Overview
For Dante, the Heavenly and the Good and the Godly were incorporeal - as without weight as the sunlight that beamed down upon the hill at the start of The Inferno. Sin was a matter of the flesh, of the body, of the corporeal, of the worldly and earthly. Hence the Hell that progressively goes down, driven by the mass of the heavier and heavier sins, until at last we reach the stocky giants who encircle the even more gargantuan figure of Satan at the final, central point of the abyss.
Since I'm a heretic and infidel, it only makes sense that I see this sort of scheme in reverse. The matter we are made of, with it's fantastic origin in the explosions of unimaginably huge stars, the earth that sustains us, and the water we have an innate affinity for, just to name a few things, are all imbued with that Highest Essence- namely, they are real. These are things that can be studied and known in objective ways, and I hesitate to use the word, but this makes them magical to me. How much more exciting than what lies at the other extreme, the source of so many problems: the imagined, the unreal, that which cannot be known, the spirit world, with it's unlimited malleability that stems from the fact that it can be whatever we want it to be.
The worst of all sins, for Dante, which is what lands one in Cocytus, is Fraud. Same goes for my Infernova, for there has been no bigger frauds perpetrated on mankind than the idea that there are gods that care about us, and that some anointed few have the ability to receive special instructions from them.
So, since the legions of prophets and holy men saw themselves as spiritual channels, or are often revered as such, it made sense to keep them grounded to the earth, a reminded that they really were not any different, after all. Hence, they replace Dante's giants that stand about just outside the final Circle, and they deserve a place as close to the final pit as possible.
And just as with Dante's Cocytus, that final pit is comprised of a large circular sheet of ice, like the bottom of a frozen well. Under it's clear surface, forever kept partioned from the real, physical world, swarm the gods. Countless gods. Every damn one that has ever been dreamed up. Except for one, the one that gets the capital G. The one that is supposed to be head and shoulders above all those "false gods" but isn't any less imaginary.
