Hunters of Norinar (Hunters of Nore-en-nar)

Norinar was the founder of the Zesheko religion, a rebel against the selkies who was resurrected by The Masked One to purify the Zeshem lands. These are his Hunters and avengers. Wherever a selkie exploits local peoples, the Hunters of Norinar ready their blades. The Hunters proudly collect the pelts of their prey, allowing them to steal their powers and transform like a selkie could - even allowing them to infiltrate the selkie's holiest places. 
The Hunters are greatly feared not just by selkies, but by Zeshem. They are dangerous spies and assassins who have eyes everywhere and collect information for the Zeshem military. And any who oppose them have a tendency to dissapear. They are some of the finest killers and infiltrators in the world, and they meticulously watch and document all they can for their fellow hunters.

Structure

The Hunters of Norinar are an autonomous military cult. Whether they serve the empire of Holy Zeshema or the Zesheko religion is muddled; the Zeshem do not see the two as entirely different. The Hunters are particularly ambiguous given their international status; they are involved in the Empire's domestic military and intelligence communities, but this is also true of them and most other Zeshem states. They answer to the priesthood, but they have a level of autonomy that scares some of the upper clergy. 
The Hunters are led by two Huntmaster Generals, the supreme cult leaders and spymasters. It is said that there is one of these per sacred Zeshem rivers. This possibly suggests three more, hidden Huntmaster Generals for the three stolen rivers, but that is just a rumor intended to scare foreigners. Beyond just symbolism, the two Huntmasters serve specific purposes: one looks to corruption and evil abroad, while the other focuses on espionage and defense in the Zeshem lands. If these other three were to exist, they'd be old retired Hunters whose job would be to mediate arguments about funding between the main two. 
Below the Huntmasters are elite entourages known as the Hounds of Alima. These are the best of the best, the veterans of the cult most respected and trusted. The Hounds direct the policy of the Hunters, manage information, and take on special cases considered too difficult for normal Hunters. While it is commonly believed that every Hound is an assassin of supreme ability, the Hounds also include the best spies, diplomats, administrators, and information analysists: anyone that the Huntmaster considers essential for higher operations. 
Below the Huntmasters and their inner circles are the Captains of the Hunt, basically chapter masters who run local bases and manage local assignments. Captains tend to be the highest a Full Hunter can typically seek to rise (without being truly exceptional). There are seven ranks of Full Hunter, simply number 1 through 7, with Captains and other leading staff being Rank 7 and newly graduated Hunters being Rank 1. Below the Rank 1 Hunters are the Apprentices, who are assigned to Full Hunters for a period of 4 - 8 years. 

Rank	Role
Huntmarshal General	Leading the Hunters in either defense or offense
Hound of Alima	Inner Circle of High Command
Captain of the Hunt	Run a local base of operations
Full Hunter	Agents; spies, assassins, diplomats. Ranked 1-7
Apprentice	Agent in training, low-level operative

Culture

The Hunters of Norinar are both glorious and terrifying for their ability to walk in both Zeshem and foreign worlds. They always carry the light taint of pollution, yet they are awash in purifying power. They are infamous for their fascination with foreign cultures and yet they redeem that fascination with violence. 
To the elites of Zeshema, the Hunters are infamous for their xenophilia. Hunters know foreign languages, make jokes about foreign ideas, and go out of their way to eat foreign foods; they often invite foreigners into the Empire as honored guests, and have connections to dubiously-Zeshem communities that live far beyond the Empire. The poor of Zeshema have the opposite expectations, as they tend to mostly interact with the Hunters in the context of military espionage and violence in the trading cities - to them, the Hunters are yet another policing agency that is less loud and all the more scary for it. This can make for quite a shock when recruits enter the Hunters; politically aware recruits find them less xenophilic than expected, common recruits find them more xenophilic than expected, and both groups of recruits have to interact with each other. Much of the training process is ironing out this tension and getting the apprentices to just the right level of xenophobia.
The foundations for this process are baked into the initiation and culture of the Hunters. This is a group that uses a lot of self-alienation. The initial hazing period and training process for apprentices is essentially torture, where the recruits are cast out of the Zeshem community and made into polluted, ghostly beings that don't belong anywhere in the world. They are purified by pain and promises of loyalty. Everyone around them is made anonymous and strange. They are made to feel separated from their bodies from raw disassociation, and then ritually bound to the land in a way that is not magical - but is extremely real to those going through it. The understanding that they are immune to foreign pollution because their entire body is essentially one great mask and their spirit resides in the pure lands, safe, is the foundation for everything else. The empty place they imagine inside of themselves becomes a safe place to put the corruption away in; their scars are re-imagined as sites of sacred empowerment. They become emotionally and spiritually dependent on their work to keep them from being torn apart by the contradictions of it all. They become living ghosts, untouchable.

History

The Rebellious Hunters (1000 - 1600)

The Hunters of Norinar were not always the professionals that they are now. When they were first founded in 1110 ME, they were more religiously-bound military conspiracy than anything else. The first Hunters were vengeful Zeshem warriors who bitterly refused to stop fighting when the First Zeshem empire made peace with the selkies - they met in secret mere months after the peace treaty and swore before Norinar's ghost that they would never stop their war. The Hunters kept alive a practice that the First Empire tried to regulate and domesticate: warriors ritually killing their souls and prospects of true living to make themselves into vengeful revenants, in the hope that Alima would allow them to fight forever as ghosts. The First Empire found this ritual, which condemned warriors who performed it to a lifetime of nonstop conflict, to be incompatible with a productive peacetime society - they tried to limit such a thing to a select few imperial chosen, and to make the oath one of obedience rather than eternal war. The Hunters raged that the Empress would dare to monopolize this personal connection to the Masked One, and continued the old ways in secret.
From 1110 to 1250 this secret cult undermined peace accords, stirred conflict, and murdered foreigners. The Empire did their best to eradicate the Hunters, but they were too well-embedded in the military apparatus to be entirely purged. Over time, though, the Hunters became less and less relevant and dangerous. The rowdy and obvious ones were caught and killed; the ones that were more bark than bite prospered. The Hunters of the late 1200s became more of a jingoistic military fraternity who lobbied for war and performed the old rituals, and the Empire became less concerned with hunting them down. But the core radicalism of their message and rituals remained, buried under inaction and complacency. When selkies were allowed into Zeshem in contained trading ports in 1310, and the Hunter's xenophobic lobbying was dismissed without an concessions by the Empire, the cult's raw rage boiled over. They played again with sabotage and assassination, and the Empire went back to trying to eradicate them. The Hunters re-radicalized, and while the Empire thought they were completely wiped out by purges in 1315, the Cult remained in secret - largely hidden in rebel cells in the Stolen Coast . Bit by bit, the Hunters regrew their ranks and expanded their influence within the military, crawling back into Zeshema proper. Over the 1400s, they became more anti-government; they harnessed frustration at the hereditary upper clergy, at the rising missionary activity, and rising social inequality. Over the 1500s, they were a major internal opponent to Imperial power. The Hunters were not organized enough to take on the full force of the Government, though, and they were cut down in size over the 1540s and 1550s. They were only saved from total destruction by allies within the lower priesthood, who had their own problems with the imperial government. In 1600, when the lower clergy overthrew the government and ended the First Empire, the Hunters were their elite enforcers who arrested the Triumvirate and helped the rebels win over the army. 

The Hunters as Secret Police (1600 - 1810)

When the Second Empire formed in 1620, the Hunters of Norinar were reorganized as a legitimate government body. They were religious police, political informers within the military, and persecutors of religious minorities. As the Empire grew in bureaucratic size and international power, the Hunters grew with them. Starting in the 1670s, the Hunters became more and more involved in overseas Zeshem agitation and organization. The Hunters became champions of Zeshem unity in the Mejika Isles, and won immense prestige converting the Zazaru tribes in Northern Larazel and helping them overthrow and skin the local selkie administrators. With their victories abroad, and with more fame and funding given to those who took pelts than to those who did local religious policing, the Hunters pivoted more and more towards international matters. By the late 1700s, the Hunters had actually become vectors for foreign smuggling and cultural pollution: they helped Zazaru and Mejikan traders move through Zeshem waters, and began making huge amounts of money allowing other foreigners to travel with them - even selkies. 
The imperial government tried cracking down on the Hunters in the 1790s and 1800s, but anti-government sentiment in favor of more open trade was rapidly on the rise along the coast - everyone was making a lot more money and didn't want this to stop. The Empire made a new secret religious police for domestic policing, which struggled to legitimize itself, and was quickly known as a bumbling and incompetent office for failed warriors. The Hunters were too well established as elite warriors and spies now, and were difficult to control or even publicly condemn. When the Second Empire came crashing down in 1810, the Hunters did not side with the old guard. 

Modern History

While the Hunters did choose the winning side in the 1810 civil war, it was not smooth sailing at first. Not everyone agreed that the Trading Ports should be re-opened entirely. Some thought that the Hunters should be in charge of trade deals (like they had been de-facto during the 1700s), and were angry that the Hunters no longer got to pocket personal fortunes. Some thought that trade should be opened to everyone but selkies; others thought this money should all be diverted towards renewing war. This led to a small schism in 1811, where a number of dissatisfied Hunters organized in opposition to the new treaties and were promptly crushed. The remaining zealous dissenters fled North, to the Stolen Coast, where they bled into local radical Zeshem rebel groups; most of the would-be rebels just accepted defeat and accepted the rule of the Third Empire, though. 
The 1811 treaty finally made the Hunters internationally legal for the first time in history. They could hunt treaty-breaking and piratical selkies without the Khilaia punishing them in any way. They could travel openly as symbols of Zeshem power abroad. And when the Zeshem jumped into the final burst of continental religious conflict during the early 1900s, the Hunters made quite the impression on the foreign armies, as shadows who made generals and princes dissapear. Since then, the Hunters have kept out of standard military engagements and focused on the selkies - much to the relief of everyone else.

"Punish Evil"

Founding Date

1110 ME

Type

Military, Intelligence

Parent Organization

Zesheko

Notable Members

• Parsem
• Sinya

Related Plots

• Birds Versus Evil