Brotherhood of the Third World

The Brotherhood of the Third World doesn't simply want to make the world a better place: it is their divinely appointed duty to destroy the world so that it may be reborn as a better, more peaceful version of itself. The Brotherhood believes that the current world, the Second World, or the Broken World as they refer to it, was forced upon the land of Veraqez not so much by the refugees of the Enlightened Races but by the Church of the Saints Ascendant. The Brotherhood holds it against the Church for creating the system of racial elitism among the peoples of Old A'nensire, of preaching a rhetoric which established the oppression and enslavement of the Ur'Ghkar and expansionist warfare which forced the Sreksians from their ancestral land, and corrupting the souls of otherwise good elves, dwarves and humans. The Brotherhood believes the first step to bringing about the Third World is by destroying the Church of the Five Saints.

Each cell of the Brotherhood follows a different path to this end with some seeking the metaphorical destruction of evil though charity and evangelical conversion, while more literal cells seek a means to bring about an event akin to the Pyroclastic Ruin itself. Regardless of each cell's methods, the Brotherhood all believe that only through conscious action can a better world be brought into existence.

Public Agenda

• The destruction of the Church of the Saints Ascendant.
• A return to the old ways and restoration of a Pre-Ruin Veraqez.
• The spiritual awaking of all those who choose to live in the Republic and the Trackless.
• The death of all Enlightened (fringe extremist belief).

Mythology & Lore

Before the Pyroclastic Ruin and the coming of the Enlightened Races to Veraqez, the Ur'Ghkar and the Sreksians referred to their home as the First World. Both peoples held that the world was alive and like all things alive one day the world would die and a new world would be born to take its place. When the War of a Thousand Tears ended and the Ur'Ghkar empire was shattered, the shamans and priests of the Ur'Ghkar declared the First World dead and the Second World had been born, dark and bloody. The Second World was a desolate place for the indigenous peoples of Veraqez, one filled with suffering and enslavement at the hands of the so-called Enlightened. Many among the Ur'Ghkar began to silently pray now for an end of the Second World, a death to this World as well.

Divine Origins

At the end of the ninth century, a young Ur'Ghkar woman ran away from the plantation where she was enslaved, ran away into the snowy night at the base of the Vorok Mountains and disappeared deep into the rugged range her ancestors called home. She was gone for three months and her family only preyed that she had died free. But when spring came, the slave patrol found her walking toward the plantation barefoot and wearing only a linen dress that she had escaped in, unscathed and clear-eyed. Later the men from the patrol who found her would recount how her eyes were too clear, like a blue sky reflected on a still pond, a gaze both sharp and distance in an unnerving fashion.

When she was returned to the plantation she had escaped from, the landmaster had her staked out in the spring sun for two days, pulled taught by ropes at her wrists and ankles as an example to the other Ur'Ghkar slaves he owned. For two days she laid there, still and calm, as though she were watching clouds slowly drift across the clear sky. Her family wept for her, to she their daughter, their sister, returned to them after they had given up hope, only to watch her be tortured so. When they tried to sneak her water in the small hours of the morning, she was silent and didn't respond to their inquiries as to where she had been and she had survived alone in the mountains.

After two days, she was released and sent back to the fields to work, gathering jute as her family had been forced to do for generations. But that night, when she finally returned to her family's shack, she spoke.

She told her parents and siblings what she had seen in the mountains. She had been visited by Thunderbird and Phoenix. They had shown her the end of this, the Second World and the birth of the Third, a return to peace for the Ur'Ghkar and the other peoples of Veraqez. These great spirits had sheltered her in the mountains and taught her great things over the winter months but most importantly they had proven to her that the Third World would not come on its own: it was up to her to lead her people, and any who would join them, against the Church of the Saints Ascendant, for it was the Church that was the spiritual power behind the Enlightened and the force which pushed them to oppress the Ur'Ghkar, the Sreksians, and the other peoples of Veraqez.

Founding Date

897 A.S

Type

Religious, Cult

Alternative Names

Blighters, the Worldkiller Cult

Demonym

Third Worlders, Blighters, Whitefeet

Location

Veraqez