Religion and Death

The Fall of the Gods

The histories hold that the rulers of old discovered that the gods meant to destroy mankind. The armies of the noble houses rose in the Great War and cast them down.

Not all agreed with that account. Queen Catherine Bannon outlawed the practice of all faith in the first century of the Age of Kings, and most worshippers of the Eldra faith were killed, arrested, or driven into hiding. Some regions kept pieces of the old ways, as the pages on the Everfrost, the Northern Marches, and Tarkath record.

The Aurorym

Even the weak can be mighty. For centuries, your forefathers have told you that this is not the order of things; that those who toil may never rise.

The Book of Magnus, Chapter 1

In 606 a cult rose in the lands of House Corveaux under a charismatic minor nobleman named Magnus Blayne. He was proclaimed the savior of an ancient prophecy, who would bring the dawn in a time of great darkness. His message was one of ascension through a person's own will and virtue, without the power of any deity. Each person held a spark called the animus. His followers came to be known as the Aurorym, the Servants of the Dawn, and his teachings were gathered in the Book of Magnus, with the Five Litanies at its center.

King Richard II had him executed in 609. Revolt followed, and an army of commonfolk led by the Living Saints defeated the Crown at Exeter. House Ulster took the name Blayne, and the Living Saints founded the Fervent Order of the Vellatora.

The great strength of the Aurorym was that its power appeared to be real. The servants of the Dawn could drive off and destroy unnatural creatures, and the Living Saints walked the land as proof. For a long time the faith struggled to spread beyond the Troth, because many monarchs and nobles refused to recognize it. That changed when King Giles II took Lady Aline of House Blayne as his bride in 751. Many feared that he would make it the religion of the kingdom.

The faith also had its own funeral rites. The family set a vigil as the body burned, spoke through the night, and divided the ashes among those present. Commoners kept a single urn for all their ancestors. The faithful nobility carried ashes in jewelry or reliquaries.

Death and Dying

Without gods, no one could promise a peaceful afterlife. Scholars held that death had an essence of its own, the chill a person feels in an old cemetery, and parts of Arnesse became fixed on it. Cults, merchants, and prophets all offered ways to avoid death or bargain with it. Memento mori, remember that thou shalt also die, was a common phrase.

Funerary Customs

Freemen and nobles entered a time of mourning in austere black and shrouded their windows. The dead lay in state for up to three days under a grief vigil, and nobles and wealthy merchants could hire professional mourners. A procession then carried the body to the nearest Temple of Lirit. The wealthy were interred in sepulchers for a donation, and the rest were rendered to Lirit's mercy in a field outside the temple.

The Lady of Death

Lirit is said to walk among mortals on the darkest nights, as a woman in black whose veil hides her face. In the spring of 765 she came to Mystvale with her priests and offered the gift of the dead to the living.

The Resurrectionists

For most people in Arnesse, death was final. Resurrectionists could restore life to the recently dead. They were rare, the ability could manifest at any point in a life, and even they did not know its origin.

The Veil

The Veil were those chosen by Death to serve it, exempt from the laws that govern mortals. They appeared to act as a balance between life and death, and they lived hidden in society at every rank.