Aurism

The smallest kindness¶

Diamal is the Beacon, and the faith raised in his name is the only one in Valdrin that asks nothing hard of anybody, which is exactly why it makes the other nine uneasy.

Candles in quiet halls. Soft hymns over stone floors. Aurists in the fields at dawn gathering the fallen leaves, dressing small wounds, putting seed into good soil. Joy and comfort are the offering. Laughter is the prayer. There is no penance, no ordeal, no test, and no enemy named anywhere in the doctrine, and the sacred weight the faith speaks of is placed entirely on acts so small that no other religion has ever thought to weigh them.

The clerics teach that a fed man and a warm room are not preparation for the holy work. They are the holy work, complete, with nothing further owed.

The suspicion this attracts¶

Every serious theologian in Valdrin has, at some point, tried to work out what Aurism is really for, and none of them has come back with anything.

The Order of the Sacred Light suffers its existence and suffers no other, which Aurists accept without comment and the Order argues about constantly: whether Diamal's gentle work is the Light's own soft hand, or a heresy so successful that it has been mistaken for one for four hundred years. Ironites regard a faith with no anvil in it as a kind of category error. Idurists hold that Aurism is the most elegant lie ever built, precisely because it asks so little that nobody thinks to check it.

The Aurists keep feeding people through all of this. It is very difficult to have an argument with.

What it actually does¶

The practical footprint is larger than the theology suggests, and it is almost entirely charitable.

Aurist houses run the almshouses, the orphan rolls and the free tables in half the ports on the map. They take in the jobless, shelter the homeless and ward the innocent, and they do this without asking after anybody's god, race or paperwork, which is why they are the only faith with congregants in every people in Valdrin including several that are officially at war with each other.

Almsgiving and the Golden Dawn are the holy days. On Almsgiving the doors of every Aurist house stand open and the year's stores are given away without record. On the Golden Dawn nothing is given at all, and the faithful are told to accept instead, which most of them find far harder.

Living beside it¶

An Aurist chapter is the cheapest social policy a governor will ever be handed. It absorbs your destitute, quiets your poor quarters, and never once petitions the chancery for anything.

The cost is political rather than material. Aurists will not turn anyone away, and one day the person they have not turned away will be someone your Inquisitors, your Purists or your creditors very much wanted found. They will not hide him and they will not surrender him. They will simply keep feeding him at an open table in full view, and invite you to be the one who walks in and takes him.