The Gilded Halls

The Gilded Halls

A walk with men in their final days

Chapter One:

The Grave Orders

         As long as men can recall, they've been driven to duty. Honorable ends for honorable lives. In the land of Loh Sai, this rings true as well. There are many ways in which men can achieve an honorable life here in this world. From being an honest and upstanding citizen, to being the greatest guardians the people of the land could ask for, and for that, there is no better than the knightly orders. Royal and Imperial orders are what you'd expect, they serve the crown in some capacity. Other orders are more nuanced and require more in depth understanding to truly say what they are about.
         Then, you have the Grave Orders... In the beginning, there was only one grave order, The Order of the Gilded Coffin. Their mission was simple, to provide rest to the dead by maintaining and defending graveyards across the empires. A solemn profession, meant only for those knights who had a serious, but humble attitude. The guiding principle of the Order of the Gilded Coffin was as such: "To lay the souls to rest so that they may rejoin the goddess Aria in the afterlife." To them, they believed that all souls, once dead, could never return to the living, and instead rejoined the ether that made all life, at least those that lived good lives did.
         Those that lived lives of destruction, either to themselves or to others, they would join the undead army of the god of death, Areneem. Craftsmen had their own afterlife and so did those connected to nature and so on, but most rejoined Aria in the ether, to live eternal with life itself. Then there came the split. One side asked, "If all life is unique and it eventually goes to join the ether or the other afterlives depending on the life they lived, does this not mean that life will one day run out? Or are we fated to be recycled through the ages?" Questions like these caused a massive division in the Order of the Gilded Coffin. Eventually, two sides would emerge.
         The Order of the Golden Coffin, who believed that life was continuous, forever, and always, and that souls were indeed recycled forever. Then there was the other side, The Order of the Silver Coffin, who believed that life was eventually doomed, and that all souls were unique and only lived once. Thus, the halls of the Gilded Coffin were no more. Time passed, as it always has, and more and more divisions within the two grave orders emerged, bringing with them new grave orders of their own. There now exist many grave orders, who believe many different things. During this time of division and formation of grave orders where seen by the church as a tumultuous time. While the Church of Aria held much power, the grave orders were often the ones who held sway over popular belief, and so the church determined that the true nature of the afterlife was a mystery to us all and that the grave orders could believe in their own personal ideas, however, there was one grave order that was unlike the others.
         The order of the Spectral Grave. This Grave Order is considered to be the most dangerous and most damning grave order to ever exist, going against the very idea of life itself. The Order of the Spectral Grave is committed to destroying the cycle of life and death itself, and so, their beliefs are condemned as heresy of the highest order, even by the other grave orders. It is here that we begin our story, the story of a particular man, not a knight, but a squire, not born from nobility, but chosen from the slums. Zeneroth Aura, Squire for Knight Verris Hartley.
         The day was a cool and brisk one. Rain fell from the sky in sheets, hitting the roof of the knight station I was standing in. My knight, Sir Hartley, was talking with the local garrison commander about a startling discovery. The City of Dol Satos was attacked in the night. The few that survived ran all night to our city, the city of Presidia. This was over 109 kilometers away. Though I wasn't good at math, I knew exhaustion when I saw it, and those few men that survived certainly looked the part.