Bank Aljaza'

The Bank Aljaza' stood as a testament to the strange and often circuitous routes devotion could take in the age of the floating city. Originally a modest chapterhouse of itinerant paladins and clerics, the organization blossomed beneath the guiding hand of its founder—Gawanon Euphoniaeres, a name whispered in reverence and in warning throughout the upper and lower reaches of Shal'Azura. Gawanon’s legend began not in the sanctuaries of saints, but in the shadowed antechambers of loss. He had once been the bright brother of a hero. His brother Balthasar, always ruggedly handsome and full of charm, had rejected the holy comforts of faith and righteousness, and in his search for forbidden knowledge, consorted with infernal powers. Now, in the annals of the Damned, Balthasar’s name was etched in brimstone as the Archduke of Phlegethos—the Fourth Layer of Baator—a despot’s crown forged in betrayal of a Goddess.   It was widely believed that the Bank Aljaza’ owed its relentless discipline and cutting theological wit to this origin story, and to Gawanon’s sustained, public refusal to relinquish hope. Through decades, as Balthasar’s legend grew redder and more florid in the underworld, Gawanon’s crusade grew subtler—less a campaign of swords and banners, more a war of finance, secrets, and salvation. The Bank was no mere vault for coinage: it was a bulwark against infernal temptation, a sanctuary where souls could be ransomed back from the slow, decadent gravity of sin. Its clerics, vesting themselves in sky-blue and gold, walked among the desperate and the destitute, granting loans of hope and penance, extracting interest in humble acts of compassion. Unlike the gray bureaus of the secular world, Bank Aljaza' measured wealth not solely in currency, but in the number of lives kept from ruination—each ledger entry a soul preserved from the eternal fires below.   It was said that in every waking hour, Gawanon’s thoughts circled back to his brother, the once-beloved, now enthroned in flame and agony. His crusade was personal, and the city’s faithful—many of whom owed their second chances to the order’s interventions—knew this, and revered him for it. In the highest echelons of the Bank Aljaza’, the war for Balthasar’s soul was spoken of not as a lost cause, but as the next grand solvency to be engineered.   The Bank Aljaza’ was not a place of mere numbers, nor even of miracles, but of strategy—an endless ecclesiastical chess match, where the stakes were nothing less than the fate of the damned, and the pieces were desperate, dreaming mortals who might yet be saved from the fire.