Urbanite Priests

The most storied formation within the Archduchy of Coledei is not its glittering Blade Sergeants nor its legendary Paragon Knights. It is a more enigmatic force whose dominion of expertise lies within the hearts of cities themselves. The Urbanite Priests are an armed order of the Coledeian Church, distinct from the archduchy's conventional military and from the orthodox Isornian Church’s own militant wing, the Armata Dea.

They are armed cleric-bureaucrats, whose very presence alters the rhythm of civic life. Cities, to them, are not dead stone, but living beings; they are ancient souls clad in mortar and memory, spirits to be nurtured with the same devotion one gives to a child or a garden.

In peacetime, the Urbanite Priests offer their prodigious administrative skill to the cities they inhabit without charge, for they see such service as sacrament. Their knowledge of urban law, design, resource flow, and disease management is unrivaled. Even the highest municipal officials defer to them without protest. To be aided by an Urbanite Priest is to receive logistical clarity and a form of divine insight, for they do not merely interpret: they feel.

This power is derived from their singular thaumaturgical discipline: Urbomancy. Where other schools of magic draw from elemental forces or personal reservoirs of will, the Urbanite Priests tap into the spirit of the city itself. Each street, each brick laid, each name etched into a stone holds meaning, memory, and hidden power. The older the city, the richer its soul, and the stronger the urbomancer becomes. It is said that the most gifted among them can speak to a city as one might speak to an ancient patriarch, sharing in its pride, hearing its laments, and rousing its strength and wisdom when under siege.

Their abilities defy the conventions of war. They can vanish into alleys, meld with rubble, enter one door and emerge from another leagues away, guided by the city’s internal logic rather than its surface geometry. They can twist lampposts into golemic sentries of iron, animate cobblestones into buckling traps, and read the very pulse of a city’s distress, detecting unrest before it begins, sensing outbreaks of plague like an immune system sensing infection. No assassin moves unnoticed in a city watched by an Urbanite Priest. No revolt begins without them hearing the whisper of unrest.

In battle, they are feared urban combatants, masters of fortification and siege in environments where others stumble. They do not need siege ladders; the walls themselves may open. They do not require maps; the city tells them where to go. Their presence turns cities into weapons, labyrinths, or sanctuaries.

Their appearance reflects their sacred austerity. Clad in gray plate armor dusted in the shade of urban dust, and they wear distinctive steel mitres. Their weapons are grimly functional: warhammers and sledgehammers for breaking through stone and enemy alike. But it is their most feared and iconic weapon, the Codex-Flail, that best expresses who they are. A chained tome of steel plates, its pages engraved with sacred laws in the arcane language of Inärtä, it crashes into enemies with unpredictable weight, breaking limbs and shattering skulls alike. When those plates are read aloud mid-combat, the ancient words etched upon them swell with power, augmenting the priest’s strength, clarity, and connection to the city’s essence.

Within the Coledeian imagination, the Urbanite Priests are are the conscience of cities, their stewards, and their guardians. No other force in the Archduchy speaks so intimately with the cities they protect, and none fight with such conviction for the soul of the streets themselves.

Urbanite Priests have long extended their influence beyond their native archduchy, and nowhere has their presence been more quietly transformative than in The Imperial Duchy of Teutei. With a population of 5.5 million and its expansion having long since devoured the duchy it once stood in, Teutei suffers the ailments of unchecked urban expansion: overcrowding, pollution, bureaucratic paralysis, and civil unrest. It is within this chaos that the Urbanite Priests have lent their unique talents to beleaguered Teuteian planners and bureaucrats struggling to hold the city together.

Where civic engineers saw decay, they saw imbalance. Where magistrates saw unrest, they heard the murmurs of a soul in distress. Unlike conventional administrators, the Urbanite Priests brought with them their strange and sacred Urbomantic arts. Teutei proved fertile ground for their talents. Its ancient stones carried deep memory; its catacombs, unrested whispers; its boulevards, the groans of overuse and neglect. The older the city, the stronger its voice, and Teutei's voice was a thunder amalgamation, a voice of many waters.

In subterranean planning councils and behind the sealed doors of overcrowded ministries, the Urbanite Priests offered more than insight; they offered communion. Their guidance allowed the re-channeling of traffic patterns by reading the pulse of Teutei’s arteries. They identified districts in metaphysical dissonance, where the spirit of the city chafed against its own expansion. They walked through alleyways unseen, slipping through walls and boundaries with the city’s permission, carrying whispered urgencies from one ward to another. Even the glowing canals of Teutei responded differently when they passed, flickering softly as if in recognition.

While Eremita’s engineers and the Confederation’s funding brought steel and tunnel-boring drills, it was often the Urbanites who mapped out where disturbance would invoke unrest. When ancient bones were shifted during the construction of the new metro lines, and noble families rose in indignation, it was the Urbanite Priests who soothed the invisible wound, who entered the crypts, read the ancient scripts, and brought the consent of the dead into negotiations. Among Teutei’s inner circles of governance, their presence is quietly treasured, and sometimes feared.

Even the Spire, the Empire’s feared detective branch, has been known to seek their counsel. For while the Spire wields the precision of thaumaturgic forensics, it is the Urbanite Priests who can sense when a city itself is lying, when a crime stains more than just the victim’s blood, but the memory of the walls and stones around it. Teutei is a city of secrets, and the Urbanite Priests, bound by their sacred law, do not reveal what the city speaks unless it threatens the city’s soul itself.