Order of the Sacred Light

Mercy held like a blade¶

The Order of the Sacred Light marches in white and sings without stopping, and every outside account gets stuck on the same contradiction before deciding it must be hypocrisy. It is not hypocrisy. It is the doctrine, stated plainly, by people who have never once tried to hide it.

Sanctus is the light that purifies. Purification is not comfort. It is the removal of what should not be there, the removal hurts, and the hurting is not a regrettable side effect of the mercy but the mercy arriving. A Luminant who scourges himself is not punishing himself. He is doing to his own back what he sincerely believes is the kindest thing available, and the reason he can do it to yours afterward with a clear conscience is that he did it to his own first.

Mercy wielded like a blade, sin carried like a shield. The Order wrote that about itself.

The Inquisitors¶

The clergy are Inquisitors, and this is the only faith in Valdrin that claims the right to put unbelief to the question. It uses the right. It keeps records of the using, in fair copy, in a hand meant to be read by superiors and by history, because nothing done in the light needs concealing.

They are not a mob and it is dangerous to picture one. A visitation is slow, courteous, document-heavy, and conducted by educated men who will ask about a household's accounts before they ask about its soul, on the sound reasoning that the accounts lie less. Most visitations end in a fine and a penance. The ones that do not end at the Festival of the Pyre, which is a holy day, which is to say it is on the calendar in advance.

That instruction was written to stop men hanging people on a frightened yes. What one Confessor did with it in a starving province is set out in The Rule of Grenave, and the Order has never formally answered for it.

Two crowns, and a third that walked out¶

The Light is the state faith of Aethrassia and of Lyaud. It is the last thing those two courts hold in common and a large part of why they have never quite gone to war.

It is also, awkwardly, the faith of the Free Colonies, who stopped answering their crowns generations ago and never stopped answering the Light. Clerks in Vaurmont and Grismere have never agreed on whether that is sentiment or the shrewdest diplomatic decision anyone in the west has made, and the Free Colonies decline to clarify.

The Order suffers the existence of Aurism and of nothing else. That single exemption is old, doctrinal rather than political, and the subject of the longest running argument inside the Order: whether Diamal's gentle work is the Light's own soft hand, or the most successful heresy in the world, currently tolerated for reasons no living Inquisitor can reconstruct.

Living beside it¶

A Luminant congregation is the most orderly population you can be given and the most expensive to disappoint. They will build your almshouse, keep your streets, staff your watch, and hold the colony together through a famine.

They will also, one moon or another, take an interest in somebody else in your streets. Every governor who has hosted the Light discovers the same thing: the visitation is not a threat, it is a service, and it has been requested, and it was requested by your own people.