Up above the world so high

The Ghosts of the Magi, known colloquially as Pyid (= "the Five") are five small luminous bodies that hurtle through the night sky above Krarth. With a good eye they can be variously seen in other northern regions also, but it is above Krarth that they are brightest.

The peasants of Krarth believe them to be the spirits of the five greatest original magi, cast into the upper heavens by the Blasting of Spyte. The Five have specific astrological significance and are known by these names: Red Death, Blue Moon, Plague Star, Gift Star and White Light. The Krarthian peasants believe they will come into conjunction above Spyte in the year 1000 AS, whereupon the gates of that deathly city will be hurled open.

Astronomers of Khitai or the Ta'ashim lands, where the world is known to be round, could possibly map these moons' orbits and calculate any conjunction – though if such a thing has ever been attempted the results are not known.

The above is what any Dragon Warriors player would have learned from "The Lore of Legend" chapter in DW Book Six, way back in 1986. But as I worked on Jewelspider, my return-to-Legend RPG, I got to wondering: what is official Church teaching regarding the Ghosts of the Magi? 

It struck me that it’s not in the nature of religious thinking to say, “OK, there are these spirits of ancient sorcerers that are hurtling around under the vault of heaven soaking up ineffable secrets for their eventual return to Earth,” because that’s a scientist’s interpretation, like saying, “We accept the origin of these objects and will now try to work out what they are.”

But in fact the Church is likely to take a very different approach: “These things are evidently real. Therefore they must be part of God’s plan, and we can ignore what those heathens in Krarth believe.”

So then I got to thinking that if you put White Light to one side, that gives us four baleful entities – the Four Horsemen, obviously and handily. So then, with a little Wiki-level research, I found that official Church teaching until very recently is not that the Four Horsemen are agents of the Antichrist. Quite the reverse: they are God’s agents who will scour the world to usher in the Last Judgement. And the fifth one? White is associated with the Holy Spirit, so that’s rather a gift.

Hence we have the True Faith’s doctrine as to what those five cometary objects are. The Five (known as the Pentaphan) are regarded as angels who have been appointed to scour the earth at the End of Days, specifically as the Four Horsemen who presage the Apocalypse, and are commonly identified as Apsinthos (ie Wormwood, harbinger of War, replacing Red Death), Qaphsiel (Confusion and Sorrow, standing in for Blue Moon), Abaddon (Destruction, taking the place of Plague Star), Kushiel (Punishment, whom the Krarthians call Gift Star), and the last is thought because of its pure white light to stand for the Holy Spirit through the agency of the archangel Jophiel (Understanding and Judgement).