Pillar of Man
The Pillar of Man comes with the sands and leaves with the dead. Outside of their presence at Bomb Bay, their membership is nearly impossible to determine. They appear and disappear with the desert, and no pattern to their returns has been identified.
What is known is this: they are half scientists and half theologians, and their experiments kill people. The Pillar believes the secret to escaping the Grave Mind's grasp is hidden somewhere in Bomb Bay, the toxic lake where corpses are never reclaimed by the infection. Understanding why the dead stay dead there, they reason, could unlock humanity's liberation from the cycle of death and resurrection. The means they employ to test that hypothesis are not gentle.
Their subjects are rarely willing. Captured travelers, condemned criminals, and gullible members of the sect itself die in a variety of carefully documented ways: encased in salt, buried in sand, drowned in the poisoned waters of the lake. Pillar members stand nearby recording observations, trying to make sense of findings that have yet to yield a breakthrough. Their arrival in a region is heralded by quiet disappearances, kidnappings, and slave purchases across Lorado. Corpses surface later, crusted in salt and half-buried in sand, far from where they were taken.
Whether the Pillar of Man is pursuing genuine scientific inquiry or indulging in ritualized murder dressed up in academic language depends on who you ask. The bodies accumulate either way.
What is known is this: they are half scientists and half theologians, and their experiments kill people. The Pillar believes the secret to escaping the Grave Mind's grasp is hidden somewhere in Bomb Bay, the toxic lake where corpses are never reclaimed by the infection. Understanding why the dead stay dead there, they reason, could unlock humanity's liberation from the cycle of death and resurrection. The means they employ to test that hypothesis are not gentle.
Their subjects are rarely willing. Captured travelers, condemned criminals, and gullible members of the sect itself die in a variety of carefully documented ways: encased in salt, buried in sand, drowned in the poisoned waters of the lake. Pillar members stand nearby recording observations, trying to make sense of findings that have yet to yield a breakthrough. Their arrival in a region is heralded by quiet disappearances, kidnappings, and slave purchases across Lorado. Corpses surface later, crusted in salt and half-buried in sand, far from where they were taken.
Whether the Pillar of Man is pursuing genuine scientific inquiry or indulging in ritualized murder dressed up in academic language depends on who you ask. The bodies accumulate either way.
