Main > Compendia > Creatures > Strange Gods > Lost Gods > The Joyful Girl

Overview

The Joyful Girl (Commonspeak) is a Lost God associated with innocence, harmlessness, and the remembered joy of a world without injury. She is among the most emotionally powerful of the Lost Gods, and one of the most painful to contemplate in waking life.

Integral scholarship agrees that the Joyful Girl does not represent ignorance, naïveté, or moral purity. Instead, she embodies absolute safety of being: the condition of existing without fear of harm and without the capacity to harm in return.

Those who encounter her in dream report overwhelming joy, comfort, and relief. Those who study her in waking life speak of her only with sorrow.

History

Shattered Age

The nucleating identity for The Joyful Girl was Anastasia, born a Human in Acrolon during the early Shattered Age. She wasuniquely identified as a Paragon of Innocence, a phenomenon without precedent or recurrence. Her presence inspired universal affection and restraint; no Integral being, mortal or divine, could willingly harm her.

Recognizing the importance of such a virtue, the Shard God of Spring, Ydalla, willingly sacrificed herself to elevate Anastasia to godhood, hoping divine power would preserve what mortal existence could not. Anastasia served as a God of Spring in Acrolon until the catastrophic events of The Fall.

Dark Age

The Joyful Girl came into existence following the death of the God of Spring Anastasia in the early Dark Age.

When the Fall shattered the Grand Designs of Spring and Autumn, governing life and death, Anastasia recognized that she lacked the skills necessary to help the other Gods of Spring and Autumn. In a second act of sacrifice, she surrendered her godhood to Nexia, enabling the restoration of the cycle.

Anastasia’s death was felt across the Integrum. Records describe spontaneous, inexplicable grief, weeping, and despair among mortals who did not know her name, role, or fate.

It is from the dreams of that grief, and from the inner innocence of countless dreamers, that the Joyful Girl emerged.