The Church of the Infinite Maw was founded in the era of Modern Geba by Zairen Vaul following his singular encounter with the Entity, a wound in reality known interchangeably as Liminor or Liminora. Some Maw followers perceive it as masculine, others as feminine. It manifests as a hovering rupture in space where the surrounding world folds inward and thins toward nothing. It is visible only to Vessels, Scout-Class individuals, and for brief moments by some natural-borns. To all others it is unseeable.
Zairen was born twenty-two years before the end of the Warlord Eras in Thazahd, a contested city where murder, trafficking, and extreme scarcity were routine. After the wars ended he remained in the ruins, built a stead at the city's edge, and began scavenging and building. Survivors joined, among them Vohk'tirrel, a Scout-Class deserter who had evaded conscription for nearly twenty years. One evening the wind stilled, the sky turned violet, and the Entity appeared to both of them. It brought no fear or worship, only a profound sense of inevitability and clarity. Zairen emerged with a new understanding: collapse was calibration rather than chaos. He founded the Church through presence and example alone and transformed his ruined birthplace into the Maw's Crown, its central seat.
At the end of the Warlord Eras, formal reconstruction and attention went to the places that most needed it, the atrocity sites and the regions left worst by the wars. Thazahd and the survivors gathering around Zairen were not among them. Left outside that attention, the Church grew unwatched. Zairen broadcast his words across the healing planet every day, and every day drew new followers and migrants who read in his teaching a meaning built from the trauma of the eras they had just survived. For a long time the world regarded the Maw as nothing more than another city that had recovered with a belief of its own, and it did not look closer. That inattention was what allowed everything the Church did next.
The migrants arrived from drastically different backgrounds, and each carried different fragments of knowledge and secrets. Assembled together, those fragments pointed to the resting places of the Recursion Bombs scattered and lost during the Warlord Eras. The Church theorized eight locations. Belief and numbers were never the obstacle. The obstacle was the logistics of physically reaching and removing a weapon of that kind, especially where one lay in or near a populated area. The Infinite Maw Conflict was the Church solving that problem. Of the eight theorized locations, four were found and three were taken. The relays and territory seized along the way were the means and the cover. The bombs were the purpose. The seized territories, and the three bombs, remain under Maw control.
The Church is not a body of uniform belief. Its roughly two billion followers divide into four recognized factions that function much like political parties within a single faith. All four accept that collapse is calibration and that directed annihilation serves creation. They disagree on how far that principle should be carried, how the Entity should be pursued, and whether the world should be reset by force. Most followers are ordinary civilians who believe in the Maw as a whole and lean toward one faction without belonging to it formally. The distinctions matter most among the active membership, where the four positions produce very different conduct.
The Liminorans worship the Entity directly and want its manifestation above all else. They operate openly across the governed world through public educational complexes and refuse to deploy a Recursion Bomb without evidence that it would return the Entity rather than destroy the planet or accomplish nothing. They hold no such evidence, so they take no such action, and they pursue every other path first.
Zairen's Counsel is the faction closest to daily governance and the body through which all official decisions of the Church pass. They exist to assist Zairen Vaul in whatever the territory requires and do not leave Maw territory. They are the most peaceful of the four, and much of what allows Maw cities to run cleanly is the ordinary administrative and communal work this faction carries. Anyone within the Church who holds the title Grand or Arch sits on Zairen's direct counsel regardless of which faction they belong to. The Liminoran Inquisitor handles intelligence gathering across and outside Maw territory. The Arch-Seeker of the Sect of the Infinite executes investigations based on that intelligence within Maw borders. The Grand General of the Ghosts of Thazahd determines what is done with the intelligence, handles defense and policing across Maw cities, and is responsible for ensuring that the most dangerous individuals on the planet are contained or exterminated, including targets outside Maw territory. Both the Sect and the Liminorans have access to Zairen at their highest levels, but every official decision passes through the Counsel because the Counsel is the body Zairen built to carry the weight of governance so that the faith could remain separate from the administration.
Above the Counsel sits Zairen's inner circle. They hold the most power within the territory and simultaneously none. When they speak, what they say is followed without question. They rarely speak. Their influence is structural rather than directive, present in the architecture of every decision the Counsel makes without appearing in any record of how those decisions were reached.
The Sect of the Infinite wants nothing more than to deploy a Recursion Bomb, reasoning that since the first deployment produced the Entity, another should return it, and they read every year of waiting as failure. They are among the few Maw factions seen outside Maw territory, where they search for evidence against the caution of the Liminorans and clash with manufactories, syndicates, and at times the Liminorans themselves. They also hunt Unbound death cults and dismantle cannibal networks, regarding those horrors as proof that the world needs resetting so that every place might become as ordered as a Maw city. Within Maw cities they work alongside the Liminorans to remove Unbound infiltrators before corruption can spread. If any faction of the Church is genuinely zealous, it is this one.
The Ghosts of Thazahd are the fighters. When the Maw is seen fighting or taking captives, it is almost always the Ghosts, and they do not leave Maw territory except for conflict. They descend from a group of Teytan practitioners of the Blood Royal whom Zairen knew during his years under the warlords and syndicates. When the Warlord Eras ended, the collapse of regional transit left them unable to return to Teytan, and they remained in Thazahd to help Zairen rebuild. They did not witness the Entity, and most of them do not believe it ever appeared. They follow the Maw because they recognized Zairen's teaching as the Blood Royal carried to a deeper understanding, and they hold that its teaching is the true path to peace even if that peace requires erasing the world and beginning again. It was the founders of the Ghosts who carried out the assault on Midreach Lira that opened the Infinite Maw Conflict.
The Entity has not reappeared since Zairen's initial encounter. For decades the Church has devoted resources to rediscovering or triggering its presence. All attempts have failed. The ongoing search for resonance with collapse continues to define Maw doctrine and structure. It is not revelation they seek but confirmation that the ordering principle they built an institution around was not a singular event.