From my reread of the Dreamers so far, here’s what I have for the traits of the Gods of Dhrall
- Their waking period is around 25,000 years, and they have existed before multi-cellular life came into existence on their world.
- They feed on light for sustenance. This is explicitly not subject to thermodynamics, they can through various means generate light which will feed them without tiring them.
- They are physically capable of consuming human food, but choose not to, though based on Mother Sea and Father Earth’s physical manifestations they’d probably enjoy it if they did.
- They do not need to breathe and can survive in perfect comfort in the void of space (Veltan was banished to the Moon for several thousand years, and he explored the Solar System for a while before going back to the moon to wait his banishment out). That being said they can extract oxygen directly from water, so it might serve some purpose for them. They can also enduring the crushing depths of the deep sea.
- They do not tire from physical exertion.
- They can walk, stand, and sit on water.
-They can verbally and mentally communicate with natural phenomena such as the wind, thunderbolts, and such alike. These things seem to be positively disposed to the gods by default and will generally behave as asked, even in defiance of normal physics, but they tend to have personality traits suited to the phenomena in question. The male gods tend to have pet Thunderbolts which serve as both transportation as well as mountain-shattering pets. In contrast the goddesses tend to call down wind currents from the upper atmosphere to carry them where they wish to go, a bit slower than thunderbolt travel but less damaging and more subtle.
-They can directly manipulate matter and energy to a rather silly extent. Dahlaine has mastered the art of manipulating gravity such that he can create miniature Suns to follow him around feeding him light while he skulks around in caves (gods can also just directly consume said Suns, and implicitly they could maybe do the same to actual stars, if not for stars implicitly being Bigger Gods than them, like, retroactively erase the god in question from existence bigger) and has explicitly made short-lived black holes by accident. He and the other gods have also mastered the art of creating pocket dimensions that follow them around and which can either be empty voids or fully atmosphere’d spaces you can safely deposit living beings in. Veltan created his house by thinking a house-sized stone into existence with negative space for all his rooms, and Zelana creates a (presumably nigh-)indestructible force field to protect a pile of gold she had her people collect to at the not-Vikings (the Maags are very clearly Bikings, rather than Norsemen)
-They can bypass language to communicate with each other, animals, and humans in such a way that the person being communicated with won’t realize they aren’t being talked to normally unless they can lip-read and look for it. The gods can also spread this effect over whole continents to affect everyone inside.
-Back before life was a thing, they played a substantial part in shaping the planet’s geography on the scale of continents and can pull their manipulation of phenomena on similar scales given some time, such as Aracia’s ice sheet which is itself the size of a small continent and completely blocked off Dhrall from the south, south-west and south-east
-The gods cannot kill, and if they try they will cease to exist on the spot. That being said, this seems to need to be both direct and intentional. A maddened Aracia ceases to exist after she tries to murder her Dreamer child, but Veltan is fine after unintentionally kill tens of thousands of fish (and yes, it doesn’t need to be sapient life) by telling his pet thunderbolt to create a pathway through Aracia’s ice sheet to let their foreign mercenaries in. This would seem to suggest that since Veltan didn’t personally kill the fish, his pet lightning bolt did, and he didn’t intend to kill them, it doesn’t count. Similarly, the gods telling their human subjects and foreign mercenaries to kill the spawn of the Vlagh has no impact on them, though whether it’s just a matter of them not personally doing the killing, or the fact that the humans have a choice in the matter that makes the difference isn’t clear.
-The gods seem to be able to transform living things and mess with their minds, but largely choose not to outside threats. The biggest example of actually doing so is Dahlaine transforming the sleeping Younger Gods of Dhrall into the mostly-human Dreamers, though in that case their divine nature starts leaking back in over time till they either become their old self again, or you get a split of the old self coming back and a new one being made (though that was facilitated by Mother Sea and Father Earth) as an independent deity, depending on how much mortal experience affects the sealed Younger Gods’ sense of self.
-The Vlagh seems to think you can physically harm or even kill the gods, but it has no basis for thinking as much, isn’t particularly intelligent beyond its animalistic cunning, and is kinda out of its depth.
-The bigger gods of the setting (Mother Sea, Father Earth, the Moon, presumably the other planets, etc) can just make humans into gods, resurrect the dead (the Elder and Younger Gods of Dhrall might be able to do that one too), and freely fuck with the timeline. They also aren’t limited by the “no killing” rule….my mind might change when I finish the books, but as of now this level of power won’t be on offer. If I do change my mind, it’s going to be as painful as being the Shifting Mound or Empty Silence in Slay the Princess (thank you Argent, that was a genuinely great jump).