The Blue Order and its Fall
Once a major religious institution in the eastern Scavenger Lands, the fall of the Blue Order of Venus-Phosphene was even faster than its precipitous rise. By the early 600s, little remained of its structures, but its substrate sprawls across the Scavenger Lands in many ways small and major.
A Vision
This is the story that is told.
During the late third century, the nations of Kayzadon and Gairica, to the east of Port Calin, are locked in an inheritance dispute over the minor principality of Jien. In the disastrous aftermath of the battle of Yoti, where both princes and their heirs died in the sudden calamitous flood, much of the hinterlands degenerates into banditry and the rule of petty warlords. From a small village near Yoti itself, a young man named Snowy ka-Yoti - the third son of a local magnate - who has been prone to visions all his life announces that the river had started to flow backwards and the dead from the battle had started to rise from the grave, but he had met a woman in blue who set things to right. The goddess Venus presents herself as Venus-Phosphene the Revelator, Venus who grants the serenity of self-knowledge to all she shines upon. She tells him that she has need of him, and lays her hand on him, turning his hair blue. In the religious fervour of the late third century this would have been unexceptional, except the young man is revealed to be an uncannily talented exorcist who can drive out ghosts with a touch, and who elementals and gods address as an equal. Even more strangely, those who follow him garner a measure of the same talent. Behind him forms a mob of petty landholders, landless peasants, and once-bandit remnants of the armies.
The new prince of Kayzadon welcomes Snowy ka-Yoti to her capital Yzadon. Merita II sits on an unstable throne, greatly in debt to the Nexan Guild, Dead creatures running rampant, and with her cousin in outright rebellion. Her nominal Immaculate Faith bows to political need, and she kneels before him to receive Venus's blessings. Perhaps it may have started as a political move, but her faith grows as she sees the Dead banished from the hinterlands, and a peace negotiated with her cousin. Gairican nobles pledge themselves to her. She gives thanks back to Venus-Phosphene for the blessings she has received. Yzadon sees a grand temple built. and she declares Jien to be a city holy to Venus-Phosphene. Her second daughter is granted Jien, and at the same time is raised in the Blue Order. The local Immaculate Faith makes accomodations for this, as it must - after all, is it not right and proper to give honour to one of the Incarna, especially one who has blessed the land with peace? And because the two faiths are not set in opposition, something of the local Immaculate Faith blends into the young Blue Order. They have monasteries where they train new exorcists. Their vision of serenity is temperate and humble, and shuns excess - which cannot bring true peace, they say.
Snowy ka-Yoti dies young, as if he had been burning through his life too quickly. By the age of thirty, he is grey and frail. By thirty six, he is dead. "Do not cry for me," he says, "for a priest of Venus should always be joyful". His attendants say that Venus descended and took his body away; his cenotaph is built in Yoti, beside his family's graves. It becomes a holy site. Miracles are seen among the pilgrims who come to beg for his intercession with the Maiden of Serenity. He is seen in the dreams of nuns and monks of the Blue Order.
Prosperity
The Blue Order of Venus-Phosphene waxes and waxes.
Early in the fourth century, one of their exorcists saves the new head of a major Port Calin family from the vengeful ghost of their predecessor. This is their in-road to Calinate high society. It occupies a complicated place in the nest of vipers which are the politics of that place, and it cannot bring serenity to that land - but it can lay the dead to rest and banish demons when some go beyond the pale and call on forbidden forces. Certainly, the Blue Order gains more wealth in Port Calin than it could have earned simply in Kayzadon.
Its temples can be found across the eastern Scavenger Lands. Where it is strongest, around Kayzadon, even the smallest village has a shrine and even if there is not a full-time exorcist there, lay acolytes polish the icon of Serene Venus and ensure that there are fresh candles for when a roaming priest stops by. Its warrior-monks and nuns may not be the equal of the Immaculate Order, but they still march against Yozi cults and the gatherings of wicked spirits. God-children, elemental-kin and dragonblooded are found among the ranks of the Blue Order, and an inner circle of sorcerer-priests work magics in Venus's name to bless the land and banish evil spirits.
Something of Snowy's vision stays with the early Voices of Joy. They embrace other Venusian cults, and this results in an extended penumbra of sects around the Blue Order devoted to other aspects of the Maiden of Serenity. The travelling minstrels and purveyors of morality plays who follow Venus Beloved are easily brought into the fold, as are the strange followers of Venus Sleep-Handmaiden who take the dead of Archbridge to Sijan. The temple courtesans of Venus Joybringer encountered in Port Calin are more difficult, and their own money and influence garners them more independence from the more monastic main body of the order. Still, there is a certain level of cross pollination between the different aspects of the Serene Maiden, and though the followers of Venus-Phosphene do not realise it, they are changed just as they change others.
The Blue Order spreads beyond its traditional focus. Itinerant nuns and wandering monks travel up and down the waterways of the River Province. Where they go, they banish ghosts and drive out demons, settling village disputes and mediating conflicts. Sometimes they settle in a town that needs them and new branches of the faith arise, beyond the control of the Voice of Joy in Jien.
But that is not where the rot starts. For ambition blooms in the heart of the Blue Order.
Decadence
Decay spreads from the head.
In Kayzadon, the early temperate Blue Order is a distant memory by the mid fifth century. Political power and Calinate money has saturated the temple hierarchy. There is little divide between the Kayzadon state and the Blue Order, for the Voice of Joy is always part of the royal family and its warrior-monks are the spine of its army. The aristocrats have priestesses as their wet-nurses and study in temples of Venus. In the urban core worship is increasingly given to other aspects of the Incarna; Venus Joy-Bringer, Lovely Venus, Venus Hearth-Lighter. Aspects gentler and softer in face, which demand less of their adherents than Venus the Revelator. But this is not reflected in the more conservative rural areas, where in the face of poor harvests and frequent wyld-winds a harshly austere tendency towards Venus-Phosphene is seen. Wandering visionary priests seek her guidance with the aid of dream-questing and hallucinogens, and scorn the sneering ways of city-dwelling sophisticates.
The smaller branches of the sect on the Yanaze drift out of the control of the Voice of Joy. This cannot stand. The Voice of Joy Ela II, who takes up the mantle in RY 498, seeks to centralise matters - especially in the face of growing Immaculate pressure from both the Order and the Lookshyian Faith who. Those who take the pilgrimage to Jien must avow their loyalty to the Blue Order; she seeks to clarify doctrine, remove heterodox aspects of Venus. All she manages to do is schism the Blue Order. Save for the largest temples, the more eastern elements cease to travel to Jien but no hierarchy rises up to replace them in their lands. What exists in their place is a scattering of smaller temples and shrines, often taking a single aspect as their patron. What is lost is the ability to call on warrior-nuns and exorcists, and the wealth of the Blue Order. They become just another faith along the Yanaze.
Early in the sixth century, a loathsome Dead creature crawls out of the stagnant rivers of the underworld. It is a slow and patient predator, and it hates the Blue Order. Over the course of years, exorcists vanish as this rotting beast and its servants ambush them as they go about their duties. In the end, it is hunted down in RY 579 in the last great banishing of the Blue Order, and though it is the twilight of the order, it is a deed of great heroism. But the exorcists have lost many of their most experienced and trained members at its hand, and though the Order has plenty of money to replace the men who were lost, their replacements are raw and the chains of student-mentor training are broken.
And then there is the money. The Blue Order still has temples reaching all the way to Nexus and even Great Forks, and it is still wealthy. It is an awfully useful thing to be able to entrust your jade and silver to the vowed servants of Venus, carrying only a promissory note to another city, and then withdraw your funds - minus a small fee, of course. With warrior-monks to guard their temple-vaults, many merchants in Port Calin would rather trust the Blue Order than less holy members of the Nexan Guild. This money does not tempt the Blue Order to sin. But it does distract them, and worse yet, it draws the eyes of the perpetually indebted nations in the eastern Scavenger Lands.
Trouble is brewing, and the servants of Venus-Phosphene the Revelator see it not.
The Fall of the Order
This is how the Blue Order falls.
The wicked demon lord, Claudia - called by some the Lambskin Hyena - was thwarted too many times by exorcists of the Blue Order, who banished her back to the perverse golden-lit hell where she dwells. She swears her revenge, and certain of her peers in the infernal hierarchy join her in a dark compact. But while the Blue Order was strong, she could only blight them in minor ways. The loss of so many exorcists to the Dead thing is what lets her step up her revenge.
The Lambskin Hyena is wise in the ways of corruption and, as is her way, she wraps her wickedness in a fair-seeming face She grants visions and a measure of power to Calinite members of the Blue Order, making herself known as Venus of the Azure Pyramid; she who maintains the serene order of the heavens from mightiest to smallest. In this way and others, she brings powerful members of the Blue Order into the Descending Hierarchy of the hellish demon city Malfeas. One of these cultists is the wet-nurse of the next prince of Kayzadon, and the prince is raised to venerate Venus of the Azure Pyramid above all the other faces of the Serene Maiden.
As the sixth century comes to an end, Claudia's influence comes to full fruition. She sends demons to ruin the foes of her patsies, even as they are seen to defeat and banish the wicked servants of Hell. She spreads the worship of the Azure Pyramid. She sires her bastards on nuns, in monasteries that become little different from the courtesan-houses of Venus Joy-Bringer. There are places where slaves bought from the Nexan Guild are taken to secret routes that lead to the city of demons, and in return for that price in flesh and blood she grants power and authority and strength to those who offered them.
This is the game of the Lambskin Hyena; she intends to be caught, but only once the rot becomes incontrovertible and undeniable. She does not build her cults to pass unnoticed; she builds them to be condemned as monstrous once they are discovered, and in the mean-time make her a fortune in the bazaars of Hell. And when the Azure Pyramid is discovered, she sheds the stolen skin she used and calls in the debts she is owed. In the Laughing Night in Calibration RY604, she and her servants snatch up those who have pledged themselves to her and drag them screaming to Hell, to be hers forevermore.
Even the corruption of the Blue Order would not have been fatal. Enough of the Order has stood against Claudia's blandishments that it could have endured and recovered given time and a smidgeon of luck. But its wealth has weakened it and now its wealth kills it. Princes and despots and tyrants alike look at the fortune of the Blue Order, and see its vaults filled with jade and its beautiful temples and its land-holdings. Surely infernalists do not deserve such things! Wrapped in the banner of demon-hunters they tear it to shreds. The Immaculates of the Scavenger Lands are more than happy to assist in hunting down a borderline-heretical sect which had thought to set itself against them. And in the shadows of the world, the many enemies that the Blue Order had made during its rise are happy to hold its head under the water during its infirmity.
By RY 620 the Blue Order has fallen, and Kayzadon falls too - and in that, Claudia wins. The prince of Gairica owes her for the revelation of the demonic corruption at the heart of their old foe. For this is the game of Hell when it plays the Gateway of princes; it does not seek to win in the ways of men, but only to lessen and degrade the righteous.
Remnants
An institution like the Blue Order does not simply vanish from the annals of history, and its existence still leaves its scars.
In Gairica and Port Calin, Claudia's corruption fully took root, and the purges which follow do not cut out the rot. Protected by their wealthy patrons, elements of the Blue Order fully embraced their demonic mistress. They turned their Venus-worshipping rites to a darker mistress, though they still hid their ways behind blue veils. The Azure Pyramid still can be found among the cities of the western Scavenger Lands, where certain families, passing down their own traditions, offer worship in forbidden ways.
In the countryside of Kayzadon, the worship of Venus-Phosphene was prohibited by their new lords from Gairica. But the mystery cults of Venus the Revelator were Kayzadon's pride, and they became a centre-piece of the resentment towards the Gairican oppressors. It is the icon of Venus-Phosphene which was raised high in once-a-generation peasant revolts in 639, 684, and 701. In the Time of Tumult as taxes rise, once more mystics announce visions granted by their blue lady and speak up of an upcoming time of peace and tranquillity where there will be no lords and no masters.
The river-port city of Matasque, dominated by its great lighthouse of antiquity, was briefly the temple-in-exile of what remained of the Blue Order, led by a pretender Voice of Joy who claimed to have seen Snowy ka-Yoti in his dreams. He could not unify the dribs and drabs of what remained of the eastern branches that descended from the Blue Order, and with his death, what remains of the exorcists decamped to Great Forks. This is what remains of the formal organisation; a temple in Great Forks, and a declining monastery. Ironically, with the recent military catastrophe for that city, the current Voice of Joy, Third Cat, is trying to lever her ill-equipped and austere warrior-exorcists into a position of more status in a city that needs defenders.
Cast out from their shrines by demon-fearing, silver-loving princes, many of the members of the Blue Order in the lands around the Yanaze took up an itinerant lifestyle. They become wandering exorcists and entertainers, the lines between the aspects of Venus they followed blurring beyond recognition. Stripped of the structure and support of their temples, much esoteric knowledge was lost, though surprising strains survived in some lines of student-mentor teaching. Some take up wyld-inspired dream questing to plead their case to Venus-Phosphene; others embrace the role of Joy-Bringer and turn their new temples into holy brothels. In the end, however, these degenerate remnants of the Blue Order forgot nearly all their history beyond a few tales of lost temples and former respect passed down by bitter yen-packet half-trained priestesses. Such entertainer-exorcists quickly gained a reputation (often-deserved) for immorality and petty theft, and in many places - including Nexus - the term 'joyful priestess' is an euphemistic term for a lady of the streets.
It is surprising to many where small remnant sects of the Blue Order can be found. A small group of anchorites in the hinterlands of Chiaroscuro maintain a rocky temple of Venus Crowd-Blesser, where the traditional Kayzadoni icon of Venus-Phosphene is recognisably painted on the walls. In the Hundred Kingdoms, a cult of the followers of the Shogun of Melody, Nightingale Heart, worship their goddess with the forms of the Blue Order. In far-off Saata, sinful city of pirates and priests in the Anarchy of the South West, some courtesans give dual allegiance to Venus Joy-Bringer and the art goddess Nululi with half-remembered Nexan forms.
And then there are the prophecies. Venus-Phosphene the Revelator was always an aspect of Venus associated with unveiling and binding-through-truth, and dream-questers and sacred voyagers returned with many words of the gods. That Venus-Phosphene would choose an heir to Snowy ka-Yoti in the next age, or when she needed another servant to put the world to right. That favour would only return to the order when the demon lord Claudia was slain and the souls she had stolen were freed. That the Blue Order had lost its way when it became linked to the royalty of Kayzadon, and to fulfil their duties, they would have to return to an austere, temperate way. That Venus-Phosphene would lay a hand on one and turn their hair a shining blue and through that chosen one things would be put to rights. That the Blue Order had fallen because its work was done, and now it passed to her sister Saturn's hands, so they had to find a new goddess to follow.
But in the end, are prophecies ever really more than a way of putting words to hope and fears?
