Truthful Path

All-Consuming Kivishta

"I sat on the Whispering Star and watched the wasteland before me shimmer like a mirage. I could feel it transmute the air on my fur and in my lungs like the Ederstone was looking for a way inside me. It searched my breath and read my pulse for signs of panic. But I was invincible. I was somewhere else. While the Star destroyed the bodies of so many other Kivs who once stood here, I knew I was the master. I breathed deeply and pushed the soul from my body. I could see myself down there, meditating on the great destroyer. I felt the same power I had learned to wield in my own dreams, the total mastery of self and world. What was once complicated became simple. I moved by body up, held forth my arms, and said the words: "Let us wake". The Star did not destroy me for the sudden movement nor did it push against me. Instead, it sundered the landscape to mirror my movements. My pack-thralls were caught on the movement of my left arm and were blasted apart like sea foam on a rock. Their bodies were eagerly taken into the landscape. The students bowed in awe as I stood the master when all men would be slaves. What had been my pain became my power." - Account of Verkohn the Honest as recorded by the Reverent Standard Uvikov
Pain. Life is suffering. Even the truth is hurts when you first hear it. People spend their lives trapped in cycles of ignorance and illusion running from pain, ruled by the fear of it. Ironically, the stubborn refusal to experience the sharp pains of truth and discipline dooms people to experience far more pain in the long run, as they fall from rebirth to rebirth in agony papered over with vapid pleasures. All pleasure contains the seeds of loss, all attachment begets grief. You have to let go of it all and wake up from the nightmare you've been trapped in. You must master suffering itself, turning it to your advantage. Embrace even the harshest truths and reject all coping. Feel the worst of it and realize that you can rise above the world's hooks and talons.
Like all Kivish sects, the Truthful Path preaches that the world is a dream or illusion. Ederstone is a demonstration of the illusory nature of reality - it turns the world to malleable clay and defies all earthly logic. Kobolds, as the only things in the world immune to Ederstone and other transformation magic, are the only entirely-real people inhabiting the shared dream of reality. Similarly, while other people go to various afterlives (enduring in the dream for eternity), Kobold souls vanish after death to re-enter the cycle of reincarnation (or so the priests claim). As the real people within the shared dream, Kobolds have a special calling to seek enlightenment to escape the dream and become 'Awakened'. Until the believer has reached this ideal spiritual and mental state, they will be trapped in the cycle of suffering that is reality. Only the blessed few will fully transcend reality and suffering, while most people will have to wait until the coming of the messiah - called the Irunek - to usher in an age of enlightenment.
The Truthful Path understands the simplicity of it all: the world is a dream and the only objective in life is escape from that dream. Only Kobolds are real. Everything else only exists to prevent you from awakening. The logical conclusion is that the world can only be rejected or mastered. Accepting the world as it appears to be, with social norms and rules of behavior, is passively accepting the agonizing illusion of the false world. The only codes of conduct worth following are those that might offer awakening or at least mastery over the dream. The other Paths flinch at the pain and stop short of this radical simplicity. They invest false value in false things and false people, leading to social orders that claim to master the dream but are actually ruled by it. These other Paths seek to reduce pain and offer hollow mercies, allowing attachments and illusions to grow like mutating weeds. You don't interpret the dream or engage in large-scale social projects to change the nature of the dream - the dream has no meaning and its nature is fixed. Destruction may bring immediate pain, but it is a true mercy that enabled true healing in how it breaks attachments and shatters the grip illusions have over the hearts of slumbering souls.
The Truthful Path has a very bad reputation even among the Kivish because of that belief that the reduction of the material can stimulate enlightenment by breaking attachment. The general fetishization of pain by the Truthful Path and the tendency by Truthful Path military traditions to equate traumatic mental breaks with moments of enlightenment have also made the Path fairly unpopular. The Truthful Path has committed some of the worst atrocities of all Kivishta. The ancient and terrible Kivish Horde, the Children of Verkohn who launched their brutal coup of the Empire of Kizen, and the Fifth Scouring are the main examples of large-scale political Truthful Path dogma. All of these groups and moments "taught" people "hard truths" through atrocity. They broke reality to eliminate all possible meaning and attachment, wielding Ederstone weapons freely and forcing people to confront the flimsiness of reality personally. Students of the Path were taught by exposure to the maddening magic of the chaos wastes; they were exposed to physical and mental pain to teach them to "master" that pain. Kobold and non-Kobold alike suffered greatly under their rule. And for all their talk of detachment from reality and desire, historic Truthful Path groups have accumulated riches, slaves, and political power.
Not all Truthful Path believers are bloodthirsty warlords dreaming of mass destruction, obviously. Many hold this theological position seeking their own personal enlightenment, not particularly harming anyone. The Truthful Path's political history can obscure the ways that the ideas and practices of this tradition can be interpreted and used by individuals. Kobolds who inhabit the chaos wastes and do not find the Liberated Path appealing often gravitate to the Truthful Path instead. These wastelanders bring their own needs and experiences to the tradition and make it more than just the bloodshed of the past. Even these non-imperialistic traditions can seem harsh and painful at times, but that reflects the demands of the wastes just as much as it does the teachings.
The fragmented and disempowered nature of the Truthful Path means that there is no unified culture or organization to describe here.

History

The First Scouring

The Truthful Path was the original tradition of organized Kivish religion. The Path began under the great teacher-emperor Verkohn the Honest, a Kobold from the (now vanished) Azkrubak chaos waste. Verkohn declared that, as the Great Teacher who would prepare the world for enlightenment and the arrival of the Irunek, they would conquer the world under a great Kivish Horde using Ederstone weaponry. They structured the early Truthful Path to serve this military machine of endless conquest. Much of the early religion was intensely martial and relied on large numbers of non-Kobold slaves to function as a social-political unit. This was known as the First Kivish Scouring.
The prophet Verkohn encountered intense opposition. The people of Stildane also had a lifetime of experience struggling against Ederstone and the chaos wastes and were harder to break than expected. The Lunar Pantheon also did their best to empower and organize the opposition. A druid of immense power, Vetka the wanderer, came from distant lands to defeat them. It was only thanks to these outsiders' fears of Ederstone that Verkohn was able to avoid being destroyed by Vetka or the demigod Haru. While this intense opposition did stop the Horde from conquering the world, it also intensified their sense of cosmic importance and truth. There was now genuine material evidence that the Truthful Path's message terrified the corrupt material world, and that the Path's weapons of truth and ederstone were actually effective in driving the most powerful threats of that world away. Immortals were so terrified of the Path that they largely avoided the entire subcontinent for centuries. The Path eventually began to run out of inertia in its conquests. The Kingdom of Hain to the South had learned how to grind down Kivish forces, and the Horde's shock factor was wearing off. The North and East were too dispersed and mobile to effectively conquer. The Kivish gathered more and more Ederstone, but in division they fractured and turned on each other. This era of tumult and disorganized violence became known as the Second Kivish Scouring.

Truth Eclipsed

Eventually, the model of charismatic military rule fell apart. Verkohn had left behind a mechanism for managing succession within the Horde: a group called the Children of Verkohn, which trained various children of Verkohn's extended family in the depths of various chaos wastes with the goal of making them hardened and zealous killers. In many ways, the Children tried to replicate Verkohn's rough upbringing and enforce Verkohn's beliefs in an attempt to replicate the Prophet. Verkohn believed that, if they didn't leave reality entirely after death, they would be reborn in one of these Children and would naturally rise to the top. In practice, the Children created a number of hyper-competitive and violent heirs with unstable personalities. They elected leaders of the Horde from within their ranks, but the fragmented Horde was intensifying disunity among the Children. Slowly, a number of successor-prophets moved the Kivish Horde to become the First Empire of Kizen: a stable and functional state with cities, a budget, castes, a legal code, infrastructure, and formal government. This system allowed the Truthful Path to regroup and actually start making gains from their various conquests. The Children similarly began to re-stabilize. But the social order built by the Empire fundamentally contradicted with the ideology behind the Truthful Path's reign of terror. The reduction in violence created room for dissenting voices. Two main bodies of criticism emerged from within the Kivish ranks: the Reverent Path that wanted a peaceful and orderly world, and the Liberated Path that wanted a freedom and individual expression. Both Paths suggested a more nuanced and less hostile relationship with The Dream: waking up was still a priority, but life for most people could reach a desirable status quo. 
In many ways, Verkohn's dream of all the world toppled to reveal its underlying truths simply was unrealistic and created an unsustainable organization. The Kivish assumed that the world would fall more easily before their unstoppable weapons (not an unfounded assumption). There was no plan for a partial success, and so the Path stagnated and drifted. The new sects tore it apart from the inside. Centuries later, new Paths - the Promised Path and the Exalted Path - captured the hopes and imaginations of outsiders far more effectively than the Truthful Path. From 999 ME to 1700 ME, the Truthful Path retreated into a series of cult-like warrior-schools in the chaos wastes and it waited.

The Fifth Scouring

There was one notable exception to the Truthful Path's descent into obsoleteness: the Children of Verkohn remained symbolically important to the new Empires of Kizen even though these empires followed the Reverent Path. During the Fourth Kivish Scouring and the collapse of Kizen's imperial dynasty, a faction of Reverent Path priests sought to recruit a new dynasty from among the Children of Verkohn. The new Emperor betrayed the Truthful Path by converting to the Reverent Path (a condition of being chosen for the throne), but created a permanent link between the new Empire and the Children of Verkohn. The Children became an elite regiment of the Empire while remaining mostly in the wastelands: half Truthful, half Reverent, caught between old and new worlds. The Children's heresy meant that they were barred from formal politics and they were confined to mostly ceremonial roles. The Children wanted more. They became more subtle, political, and organized; they nurtured connections to sympathetic factions within the Reverent Path. They even curried favor with a Lunar God who had once opposed them: Emesh, a Lunar God of Knowledge known for their love of things obsolete, eccentric, and forgotten. 
In the 1600s, the Children of Verkohn began to ascend in politics and public popularity. Reverent Path fundamentalism was rising as the economy of the Empire of Kizen collapsed. The Children of Verkohn and the Truthful Path represented a nostalgic golden age for Reverent fundamentalists, who were more interested in the old imperial glory of the Truthful Path than their theology. The Children of Verkohn knew how to move symbols in the minds of the people better than they knew how to move numbers in a budget-sheet. In 1680 the Children launched a military coup of the Empire of Kizen and re-installed the Truthful Path as an imperial powerhouse. The Truthful Path did not seek to totally and immediately replace the Reverent Path, as they relied on collaboration and cooperation with existing imperial elites to actually maintain their power. Instead, the Truthful leadership sought to combined Truthful goals, Reverent bureaucracy, and Exalted Path arcane arts to accomplish Verkohn's dream of conquest. Kivishta would re-unite peacefully, the Children said, when the truth was made clear by example. And so they launched the Fifth Scouring, a terrible series of wars that killed many thousands of people. Like with prior Truthful Scourings, the world rallied to defeat them and the Truthful Kivish once again lost. In 1750, during the "Week of Cleansing", united heretic, Uvaran, and Lunar forces butchered Truthful Path believers and their allies. The Reverent Path was restored to the throne and all of Stildane cheered that the Truthful Path was gone forever.
But is it? The Children of Verkohn are gone, but their traditions have been picked up by others in the chaos wastes. These are not particularly powerful groups and they do not have imperial ambitions, but they do live the Path's teachings. And the Truthful Path's historical power means that its messages are embedded in the texts and teachings of their enemies. The Uvikov contains many passages by Verkohn the Honest, even the versions made by opposing Paths. The Truthful Path may be a symbol of violence and tragedy, but it is also a symbol of power that is very attractive for the disenfranchised and the ambitious. Even the condemnations of the Truthful Path grant them a potent mystique. And sure, these new adopters are unlikely to practice the Truthful Path as it once was, but all religions are in a state of perpetual reinvention. It is likely that, as long as there are Kivish, the Truthful Path will never truly die.

Founding Date

460

Type

Religious, Sect

Founders

• Verkohn the Honest

Parent Organization

Kivishta

Permeated Organizations

• Children of Verkohn
• Kivish Horde

Related Ranks & Titles

• Irunek

Related Species

• Kobold