Rite House of He Who Allows

Geba's oldest surviving religious institution and the official faith of the imperial capital. Its teaching holds that He Who Allows is the supreme cosmic authority and that the empire Vaer'karesh established is his direct expression on the planet. Every conquest, unification, and assimilation across six thousand years is framed as divinely permitted through the imperial line. It does not acknowledge what the Velcrith did to the planet, does not teach what Vessels actually experience, and does not address the Seraveth at all. It built its authority on the premise that He Who Allows operates through the empire, and incorporating the Velcrith or Seraveth into that framework would require admitting that the empire is not the center of the cosmological order. It chose its position and lost the factual argument to Veyan Thought when Eira Vey's evidence became available.

Population

Billions follow it by default across the Geba continent, though the number of active practitioners who attend services and participate in Rite House life is far smaller. Most citizens who grow up inside its influence accept it as background without ever examining what it teaches or what it leaves out.

Identification

There is no reliable way to distinguish a Rite House adherent from someone who simply grew up around it. The identifiable core is the capital's administrative class: the priestesses, the ceremony officials, the families whose positions depend on the continuation of imperial tradition. Outside of that class, calling someone a follower of the Rite House is often just another way of saying they have not thought about it enough to choose something else.

Centered

Karesh and the Geba continent. Chapters exist in major cities across the continent but carry diminishing influence the further from the capital they sit.

Veyan Thought

What most of the planet actually believes. Named after Eira Vey, who left the Rite House before ordination, traveled with Prince Raeth, spoke directly with Velcrith and Seraveth Vessels, and recorded what they told her without filtering it through imperial requirements. Her treatise, The Parent Preceded The Children, presents the origins of Geba as a world shaped by the Velcrith under the principle of allowance, with the Seraveth as the counterpart that remained within the Infinite. It treats He Who Allows as the principle of allowance itself rather than a ruler or cosmic endorsement of government. The Velcrith left because they sought beyond what was sufficient, carrying an encoded flaw that recurs in every species they have uplifted, including the humans of Geba. Vessels are the living proof that these processes are ongoing. The framework spread globally without institutional backing because the source material was stronger than anything else available, and it serves as the doctrinal foundation that the Liminorans build from alongside the Blood Royal.

Population

Tens of billions. The majority of the planet's 71 billion people accept Veyan Thought to varying degrees, from those who have read the source material and studied it in depth to those who simply grew up absorbing it as the default understanding of how the world works.

Identification

Followers of Veyan Thought are so numerous and so varied in their degree of commitment that there is no reliable way to identify one. It sits underneath daily life the way weather does. Most people accept it without thinking about it unless someone brings it up, and bringing it up usually means encountering someone who holds a different position and being surprised that anyone would.

Centered

Dominant across Jeyrha, Berinu, Kela, and much of the Geba continent. Present to some degree on every inhabited continent.

Saodeh

How Yuvaar understands He Who Allows, developed in complete isolation from every other belief on the planet and predating all of them by centuries. It does not acknowledge the Velcrith or the Seraveth, has no position on Vessels, and no framework for the origins of the planet. He Who Allows is present in the natural world, and the way to honor that presence is to live within it rather than above it. The hunt is the center of practice, understood as a conversation between the hunter and the world that produced them both. When a hunt succeeds the world allowed it, and when it fails the world did not, and the Saodeh does not negotiate with either outcome. Body mastery is the primary discipline. The body is the most direct gift He Who Allows has given, and refining it is the purest form of worship. This refinement does not serve war. Practitioners do not fight in conflicts, do not serve as soldiers, and do not participate in organized violence. Much of Yuvaari culture stems from Saodeh practice whether a given individual follows it or not, but being Yuvaari and hunting does not make someone a practitioner. The Saodeh is a specific spiritual commitment within the broader culture.

Population

Millions of dedicated practitioners out of the broader Yuvaari population, with communities in Berinu and elsewhere. The number is small relative to the planet but concentrated in a way that gives it enormous influence over Yuvaari identity.

Identification

Saodeh practitioners never have permanent body markings. Tattooing, piercing, and any lasting modification are considered desecration of the body they worship through. Temporary paint is acceptable. They wear head and arm cloths, even when not hunting, incorporated into their daily attire in ways that do not look out of place. Status within the practice is communicated through the color and length of these cloths. If you see a Yuvaari with no tattoos, no piercings, and bound cloths on the head and arms, you are likely looking at someone who follows the Saodeh. Nearly all of the athletes who compete in the Yuvaar Hunting Games are practitioners.

Centered

Yuvaar, with training communities in Berinu and globally scattered Yuvaari populations.

Severan

The warrior faith, rooted in the old Dominion's interpretation of the Seraveth. Where the empire reads the Seraveth as gentle stability, the Severan reads them as correction. When something falls out of alignment, violence restores it. Practitioners worship the Seraveth directly and see themselves as instruments of both Velcrith advancement and Seraveth restoration operating simultaneously in every engagement. They treat the Blood Royal and Veyan Thought as foundational to war, and they do not care which side they fight on because the side is not the point. There are no better combat practitioners on the planet. They understand every weapons system, every vehicle class, hand tactics, rope manipulation, and how to use fauna and terrain when vehicles fail. Their paragons are Venar'Tal Kareth, Kharan Khatan, Tharyn'Bregun, and Brannok'Drekan. Strict monogamy. Rites of passage before courtship. Children raised immersed in the weapons, martial arts, discipline, and music of the culture from birth. Those who choose a different path go into sporting events or entertainment management, treating those worlds as different battlefields

Population

Tens of millions who actively identify, with hundreds of millions more who live by Severan principles without naming them. Many contractors adopt it simply by spending enough time in the field, because sustained combat teaches the same conclusions the Severan names. By the time someone tells them what they already believe has a word attached to it, they have been living it for years.

Identification

Severan practitioners are never unarmed. This is absolute. Even outside of corridors, even in regions where weapons are restricted, even for things as simple as buying food, they carry something. Their mates and children are never far. Close comrades travel with them. Outsiders describe them as packs of armed, tired-eyed, intimidating people moving together through public spaces for reasons as mundane as a meal, trailed by rowdy children and followed by a cloud of smoke because they smoke more than every other population combined. If you spot one, there are normally others nearby. The combination of monogamy, visible armament at all times, the constant presence of family, and the particular exhaustion that comes from a life spent in sustained combat makes them identifiable from across a room.

Centered

Everywhere there is fighting. Corridors, staging areas, transit hubs, contractor camps across Inland Thazvaar, Coastal Thazvaar, northern Berinu, Ukhaalstaag, and contested regions on every inhabited continent. Popular among Frost Sentinel descendants, Assault-Class and Tactician-Class Engineered, members of the New Emperor's Wrath, Children of Kharan, and independent mercenaries.

Covenant of Advancement

The least public faction on the planet. Founded during the Era of Absolute Expansion when a Velcrith spoke directly through a Vessel during the merge, while the two were still separate, and delivered the full arc of its kind across billions of years: departure from the Infinite, the civilizations they uplifted, the age of possession, the Marking by He Who Allows, the severing, the Seraveth who never left, the shift to merging, and the Rupturan collapse. The message: we will always give where it is received and practiced. If you destroy yourself, there is no purpose. The Vessel was guided to the Rupturan ruins to see firsthand what the gift produces when received without restraint. The Covenant exists to advance the world without repeating what the Rupturans became. Members are engineers, political influencers, high-tier contractors, and public figures whose enclaves run on undersized, overpowered relays independent of Solarn. Believed to have access to recursion technology and connections to Imperia Research. Many Liminorans were Covenant members before joining the Church.

Population

Tens of thousands at most.

Identification

Impossible unless you are one of them. Covenant members continue their public lives without interruption and identify each other through layered signals that change by culture and region. A Ngorrhali member uses entirely different markers than a Jeyrhan engineer or a Thazvaari contractor. Two of them can confirm each other across a crowded room without anyone else in the space realizing anything happened. The signals are visual, behavioral, and contextual, layered so that no single marker identifies them and no outsider could learn to read them without already being inside the system.

Centered

Enclaves in remote wilderness across the planet, near their independent relay infrastructure. Members are distributed throughout every continent within the governed world.

Liminorans

Tens of thousands within and adjacent to the Church of the Infinite Maw's roughly two billion followers. They worship Liminora, the Entity, directly. It appeared once to Zairen Vaul and has not been seen since. The Church has failed to find it because it stayed behind its own walls. The Liminorans went outside. They built open educational complexes near major relay centers where anyone can walk in and learn about He Who Allows, the Velcrith, and the Seraveth, easing visitors toward understanding annihilation as restorative and the Entity as the mechanism through which the world can be reset. Since these complexes are not officially affiliated with the Maw, the empire does not classify them as terror infrastructure. They collaborate with contractors, relaymen, Veykar entertainment, and Solarn. They have successfully infiltrated Teytan through shared study of the Blood Royal. Their fighters are elites from whatever they belonged to before joining the Maw, and they operate at a level granting direct communication with Zairen Vaul. The Church holds three Recursion Bombs. The Liminorans are not against deployment. They are against deployment without evidence.

Population

Tens of thousands. A fraction of the Church's two billion, but their personnel quality and access to leadership give them influence far beyond their size.

Identification

Impossible to identify an individual Liminoran unless they choose to reveal themselves. They move through the governed world indistinguishable from any other educated citizen. The complexes they operate are visible and public, but the people staffing them do not announce their personal affiliation with the Maw unless the situation calls for it.

Centered

Complexes near major relay centers across the governed world, within Maw territory, and wherever their collaborations with external organizations take them.

Church of the Infinite Maw

Two billion followers. Three mega relay spines and dozens of smaller relays seized during the Infinite Maw Conflict. Founded by Zairen Vaul after witnessing the Entity directly. Doctrine of adaptive evolution through annihilation and calibration, holding that collapse is calibration and that destruction, when directed, serves creation. The Church governs territory that functions as its own state within the planet, and the cities inside run clean, functional, and better maintained than most of the capital's outer districts. Three Recursion Bombs sit within its borders. Internal factions disagree on whether to deploy one. The tension between the violent elements who want to fire and the Liminorans who demand evidence first defines the Church's internal politics and keeps the rest of the planet aware that coexistence is the only alternative to a conversation nobody wants to start.

Population

Approximately two billion. Most are ordinary citizens whose lives function under the framework of adaptive evolution the same way citizens elsewhere function under Veyan Thought or the Rite House. The zealots and the militants are a minority within a population that is overwhelmingly civilian.

Identification

Inside Maw territory, the cities are saturated in black, purple, glass, and metallic tones, with plants of all kinds woven throughout the architecture. Citizens dress in combinations of black and purple as a matter of cultural norm. Outside of Maw territory, some continue wearing these colors without concern while others attempt to blend into the governed world to avoid scrutiny. Regardless of clothing, their way of speaking gives them away. Maw citizens speak in very clear, deliberate sentences with long pauses before responding, taking time to formulate answers that are as precise as possible. Anyone who has lived in Maw territory long enough develops this cadence, including those in the countryside who may have no strong feelings about the doctrine at all. It is the single most reliable identifier of someone who has spent significant time under the Church's governance.

Centered

Seized territories from the Infinite Maw Conflict, operating as a de facto state. Influence extends into every continent through the Liminoran network and through the sheer gravitational weight of two billion people organized under a single framework.

Neutralians

Rejection of everything. He Who Allows does not exist. The Infinite is a story. Velcrith and Seraveth are mythology wrapped around natural phenomena. Vessels were brilliant individuals whose achievements became sacred over centuries of retelling. Geba's conditions are cosmic chance. Engineered are the peak of bioengineering, not the product of cosmic knowledge channeled through a merge. The Entity is a fabrication the Church uses to justify holding three planet-killing weapons. They admire the Seraveth concept of balance as a practical life philosophy stripped of its cosmological framework, practicing equilibrium because it works rather than because something divine authored it. The internal range runs from those who consider themselves above the debate entirely to those who actively search for counter-evidence in the same archives the Liminorans and the Covenant use, sometimes sitting across from people studying the same fragments for opposite reasons without knowing who they are sitting with. They are active in efforts to discredit Txeiha's The Informed Position.

Population

Billions. Most youth on the planet pass through a Neutralian phase at some point, holding the position for years before either staying with it permanently or moving toward one of the evidence-based frameworks as they encounter the source material. In urban centers and entertainment circles, the Neutralian position is the default among young adults, and in relay-saturated hubs where every competing perspective broadcasts simultaneously, rejecting all of them is the path of least resistance.

Identification

No visual markers, no organizational structure, no gatherings. The Neutralian position is held privately and expressed when the subject comes up. It requires nothing from its holders and produces nothing visible. You identify a Neutralian by what they say when asked, and by how quickly they dismiss questions they have never examined.

Centered

Urban hubs across the governed world, entertainment districts, relay-saturated cities on the Geba continent, Jeyrha's urban centers, and Coastal Thazvaar's entertainment hubs where Veykar culture dominates.

The Unbound

Known publicly as The Scourge of He Who Allows. They take the same source material every other faith uses and produce commentaries that follow the implications to their end. Their core argument centers on agency: He Who Allows requires only the maintenance of free will and agency, and everything else is permitted. They make justifiable arguments about why enslaved populations maintain their agency even in bondage, about where the line falls between what is permissible and what He Who Allows would no longer sustain, and about how the concept of moral evil is a construction imposed by empires and institutions that benefit from compliance. They do not force the ideas. They ease people into them, and the arguments are difficult to dismiss because the logic follows from premises that the rest of the planet accepts. Public chapters operate on a fifteen-rank system with twelve reachable. The base and the subsets are completely connected, differing only in how far individuals choose to manifest the belief. Subsets include structured serial murder, cannibalism supply, death groups disguised as contractor teams, and infiltrators claiming other faiths. The founder of The Game is Unbound. Iera Jerhit is Unbound. Ranks thirteen through fifteen are aspirational states intended for a type of Vessel no other faith acknowledges: a Vessel of He Who Allows directly, chosen by the Infinite because the individual has exercised total allowance to a degree the Infinite recognizes. This has never happened. The pursuit of it is what drives the worst things on the planet. Every other faith, including the Church of the Infinite Maw, considers them an extreme misinterpretation.

Population

Hundreds of thousands openly, but the real number is tens of millions. The open chapters in capitals account for the visible layer. The hidden practitioners, spread across every other faith and every region of the planet, push the actual count far higher. They do not announce themselves. The open ones are those who feel no need to hide. The hidden ones are the reason the number is impossible to pin down, because a person can hold the Unbound worldview inside any other identity and never say it out loud until the moment they choose to act on it.

Identification

Public chapter members are identifiable through behavior and association rather than specific items or markers. They frequent chapter locations, speak openly about allowance in terms that go further than most conversations are comfortable with, and associate with others who do the same. The hidden ones are different. They reveal themselves not through markers but through worldview: the way they frame choices, the language they use when discussing what is and is not permitted, and a particular comfort with the implications of total allowance that most people cannot sustain in casual conversation. You may not recognize an Unbound practitioner until the conversation reaches a point where most people would pull back and they do not.

Centered

Public chapters in several capitals across the governed world. Private clearings and gatherings in the arid highlands between Inland Thazvaar and northern Berinu, and remote areas across the planet where relay coverage is thin and distance provides cover.

False Vessels

Not a faith. A phenomenon that exists across all of them. Wealthy individuals claim to be Vessels and allow people to worship them as cosmic children and direct messengers of He Who Allows, building communities on clearings where followers live around them in devoted households. Some of these communities are massive and longstanding, with followers who live stable lives away from the Energy Wars and the syndicates and who benefit from the structure even though it is built around a lie. Others are exploitative to a degree approaching the extremes of The Unbound, centered on a single charismatic individual whose teachings serve no one but themselves. Most of the false vessels know they are not what they claim. A few are genuinely delusional. Verification would be simple: real Vessels communicate through the resonance architecture, and confirmation from another Vessel would settle any claim immediately. But real Vessels find the entire phenomenon embarrassing and beneath response, and Seraveth Vessels, who might be more inclined to expose the frauds, see no purpose in correcting something that serves no end important to them.

This phenomenon is directly responsible for the genocide of real Vessels during the Warlord Eras. False vessels claiming immortality drew attention to Vessels as a category, and when warlord factions decided to target them for narrative control of He Who Allows, they could not distinguish between the real and the fake. The fakes dying proved the immortality claim false. The real ones dying was the actual genocide. The population collapsed from millions to fewer than 20,000. Many accused Zairen Vaul of being one of these frauds until his transparency about what he actually witnessed made clear he was in an entirely different category. Most faiths treat the phenomenon with more humor than concern. The Neutralians are correct about this one.

Population

Millions of individuals claiming to be Vessels across the planet, with thousands running successful, longstanding communities. The followers within those communities number in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands depending on how broadly you count the people living on the clearings.

Identification

The false vessels are identifiable because they want to be. The entire structure depends on being recognized and worshiped. They present themselves publicly, build visible communities, and attract followers through charisma and the promise of proximity to something divine. The question is not whether you can spot a false vessel but whether anyone with the ability to confirm or deny the claim cares enough to do so. So far, none have.

Centered

Major concentrations in Berinu and Inland Thazvaar, with smaller operations scattered across remote clearings on every inhabited continent.