The Šamru
An esoteric scholarly guild that never sought recognition, operating in the gaps between the official federations. Where other guilds preserve knowledge that can be shared, the Šamru guard knowledge that should only be understood. They study phenomena the world calls “mysteries”: untraceable harmonies in resonance fields, prophetic mathematics, unaccountable healings, unbidden visions, cryptids and other things that glide or go bump in the night. Not to expose them, but to maintain the boundary between awe and explanation.
Origins:
Their roots stretch back to the first libraries of Mesopotamia, when temple scribes began keeping separate ledgers for “the words that move of themselves.” Over centuries, those custodians re-formed inside academies, observatories, and monasteries, always in plain sight but never named. By the Age of Inquiry, they had become a silent network of archivists and philosophers bound by one creed: Guard what stirs the soul before it is dissected.
Structure:
The Šamru are organized as a closed circle within the Guild of Translators and Observatories. Membership is not hereditary or political; initiates are chosen after years of proven discretion. Each keeps a double life — one as scholar, healer, architect, or linguist, the other as a custodian of the unseen.
Their archives, called The Veiled Index, are stored in mirror sites across the federations, copied in resonant code that can only be read when two members harmonize their voices in recitation.
Beliefs and Conduct:
- Mystery is a form of truth that cannot survive exposure.
Reason must coexist with reverence.
Every discovery demands a keeper as well as a teller.
They never worship what they study, but they also refuse to reduce it. To them, the supernatural is not divine intrusion but human perception extending past its instruments.
Public Face:
None. The Šamru do not claim lineage or property; their meeting places masquerade as restoration guild halls or old observatories. The Council of Voices and the Wardens know they exist, and quietly consult them when phenomena defy civic explanation — but official records omit their name.
Role in Koina:
- They are the philosophical counterweight to The Pale.
Where the zealots seek absolute certainty, the Šamru preserve uncertainty as sacred.
They ensure that Koina never loses the humility that gave rise to inquiry in the first place — the recognition that not all truths can be tamed, and not all light should be stared into.
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