The Church of Light

The empress herself leads the faith, claiming to be the only one who Aidan will speak to, and dictates his will directly to the Exalted Clerics for dissemination to the lower echelons of the Church. Below the Exalted Clerics are the Clerics, who comprise the rank-and-file priests responsible for the day-to-day operation of the Church. The Lightbringers are an order of holy knights sworn to drive back the Deep Rot and defeat the demons it creates.

In the tenth millennium of the Age of Law, the giantish empire of Tuongraunimozg drove the Tisseri elves from the Udhir peninsula. The elves fled across the sea to Ice Crown where they conquered the Vale of Pelgarian from its Karhad inhabitants. In the process their king, Aidan, defeated the maruthar Esira who had ruled the Karhads as a god-queen. In the process Aidan was fatally wounded however. Lacking the power to slay her outright, the Tisseri chained Esira in a cavern beneath the Crags of Alerikas. Aidan's queen, Kireana, used Old Magic taught to her by spirits in Udhir to resurrect her king as a maruthar to guard them eternally. They then founded the Tisseri Empire, a civilization dedicated exclusively to the worship of Aidan and forbidding all other deities. Aidan’s clerics erected Luminous Shrines to capture the souls of dead Tisseri and began using Old Magic to transmigrate them into new bodies.   Deep in her subterranean prison, Esira began poisoning the Underworld with a pestilence that spread from her fettered body. This cursed blight, known as the Deep Rot, wormed its way through Ice Crown’s Underworld and then south to the rest of the Oras. Lightbringers, paladins of the Church of Light, work tirelessly to eradicate any Deep-rot that reaches the surface. To the south, the Fire Dancers of the Temple of Flame do the same.   Some decades after the establishment of the Church of Light, the Korsamu called a crusade to purge what they feared might become a trend of transcended mortals replacing the Korsamu as the target of mortal veneration. Armies from the giantish empire, the Empire of Eleyha, and the The Empire of Scale converged on Ice Crown. Against all odds, the young Tisseri Kingdom held out against the crusaders long enough for internal divisions to develop and split their alliance.   Vindicated by their survival, the Tisseri expanded across all of Ice Crown and the Lesser Oras spreading the Church as they went.