Church of the Infinite Maw
The Church of the Infinite Maw was founded in the Era of Modern Geba by Zairen Vaul following his singular encounter with the Entity, later understood as a Lateborn scar in reality and known interchangeably as Liminor or Liminora. Some Maw followers perceive it as masculine, others as feminine.
Visible only to Vessels, Scout-class Engineered individuals, and for brief moments by some natural-borns, the Entity manifests as a parallax scar: locality thins to an infinitesimal limit, structure collapses inward, and perception breaks alignment. To all others, it is unseeable. The Maw identifies it as a convergence born from Recursion Bomb echoes. It does not speak. It couples passively through Zairen Vaul. Doctrine holds this as not communion, but reflection—Zairen as a carrier of clarity through annihilation.
Origins
Zairen Vaul was born twenty-two years before the Warlord Eras' end in a contested city amid normalized murder, substances, and trafficking. Surviving this shaped his endurance. Postwar, he remained in the ruins, building a stead at the city's edge to scavenge and unearth design from desolation. Loners joined, including Scout-Class Engineered Vohk'tirrel (Vohk), a deserter who survived by precision perception—eyesight tracking heat and motion, timing movements to shadows. They worked in rhythm, building shelter without mourning or hoping.
One evening, as wind stilled and sky bled violet, the Entity appeared. It hovered without force, bringing heavy clarity and realization to Zairen and Vohk—not awe or terror, but inevitability. Zairen stared at the black horizon scar, waking with new language and patterns in suffering. This reframed collapse as calibration, inspiring the Church as imitation of its unmaking, finding meaning in silence.
Doctrine and Activity
The Church draws from settler communities, disillusioned survivors, and post-collapse networks alienated from Empire and Shadow Rule. Its doctrine promotes endurance through collapse, not avoidance. Doctrinal rites include periodic destabilization, memory denial, and ritual cycles of erasure and clarity.
Initially treated as terror zealots, the Church launched coordinated strikes and hijacked global relays before cutting feeds—shock first, structure after. They attempted to render Engineered obsolete through doctrine over design, but gained rapid support from Engineered ranks: Assault lines opened corridors, Tacticians synced maps, and Scouts surveyed routes for efficient territory shifts in days. Destroyer-class Engineered largely abstained post-Warlord Eras. The short, ugly war ended with the Maw shutting doors, then reemerging under diplomacy; the gap is often ignored, though skirmishes persist when cells test boundaries.
Today, private relays like EM-7 and CS-12 mark Maw territory on the main continent—avoided to prevent real war, as they include non-Maw clearings of small farms, clinics, repair yards, mines, and citizen hubs. The Entity has not reappeared since Zairen’s initial encounter. For decades, Maw resources have quietly pursued methods to trigger or rediscover its presence. All attempts have failed. Still, the search defines their structure. It is not revelation they seek—but resonance with collapse as an ordering principle.