Receiving a Conscience

A Conscience is the greatest gift known to man. In many cases, they are the only things standing between a peron's Soul and the torments of perdition.

— A Saints-Servant to a young boy

In the wake of the Great Confiscation (850HE) and the butchery of the Hubraic Wars, the Saeric people learned of the horrific truth of what had unfolded in the Spiritual Realm. The Raven had overthrown the cthonic fertility godess, the Phoenix, and transformed Her spiritual kingdom into a pit of torment and torture. The Throwbacks warned mankind that the only chance they had of not falling into the Raven's clutches was to find a way to stop their Souls from passing into the spiritual realm at the moment of their death.

Conscience

A Conscience is the Soul of a dead person. At the moment of death, the Soul is trapped inside a tiny glass vial and stored in either a family reliquary or a reliquary inside a temple. While the process of fusing a Soul with a Soul Chip is a carefully guarded secret by the Saints-Servants, this process allows a human Soul can be fused with the Shadow of a living person. This transforms the incoporeal mass into a sentient being.

Receiving a Conscience

"As is the right of all Kredasene, you have rejected the holiest gift any mortal can receive of the Saints: you have chosen not to welcome a Conscience into your shadow. Do you accept all this to be true?”
“I do.”

— Radimir Ekhorin and Chazley Dunheuvelin, as quoted in The Sorrow of Souls, Book One: Harbinger

From the age of ten, children are expected to choose a Patron Saints, and welcome a Conscience into their Shadow. This surgical procedure is carried out under a general anesthetic either in the Mother Temple or other licensed, smaller temples. The Soul Chip is inserted under the skin behind the child's right ear. While the majoirty of these operations are carried out on children and adolescents, the expansion of the Raskvaeric Empire has prompted a rise in converts to the faith in the Holy Chorus of Saints. The welcoming of Conscience by adults and elders is now an accepted practice in the modern era.