"We preserve the Old Faith, remembering the kindness and the sacrifice of our priests. We honor the Ethelen who broke the chains, and we wait in hope for the return of the Lone God, and the Journey's End. In addition to this, we remember the ancient teachings...that the Four Worlds were made from the same substance, and carried the same children into the stars at the time of Forsaking. We remember our brothers and sisters every evening, and we pray to meet them at Journey's End, when we return to the place of our beginnings." - spoken by the Keeper of the Truth, on the Day of Atonement.
The Children of the Four Worlds sprang to life around the same time as the
Aeternum rose to power and began systematically destroying the Old Faith.
Beings are peculiar in that they will always find something to value more than life itself. For some, it was their beliefs. Relics and books were sifted out of the ashes of the burnt churches.
Priests were squirreled away to safety or else given honorable burials. Friends and those who had worked closely with them set about recording and compiling the tenets of the faith into a comprehensive whole. Realizing how few remaining books there were, they created an oral tradition where the stories of the
saintly heroes and the
battle of gods would be chanted during meals, or recited dutifully at prayer. In this way they hoped to preserve the truth, even if all the writing they had left should be burned by the
Archivists.
The majority of the land still dutifully bows the head to Aeternum and allows him to claim divinity. The Children are persecuted. Their members either live their lives in silent, secret resistance, or they risk life and limb to carry the truth to all four corners of the known world. If found by Archivists, they will be tortured into signing a confession of heresy. If caught by the
Born-From-Ashes, they will be violently torn limb from limb. If their neighbor turns them in to the
Baron, they will be thrown into a dark dungeon to rot a bit before being publicly executed.
And they do all this for a god they have never seen, and to honor his
son whom they only know by hearsay.
They protect and promote many archaic beliefs that, even when the Old Faith was flourishing, were thought to be outdated or mere myth:
- That the lost magic that once powered the Aither Fleet is still lurking in the world, and with proper application and study we might be able to sail among the stars again...even astral project ourselves, which is what many argue the author of the Glimpsing Tome achieved.
- That the war in heaven was real, and it truly broke the surface of the world, rendering it far changed from its original conception.
- That four worlds were created at the beginning of time, and we simply do not know where the other three are in their relative journey through space.
- That the Lone God who created these four worlds had a definitive plan in mind for us, and when we return to him at Journey's End we will finally reach earthly fulfillment and happiness.
They cling to these tenants with a ferocious dedication that cannot be quenched by the threat of the Aeternum. He is determined to excise them from the kingdom, but that is most likely too difficult for him to achieve by force. As the Children are wont to say, "You cannot remove the faith of a people...you may as well rip the lungs from their body and tell them to breathe."
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