The House of Waking and Sleeping
The House of Waking and Sleeping is an arm of the Pax, and a sizeable fraction of the Imperial Cult, although it doesn't look like it to outsiders. While the worship of the Empress is the most obvious arm of the Imperial Cult, with an ostentatious temple that usually doubles as a civic monument is a fixture of every city paying tribute to the Empress, the understated Waking House in a city and its black caravans that leave laden with the dead on a monthly basis are far less an object of concern, once a tributary gets over the idea of an order of necromancers as a respectable option for a funeral. When people think at all about The House, they think not of the local Waking House, and its serene priest who never leaves its walls and is always ready to counsel grief and pain, but the feared image of a Lyctore, under orders from the Empress to remove those who have displeased her. The fear of the one-man Legios that make up the public face of the house mostly masks a relatively innocuous, if omnipresent organization.
The House of Waking and Sleeping holds that all that is, is merely a deception of a single intelligence which is, at best, indifferent, and at worst actively malicious. This intelligence has ensnared all life within an illusion of its construction, beyond which there is either, nothing, or something unknowable. To exist within this delusion is to suffer, either by the stressful nature of daily life, or to form attachments and connections to things which are not real. That pain arises from a relation between a subject and an object, neither of which truly exist, is one of the cruel ironies foisted upon all things by the great delusion, according to the priests of the house. The escape from this is, ultimately, death, but death with a cultivated understanding of the true nature of 'reality'. The occasional merciful and omnicidal heretic comes from this philosophy, but the general understanding is that escape is inevitable, and generosity both through providing for those suffering and cultivating their understanding of the truth is better than indiscriminately murdering people as a method of saving them from this demiurge. The House, as a result, operates many of the poorhouses, alms houses and soup kitchens in The Pax. To voluntarily hold oneself back is thus considered an incredible act of compassion, and by the same token, to deliberately sabotage another's escape, by ensaring them as an intelligent undead, is an incredibly vile thing. And so, while the order very effectively makes use of the undead, whom they keep both gilded and in very good condition, they exclusively use mindless undead, and consider the existence of intelligent undead to be a terrible cruelty both to the deceased and to those upon whom they usually prey.
It's probably this limitation that makes them as acceptable to so many cultures as they are. Many peoples have strong taboos surrounding the dead, and respecting their corpses, and the House's meticulous practices of embalming and preservation, as well as the lack of obvious magical cruelty commonly associated with the craft of necromancy.
The House is based out of Ctezibond, in the House from which they take their name.
Type
Religious, Organised Religion
Permeated Organizations
Location
Controlled Territories
Comments