Cleric

Clerics are chosen not in a single crucible of ordeal like Paladins, but over years of devotion and study. The gods’ silence means most aspirants are trained by older clergy, learning rites, scripture, and interpretation. Yet no education alone can make a cleric, only faith can. A farmer who kneels before Chiniae’s shrine and wills forgiveness with perfect clarity may find their prayer answered more surely than a priest of thirty years. Still, true clerics often rise through:

• Seminary Rites: Long apprenticeships beneath existing clergy.

• Trial of Silence: A month or more without speaking, proving they can bear the silence of the gods.

• Trial of Scripture: Transcribing holy texts by hand until their faith bleeds into ink and paper alike.

Unlike Paladins, who are seized violently, Clerics are cultivated. They awaken to their gifts slowly, often realizing only after years of prayer that their words carry more than sound.

To serve, Clerics must:

• Uphold the domain of their patron deity, mercy for Chiniae, labor for Druvain, stufy for Thalyss, and so forth.

• Study scripture to prevent their faith from dissolving into self-made heresy.

• Maintain ritual purity as defined by their order (though these rules vary greatly).

Failure to abide by these is not always instant death, but often a slow wasting, miracles fail, prayers falter, until the faithless cleric is nothing but a priest without power.

A cleric’s anointing is rarely grand. Often it is confirmed through quiet ritual, ashes upon the brow, immersion in river-water, scars cut into palms. The Knights of All-Faith record such initiations, but independent cults and sects invent their own, sometimes as simple as drinking consecrated wine, sometimes as grotesque as bleeding out into soil.

Clerics must:

• Keep the scripture alive through ritual, reading, and reinterpretation.

• Guard the faithful, not with sword, but with blessing and judgment.

• Conduct rites of burial, blessing, marriage, and covenant.

• Serve as mediators between mortal and god, interpreting omens.

Unlike Paladins, who are constantly patrolling and fighting, Clerics’ burdens are more cerebral, fasting, chronicling visions, leading councils, interpreting rival doctrines. They spend countless hours in prayer, learning to parse silence itself. Yet they are also required to face the battlefield, where their role is equal parts healer, inspirer, and arbiter of miracles.

Clerics gain benefits tailored directly to their god’s domain:

• Caelbrith: Severing curses and ending hauntings.

• Chiniae: Healing of plague, reversal of poisons, pacification of hostile spirits.

• Druvain: Blessing of tools and laborers, making weapons stronger and fields more fruitful.

• Ny’yala: Prophetic visions, manipulation of time’s flow (slowed wounds, hastened healing, glimpses of fated events).

• Orram: Cloaking secrets, silencing voices, unveiling hidden truths.

• Thalyss: Perfect recall, mnemonic wards, protection of memory itself.

• Xaethra: Influence over envy, lust, combat, and hunger, corrupting hearts to serve their will.

Unlike Paladins, clerics cannot fight endlessly, but they can heal endlessly, advise endlessly, and keep faith burning even when the swords have broken. Though their kind is rare, and often their services as-such are reserved by only the elite of Everwealthy society; The king for instance is said to have a retainer of Clerics dedicated to preserving his health in this time of war.

Clerics wield relics of faith rather than arms, staves, censers, scripture-blades that cut not flesh but spirit; Though conventional weapons are relatively common on the battlefield. Many carry illuminated tomesc called 'Tenents.' said to weep if blasphemy tot heir God is spoken nearby. Their vestments vary, Druvain’s clerics wear ash and soot, Chiniae’s wear plain white veils, Ny’yala’s mark themselves in endless spirals of ink.

A cleric is unmade not by dismissal but by silence. When their god ceases to answer, their miracles cease. Some heretics are struck by wasting plagues, others burned by divine fire. The Knights of All-Faith declare apostates “fallen” and strip them of rank before execution.

The first clerics were not born in triumph but in desperation. When Xaethra’s infernal host poured into Gaiatia during The Fall, mortals cried out, not to kings, nor to armies, but to the silence of the heavens themselves. For ages the gods had spoken only in riddles, clouds shaped like omens, dreams that bled into waking. Yet in those days, for the first and only time, they answered plainly. Where a priest once muttered prayers over grain, now his words kindled fire that seared devils. Where a grieving widow begged for mercy, her tears became light that knit torn flesh. These were the first clerics, mortals whose conviction cracked the silence wide enough for power to pour through. Unlike the Paladins, who were chosen like swords raised from the forge, clerics were diffuse, varied, even contradictory. They rose from temples, barns, hovels, battlefields, anywhere a prayer was screamed loud enough to echo. Some received visions, others felt nothing but found their hands glowing when touched to the dying. The gods themselves gave no explanations. It was faith alone that proved the conduit. In this way, clerics became the most visible evidence that worship could re-shape the world. In the centuries that followed the Schism, clerics multiplied into countless forms. Some tended famine-stricken villages, calling rains at the cost of their own years. Others were drafted into wars, bending their tenets into weapons, turning blessings into curses. The very ambiguity of divine silence made them tools for every cause. For every healer kneeling over the sick, there was a battle-cleric sanctifying slaughter in the name of Ny’yala’s cycles or Druvain’s forge. For every temple that opened its doors to the poor, another closed them and demanded coin or blood. Faith empowered them equally.   This duality gave rise to conflict. Entire sects split over the meaning of their gods’ last spoken words. The “Merciful Flame” of Druvain’s clergy claimed fire was meant for warmth and renewal, while the “Anvil Creed” demanded it be used only for war. Civil wars were fought not between kings but between clerics of the same god, each certain they alone preserved the true covenant. Out of this bloodshed, the Knights of All-Faith rose, not merely to police Paladins, but to force clerics into uneasy unity. Their solution was bureaucracy, codified scripture, canon law, and councils to interpret silence. Clerics chafed, but most submitted, for fear of being branded heretics. Even so, the faith of clerics has never been contained. The Scholar's Guild catalogues hundreds of variations, forest hermits who bleed into soil and call themselves Druvain’s hands; sailor-priests who pray to Ny’yala for tides and hear her answer; plague-healers who swear that even Chiniae’s mercy sometimes demands the grave. Where Paladins embody the gods as steel given flesh, clerics embody them as whispers given voice, shifting, contradicting, surviving. Today, clerics remain the most common channel between mortals and the divine. They birth miracles in hovels and cathedrals alike. They are mistrusted by rulers, too close to the people, too unpredictable in loyalty, but revered by the desperate who see in them the only proof that the heavens still watch. And though the gods have long since withdrawn, every time a cleric’s prayer draws blood back into a dead heart, or light into a battlefield’s night, the silence feels thinner.

Clerics are seen differently across the world. To peasants, they are healers and intercessors, binding wounds of both body and soul; Though most are hoarded away in cloistered chapels far from where folk need these talents most. To nobles, they are threats, preachers whose sermons sway more hearts than laws. To scholars, they are anomalies, proof that the gods’ silence is not complete. Among the devout, they are scripture made flesh; among the cynical, manipulators no different than merchants or lords.

• Ancelon Valmore: First of the royal line, Cleric of Chiniae, famed for halting executions by pardoning even the blatantly guilty; Remembered by varying accounts as the holy warrior who thwarted Vile's ritual, that while causing it to fail thus ceasing his rampage at Xaethra's behest, did launch the world into The Great Schism soon after. A figure both a boon and a curse depending on how the tale is told and by who, but none today can say for sure.

• Hieronynous Veyl: Cleric of Ny’yala, whose visions guided Everwealth’s armies during the early Schism, though some claim he engineered defeats to match prophecy.

• Mother Sereth: Heretic cleric of Xaethra, executed for seducing an entire ducal household to revolt against crown and church.

• Vile: Perhaps the most infamous testament that the gods answer conviction rather than conscience. Vile, the devil at the head of Xaethra’s legions, is remembered mainly as a ravenous conqueror who's hubris damned our world; But his legacy is also that of a cleric in truth, one whose faith in his mistress, or at-least in what she represented, was pure enough to wield her divine power to terrifying extent; Sometimes referred to as a 'warlock' due to the titles' more-wicked implications in Everwealthy culture though this is incorrect, Vile was a Cleric by definition. His chants split earth and sky, his blessings turned mortal soldiers into ravening agents of envy, and his liturgies reshaped battlefields into carnivals of ruin. He proved that clerical authority is not bound to mortal flesh nor moral law, it belongs to any who worship without fracture. Though despised, Vile’s example is often whispered in theological disputes as a reminder, clerics are not inherently good, only inevitably faithful.