Hindu

The Hindu gods exist on a scale that makes every other pantheon on this board look like a neighbourhood council dispute.

I have been alive for ten thousand years. I have watched pantheons rise and collapse. I have personally witnessed the fall of Olympus's first expansion, the binding of Hades, events in the Duat I am not going to put in writing. I mention this so you understand that I am not easily impressed by claims of cosmic significance.

The Hindu pantheon impresses me.

Shiva destroys the universe. Not threatens to. Not has the power to. Destroys it. And then it is rebuilt, because destruction and creation in this cosmology are not opposites — they are the same motion viewed from different points in the cycle. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys, and all three are aspects of the same reality. This is not mythology. This is a description of how existence actually functions, which I know because I have watched it happen.

Kali is the part I don't joke about. I joke about most things — it is a coping mechanism developed over a very long career. I don't joke about Kali. She is the darkness before creation, the terror that predates structure, the hunger that exists not as metaphor but as a fundamental property of existence. She is the only deity I have ever met — and I have met more than any record could hold — who has looked at me directly and made me aware of my own impermanence.

In the game, the Hindu cards scale. Start them small and by the final turns they are forces that don't check what's in their way before moving forward. SURGE is not a metaphor — it is a theological principle. The universe tends toward expansion. These gods embody it.