Ironians and the Ironian Heresy (i-ro-ni-an (as IPA))

The Ironians were a contemporary of the Old Voxelians and were, for a time, staunch allies of that tribal group before differences in religious interpretation drove a wedge between them. Subsequently supressed by the might of the early Voxelian empire but not fully destroyed, the Ironians are are considered one of the Lost Tribes but still linger on in parts of the Medial Tesseract. The Ironian people had much in common with the Old Voxelians. They were, in fact, around when Sokalyx the Learned was codifying the Unexpector faith via his Incunabula of the House of the Unexpected and influenced the development of the House of the Unexpected as syncretism of various tribal faiths from around the Blue Silk River. In one of the Church's 'first ironies,' the Ironians were far more zealous with regards to their hatred of the tribes that would become the Elovisians than even their Old Voxelian allies. The Ironians wanted to destroy the other tribes root-and-stem by trying to either erase their religious values from the face of the Manifold. However, as Sokalyx and other theologians of the time were trying to bring the Old Voxelian Conquest to a close by absorbing these beliefs and some of their believers - diluting them though syncretism and the cultural hegemony that Voxelians still strive for in the present - the Ironians instead desired to see the nascent 'Gods of Irony' portrayed more as capricious demons to be fought back as a form of mockery of the vanquished. This difference in opinion was tolerated for a time, as the Unexpector faith was then new, but within a generation this demonizing tendency started to look more like heresy in the eyes of new Unexpectors than a simple disagreement over what to do with the text of vanquished or absorbed tribes. Unlike the later and similar schism between Forgism and radicals like the 125 Hands or the modern Church and the Way of the Biocosm, early Unexpectorism enjoyed the backing of the state. Emperor Foslei I was the first to become persuaded that the Ironians were a corrosive force in Voxelian society and had to be dealt with. The resulting pogroms saw the Ironians driven into hiding in the countryside and, eventually, beyond the commissures to live in exile with their hated Elovisian coevals. Because many Elovisians of this period still harbored resentment against the Old Voxelians for their own exile and saw the fleeing Ironians as allies of their Voxelian enemies, Elovisians in regions with Ironian incursions tended to aggressively reject the newcomers. Trapped between a hostile empire and former enemies with the advantage of the home field, Ironian exile groups found themselves diminished, isolated, and scattered. Many Ironians shed their former identities and tried to blend in with other exiled groups, eventually becoming accepted and forming the basis of Medial B settlements especially. The unluckiest members of the group were too used to the comforts of the growing Voxelian empire and perished in the wilderness or were hunted down. The most successful became so enmeshed in these new societies that they even attained a new modicum of wealth and power, such as in the region where Intercostia was established, by adopting the mask of Elovisian identity. Others were so isolated that their old traditions and lineages broke down and were absorbed by other groups, essentially becoming freelanders. Importantly, the so-called "Ironian heresy" never died out in the Manifold, still sometimes gaining traction among the disaffected throughout the Medial powers. The Church of the Unexpected, though now shorn of some of its political power due to its desire to spread beyond Voxelia to all human lands, still takes time to engage in cultural struggle against Ironian ideas. Unexpector apologia often digresses into deep discussions about why the gods are not themselves evil for not preventing evil from happening under their watch - in part because of the Ironian desire to demonise these deities as a form of cultural genocide against foes already long-deceased or much-changed from what they once were. For these reasons, while the Ironian culture is gone and mostly forgotten, their impact on the spiritual life of the Manifold Sky lingers into the modern day.

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