE: Dead Romance) closely paralleling the "Head of the Presidency" incident which The Book of the Enemy referred to as the first message from the Enemy, where the President of the Homeworld travelled to a supposed Enemy base and returned as a severed head with a note clenched between its jaws. (PROSE: The Book of the War) As part of negotiations to salvage the bottle universe, Cwej made a pact with the sphinxes, agreeing to give them access to proper time travel, which they desired. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

A deleted entry about "the Gods of the Ainu" was listed elsewhere in The Book of the War as containing enlightening information on the Enemy. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

History

In 2595, the All-High Gods took over Dellah, turning the people into religious fanatics. Anyone who disagreed was killed or forced off the planet. One God possessed Emile Mars-Smith, but he was taken off planet and starved it by trapping himself on an uninhabited planet. After the Gods had taken over Dellah, they decided to go for Thanaxos by inviting an official delegation. One God possessed Prince G'jimbo and then returned to Thanaxos, causing a religious revolution when he returned. The God was later defeated by the God within Emile. (PROSE: The Mary-Sue Extrusion)