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Oriaca

Demonym: Orionists

Holy text: The Uru

Oriaca is a religion which believes that acquisition of knowledge is the highest good and that destruction of knowledge is the gravest sin. This principle, although worrying at first, is actually joined together often with injunctions about living things as storehouses of knowledge and thus preservation of life is often a central moral theme. However, the texts spend far more time discussing the beauty of learning, of uncovering secrets, and of divining past the veil of mystery. For this reason, Orionists are often scholars, academics, technicians, and other sorts of knowledge workers but tend to be buried in books far more often than they can be found acting in the world. This religion was founded long ago by the Ponderans and has permeated into Ventusari among the Kaze, Ethakkra, Kalnis, and Utwesh. There are even Orionists among the Humans, though they are rare. 

Central Figure(s): Telimure

Templars of Borias

Demonym: Templars

Holy Text: The Uru

Long ago, some Orionists, called the Templars of Borias, created a cult which worshiped the corporeal form of the now vanished daemon Borias. This daemon, now largely unknown, is said to have been the daemon of knowledge before the modern era. It is said that he was a Ponderan whose obsession with knowledge was matched only by his resourcefulness and brilliance. He is then said to have passed away and ascended into daemonhood. Because he is clearly no longer in the world, most daemonologists assume that Borias was consumed by Telimure after ascension. Conspicuously, however, no catastrophe corresponds to his erasure, and so his whereabouts are considered uncertain.

Adherents of this sect believe that dream and waking are the same; that the life lived while sleeping is just as existentially complete as the life lived awake. The dream world is not a hallucination, but a full world in itself. The being who sleeps is therefore not only alive in their incapacitated corporeal form, but are equally living their life in the realm of dreams. There are cases where these Orionists who delve deep into dreams permanently lose their corporeal form, disappearing from the physical world in a dissipating prismatic haze. Temperamentally, Templars of Borias are detached and cryptic, speaking in abstract riddles which lead just as often to hidden knowledge as they do to obtuse rabbit-holes, terminating purposelessly in a seldom-known trivia. Some say that they have encountered these cultists, spellswords draped in blue robes with ancient armor. Others believe they are now extinct.

Central Figure(s): Borias