Borim Healing Circle

Alchemy, the art of making healing potions, is a rare and difficult trade that is often restricted to a small handful of individuals and organizations. In Northern Stildane and Boram, the masters of alchemy are the Healing Circle (also known as the Amber Circle): reclusive moon druids who relate to the world and master their magic through natural knowledge and spiritual wholeness through alchemy and healing. To learn to repair the anatomy of animals and humanoids is to learn the blueprint for transforming into them; to master knowledge of herbs is to grow closer to a true understanding of an interconnected ecosystem and one's place within it. To practice chemistry is to place oneself within the cycle of transformation that all life depends on. This is a highly specialized trade and a difficult one, requiring many years of total devotion and absolute obedience. It is a total life commitment, one few return from. Initiates of the circle swear to abandon society to better serve all of mortalkind, and build a wall between themselves and all outsiders. 
To better control the trade and practice of alchemy, the Healing circle has packaged their art into a lifestyle, taught and understood only in the language of druids: even magical compulsion cannot extract a straight-forward and easily used answer. This is by design; the druids of the circle see themselves as the only group not tainted by greed and political motive, and therefore keep alchemy away from broader society. To distribute the healing potions to those who need them, the healing circle makes deals with trustworthy merchants and local politicians to try and be as neutral as possible. The only involvement the healing circle will have in politics is refusing to sell healing potions to a regime deemed too violent, and acting as mediators. Most of the druids are sworn to pacifism, and prefer to pack up their operations and flee when threatened. 
Despite their proclaimed asceticism and lack of entanglement, the Healing circle is a major trade power and political force just by their raw magical power. The coast between Boram and True Stildane invests heavily in these druids, as their healing potions and magic are a source of immense wealth and prosperity. And the Healing circle is quick to lean on allies when their operations are threatened in a major way: the kingdoms of the North and the Sacred Warriors known as the Daughters of Munefa have been known to avenge slights for the Healing Circle with the violence the circle disdains.

Structure

At the head of the healing circle is the Archdruid, who is chosen from among the five largest circles along the Northern coast. Most of the Healing Circle is made up of highly decentralized local circles, each led by 1-3 elder druids. The Archdruid mostly acts as international coordinator and dispute arbitrator. Each local circle is divided between elder druids (the leaders), master druids (veteran members), druids, initiates, and Healing Adepts (alchemical masters who failed to connect to magic but still can brew potions). 
Moving between the circles and coordinating trade are the Pathfinders: druidic wanderers who are allowed to travel more and involve themselves in society. Pathfinders are nominated by the local circles, but given full permission by the archdruid. Pathfinders can also take 1-3 apprentices that can travel with them. These agents tend to work closely with the local squiddles and the wandering holy warriors known as the Daughters of Munefa. 
The current Archdruid is Galta Icetouch, an older Prism who has done her best to assert her authority as Archdruid and has brought many of the big local circles to heel. Galta is a bit gruff and can come off as arrogant, but she is a true believer who cares deeply for the circle and its values. Galta is something of a walking library, incredibly knowledgeable and amazingly well-read, and her understanding of arctic and Stildanian wildlife is unparalleled. She is also a druid of immense power, easily making her one of the top three moon druids alive.

Culture

Purpose and Pacifism

By joining the healing circle, all members agree to swear their lives to service of wisdom and universal good. They agree to leave the world of mortals to better enter the neutral space between worlds, the place beyond society where the purity of the mechanisms of life meets the ambiguous power of the spirit world. Religious dogma has little place in the Circle - whether the world is dream or reality, whether the true God is Ishkibal or Ustav, the druids have isolated themselves materially and spiritually from the rest of person-kind and no longer play by the same cosmological rules. Initiates ritually cut their souls off from their old selves and bind their souls to the Circle (in purely non-magical rituals that still are taken as concrete fact). So, the matter of whether the Circles are religious or not is a little messy and can vary a bit between individual groups. 
Within this new communal soul, violence that is not for the sake of immediate survival is considered unnatural, as is attachment to physical objects or people beyond the circle. A druid is to be an ascetic pacifist and social outsider beyond their isolated home, and living up to this ideal is essential to rising through the ranks. Conflict is always to be settled through mediation and understanding. De-escalation is considered an essential skill, and Circles consider offering mediation and neutral spaces for diplomacy for other factions to be a sacred calling. No group is too heinous to be offered a place to sit and talk; radical Kivish or callous bandits can be denied asylum or healing, but never a safe place for diplomacy or someone to talk to. Most everyone else is to be given asylum and medicine, though (if not potions, then medical treatment). Outsiders are welcome in the Circles, and their presence is considered an important test to see if initiates can be sociable and diplomatic without forming emotional attachments. 
This way of life can be very isolating and emotionally exhausting for Pathfinders (wandering druids), who have no sedentary home and must walk among the people of the world that they can never allow themselves to feel attached to. Among the sedentary circles, it can also create cult-like conditions; children born in the circle are pressured to join in order for their parents to be allowed to love them, and the social isolation of the circle makes leaving it a total loss of all friends and family. 
As a final note, healing circles tend to consider cities to be dangerous and spiritually polluting. Cities detach their residents from the realities of the world and of nature, they isolate their subjects from the universe and convince them that social rules are physical ones. Cities kill nature because they cannot place the fragile balance of ecosystems into an urban relationship of domination and greed. The bigger and more polluting the city, the more detached from the realities of the world it is and the more spiritually damaging attachment to it can be.

History

The Healing Circle of Boram was founded in 1311 by Kamdra the Stormbreaker, a moon druid of legend who brought together the best druids and healers of several continents to create an organization that could truly do good and act as political mediators and healers. Kamdra's organization flourished under her leadership, until it finally attracted negative attention from the militaristic Empire of Kizen in 1370. Kizen attacked the Southern reaches of the Circle and threatened to press further, but Kamdra sacrificed herself to kill the empress and disrupt their invasions - allowing the druids to escape the empire's clutches. After Kamdra's death, the circle floundered and fragmented - no one could replace the druid of the ages. Divided, the circles' effectiveness crumbled and the organization began to decline. It wasn't until 1460 that one of the elder druids, Ormot of Ikaram, was able to convince and coerce the others into rejoining as a single entity. The new Circle was initially still a bit decentralized, but it had an enforceable code and hierarchy now. The Circles drew away from society and towards one another culturally, though not necessary politically. 
From 1460 to 1640 the reforged Circle played a very active political role. The archdruids led with a large, increasingly centralized administration, and directed the Healing Circles to use their influence to shepherd political and commercial elites towards more long-term sustainable (but still profitable) systems of power. Some archdruids were corrupt, others were pious, but few took steps away from centralization and power. That changed significantly with the Great Flight of 1640, when the Kingdom of Varinok (the state North of Kizen) was able to tempt Healing Circle elders who disliked the current direction into forming their own, state-partnered Healing Circle in Varinok. The twin Archdruids spent the next 40 years fighting a petty and sporadic war that undermined the Circles' authority substantially, before a greater disaster struck further South: a coup in Kizen by religious extremists who openly rallied their empire with dreams of continent-wide destruction. Both Archdruids held an emergency meeting in 1680 to try and negotiate a settlement, and the druids of Varinok prepared to evacuate back North. The Council of Ongol lasted 7 years, from 1680 to 1687, as waves of other dissenting druids descended on the council to try and push their own ideas. Thankfully, the druids were able to evacuate during this time and the Circle was able to rally against Kizen one last time. Their economic and military might was basically paper airplanes thrown at a tank, but the Circles did their best to make Kizen's expansion Northward as difficult and fruitless as possible. Their work evacuating communities and feeding refugees did more good than their warriors did, and Kizen ended up investing little effort in invading the far North given the miniscule population or resources they got from attacking Ayvek in 1690. 
The Council of Ongol and the war against Kizen exhausted the Healing Circles and led to decentralization after the war's end. Unity and peace was seen as more valuable than centralized authority, and great autonomy had been returned to local circles in exchange for their wartime service. Their last major action as a centralized military entity was in 1736, when they sailed with Varinok's government-in-exile to liberate the kingdom, but after that the enthusiasm was gone. In the power vacuum left behind by the international druidic establishment, a new power - the Empire of Ikaram - rose from the heartlands of the Healing Circle. Ikaram did its best to play the part the archdruid once did, and it paired itself with the old druidic leadership to better do so. Ultimately, that empire fell in the 1950s, but it brought some temporary stability to the region and helped the druids transition to their current role.
As the druids became more comfortable with their more decentralized role as hyper-neutral actors, they began to spread out further and further across the continent. The late 1800s saw druidic circles exploring possible expansions into Kizen and Hain, though it quickly became clear that remaining close to the greater network would be quite difficult that far South. In 1893, the Archdruid called a great council in Ikaram for the largest circles to iron out a solution, and a formal alliance with a newly-risen Promised Path Kivish Holy Order - the Daughters of Munefa, maritime holy warriors who act as merchants and mercenaries along religious lines and act as international protectors of the Promised Path - to keep the circles across Stildane connected. This alliance has stood the test of time, though it did lead to a messy religious-political crisis when the Daughters were purged from Varinok in 1941 and the new government of Varinok and the Healing druids clashed. Aside from that, the alliance has been mutually beneficial, with the Healing Circle providing wealth and legitimacy to the Daughters in a non-religious capacity, and the Daughters ensuring that the druids always had access to transportation and trade.

"A Druid's Work is Mending"

Founding Date

1311 ME

Type

Druidic Circle

Alternative Names

The Amber Circle

Location

Boram