Gas

Oriaca

Demonym: Orionists

Holy text: The Uru

Tenets: 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.

Adherents of this religion 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 those Orionists who delve deep into dreams permanently lose their corporeal form, disappearing from the physical world in a dissipating prismatic haze. Temperamentally, Orionists are often 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 Orionists, called the Templars of Borias, worship the vanished daemon Borias, said to have been the daemon of knowledge before the modern era. Few know of this daemon and fewer still know of his importance. But it is said that he was a Ponderan whose obsession with knowledge was matched only by his resourcefulness and brilliance. The Templars of Borias were created during Borias' time and their purpose after his death was to carry on his duties. However, they are said to have disappeared from this world.

Central Figure(s): Telimure/Borias