Sealed in Wax
Twenty-Seventh Day of the Second Month 293 AC
"Odd that they barred the gates of this temple, yet you could have them opened to speak to me," you note idly, though the words are anything but that. Something is truly strange here that this priest, this being, can so easily hide from you, and in your experience strangeness of this nature usually brings peril. "Would not the highest priests of the faith wish to use the guidance they found to treat with me instead of letting an ordinary priest make choices in their name?"
"I have not dealt with you, excellence," comes the answer at once, as if the question had long since been expected perhaps. "I made neither pacts not promises, only spoke in brief of the passage of souls and the workings of the Faith."
"Granted," you nod, keeping the same light tone. "Tell me, in which world did you see the mural that could have properly expressed the concept of enlightenment? I am curious to look upon it for myself."
For a long moment there is silence, words of power, of flame and binding lying unspoken upon the tip of your tongue.
In a slow deliberate motion that leads you to suspect the 'priest' knows what is passing though your mind at the moment the figure reaches for its concealing scarf. "I have never traveled to other worlds, though I do recall them," he says cryptically. As the black hood is finally lowered, you are faced something wholly unexpected.
Neither angel nor fiend nor ancient specter, the visage hidden beneath the concealing cloth is that of an old man, narrow and clean-shaven, unremarkable perhaps... save that the pallor upon his cheeks is no natural thing, but a sign of his true nature... a
waxen image given life and reason, likely to its creator's doom. It... speaks before you can in the same dispassionate tone: "I was created following what you would name the Doom of Valyria and what my maker knew only as the End. He was mighty in his power, but not so mighty as to outrun death forever in a time of waning magic, nor did he wish for life everlasting, and so he created me in his image to remember and pass on the lessons of an age gone by."
"What of the priests?" you ask, still on guard, knowing that an awoken image of a sorcerer of old would hold much of his arcane power and few of the frailties of flesh. "Why are you
here?"
"They are my guardians as I slept the ages though as I am to be their teacher in many things that have been lost and forgotten. Mortals are ever so much more willing to heed revelations if they think them born of the divine after all..."
"So the entire faith..." you trail off, amazed by the sheer scale of the lie passed down though the centuries.
"Trios is no god that can bless his worshipers with miracles for blind faith alone, only a metaphor you might say, but one that is truer than they could ever hope to be." The defiance rings forth in the false-man's voice, though still by his very nature soft as an echo's echo. "There are other paths to the same end, as you yourself can attest, ones that do not hinge upon the favor of fickle dreams-made-flesh."
"What is your name?" you ask, still struggling to make heads or tails of this improbable revelation.
"I..." A moment's hesitation follows. "I meed no name. I am only the messenger, after all, and it is the message that is important."
"What is your message, then?" you press.
The inhuman voice echoes as strongly as you have ever heard it with the passion of one long dead. "To enlighten the heirs of the Freehold to the truths spiritual and arcane that they may better themselves without repeating the errors of the past."
What do you reply?
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OOC: A few months ago it occurred to me that I made it so that every religion you encountered was somehow backed by divine power to the point where you guys had started to expect divine avatars when you enter a temple, so I figured I would add one that did not actually have a god. That did not feel very engaging on its own so I took the concept a step further with Trios, a religion built as a teaching tool to reveal the underlying truths that other religions are more likely to hide (or at least discount), with the excellence cult growing naturally out of it as I considered the backstory.
