Faction · The Temple of the Zenith
The Church of the Zenith
By the light that sleeps, and by the light that is to wake
The church and clergy of Auren, founded around 88 AE by Cassiano the Elder, the first Hierarch. In the year 1000 it counted about two thousand people: prelates, deacons, priests, acolytes and sisters, the brothers of the Cloister, the Engravers and the Temple Guard. Most of Auren is faithful.
God, for Auren, is called the Zenith: the Sun at the highest point of the sky, the noon no one had ever seen. For a thousand years the Church worshipped a God that was there, in the sky, but covered: a dark disc with a ring of fire around it. Doctrine called it “the light that sleeps”. Patience was holiness, and the whole life of the Church was a vigil at the bedside of a sleeping God. The Moon was not a divinity but a lid.
Since the Breaking the Church names the Sun Solaris, a name from the books of the Ancients. Each morning its priests undo the Echoes of the dead, calling them Shades.
Characters
The Hierarch, Cassiano IV
The eighty-three-year-old head of the Church of the Zenith, Hierarch for thirty-nine years.
Sister Calla
She who keeps the Temple’s flame burning and makes the ointments for the burned.
Brother Calix
The monk who keeps the Cloister’s library and the transcribed copies of the books of the Ancients.
Mother Ondine
The woman who runs the Cloister’s infirmary and whose family is “whoever’s lying on the cots”.
Edrin
A fourteen-year-old bell-ringer’s apprentice, Sera’s brother, who died in the Breaking and remains as an Echo.