“Religious people are exhausting, darling. The hypocrites you can bribe, flatter, or distract. But the sincere ones? The ones who actually believe? They’re like a plague of purity—immune to reason, shame, and good sense. Bill and Claire are the worst kind: the sort of zealots who’d rather die than be wrong.”

— Soki Noles, On the Opposition

Origins in Fire and Trauma

Bill Hopkins was never meant to become a crusader. Once a cloister-priest of the Seekers of Wisdom on Deimos, his life was one of modest ritual, quiet counsel, and gentle service. He ministered to a tiny chapel and offered stability to the lost children of a Mercy House—among them, a newly grown Claire Caldwell, bright-eyed and anxious about her future. Their lives changed in an instant when an illegal SMC subspace exploitation experiment ruptured into a sustained breach. The disaster consumed much of the surrounding colony in a tidal wave of possessed bodies and impossible geometries. Bill’s half-forgotten Astro-Landing Force training—nearly a year of instruction before his youthful buyout—combined with frantic catechisms to keep Claire and the orphans alive through a night that felt like an eternity. The children were later dispersed across the moons of Mars. Bill was left haunted. Claire was left galvanized.

The Making of Zealots

Claire, having survived the nightmare, found her purpose with unshakable clarity: hunt the things that slipped through breaches. Destroy subspace contamination wherever it hid. Bill, still unstable in the aftermath, allowed her resolve to become his own. What was meant to be a few months of combat mentorship for her slowly transformed into a ritualized partnership. They trained for years, honing their bodies, will, and doctrine into something far sharper than the Seekers originally intended. Their petition for Templar Licenses was accepted with wary respect—Bill for his clerical experience and decorated survival, Claire for her discipline and zeal. What began as a partnership evolved into a crusade. And from that crusade grew a following.

The Order and Its Purpose

Today, Bill Hopkins and Claire Caldwell stand at the head of the Order of Saint Sarah—small but fervent, respected among exorcists, and feared by subspace practitioners. Numbering a dozen true Templars and twice as many lay mercenaries, the Order survives on donations and subsidies, bound by vows of aesthetic poverty; its members own nothing, desire nothing, and live only for the hunt. Bill and Claire, despite being the Order’s founders, remain its point of the spear. They rarely call for backup, rarely delegate, and rarely rest. Their crusade is personal: born from a night when faith and violence were the only things that kept them alive. Their sincerity makes them uniquely dangerous. They cannot be bribed, misled, or distracted. They do not want the Rat-Thing, nor its power—they want it destroyed, along with anyone reckless enough to chase it.