The Ashen
The Ashen were a religious cult established during the First Echwink Expedition. Members worshipped Vardura's prominent volcano as a deity named the Ash Speaker. They donned flame-red robes and daubed their faces with ash to mark themselves. Though the cult was a necessary group to engage with when it came to camp politics, their zealotry did much to inhibit the progress of the First Expedition. Some scholars speculate that it was the Ashen's worship that enabled the explosive chaos that destroyed the First Expedition and claimed many lives.
None of the Ashen were thought to have survived the First Expedition.
The Six have also discovered that the Ashen cult en masse had met a crueller fate than death. Some aspect of their faith had apparently trapped their souls in a burning cycle of rebirth tied to the acrid and brutal region called The Ashlands. Now, their charred corpses haunt the region under the careful watch of massive ash phoenixes.
The Second Echwink Expedition
After returning to Vardura, The Suckhole Six discovered much about the fate of the cult. They found that a member of the cult had survived the First Expedition because they had become petrified in a cockatrice cave. The Six and Whisper Darren helped the survivor recover from his coma and nursed him back to health. Jhohn was very strange and obsessed with returning to the Ashlands as a pilgrimage, a quest His Masons have recently accepted.Disbandment
All of the cultists were allegedly killed in the chaos that ended the First Expedition. This was a fate most of the cultists welcomed.
Divine Origins
Shortly after arriving to Vardura during the First Echwink Expedition, a group of explorers, scholars, and laborers drank of the Spooky Water and felt compelled to begin worshipping the local volcano as the Ash Speaker.
