The Immortal Cult:
Founded in the late second age, at its peak, its reported size was over 10,000 known acolytes and 2,000 priests. Based in the city of Kadųathet, it gathered around the Kesebet Bay and expanded throughout the south of the Azuna Desert and the Plemmyra Savannah. Their bastion was the Great Ziggurat of Basara, called by southerners as the Ziggurat of Başra. From here, the cult grew under the leadership of the Grand Hierophant.
Early Formation:
Despite its monumental and militaristic legacy, the cult began humbly; its exact origins are obscure. One story states that an excommunicated priest by the name of Iblis Al-Rasul formed a spiritual philosophy which took root in the south and eventually grew blasphemous to the established Eastern Syncretic Church. The philosophy in question held that all things of essence belonged to opposing cosmological energies, Negative and Positive. Therefore, it is an intrinsic end to this philosophy that within the Positive and the Negative there exists a Highest Positive and a Highest Negative, which are themselves the purist expression of their own nature. Iblis whispered of this to his followers and taught them that the Gods and Angels under the faith of THE ONE and The Many were but phantom expressions of a higher essence.
In this philosophy, THE ONE represents the Highest Positive, while Destiny, adversary of THE ONE and of Being, represents the Highest Negative. But Iblis' theology became truly heretical once it introduced a doctrine described in apocrypha of the Eastern Syncretic Church as the Rationale of Positive and Negative, which attempts to fundamentally explain what Positive and Negative is. Iblis argued that Positive is fundamentally additive, while Negative is reductive. Yet the heresy lies in the application of this idea to divinity. Iblis argued as such: if Positive is fundamentally additive, then Being must've begun from a state of fundamental negativity in order for positivity to be added. Therefore, Destiny would necessarily predate THE ONE in order for THE ONE to be the Highest Positive. After all, it would be necessary for THE ONE to have added to a state of existence that predates positivity in order for Positivity to be, whereas Negativity would be fitting as the original and primordial, since its subtractive nature suits the required condition of absence needed for positive addition to exist.
This heresy conflicted with both the Eastern Syncretic Church's and the Orthodox Syncretic Church's established theology of THE ONE, which asserts that THE ONE is the beginning of Being and father of free will. Nothing existed before THE ONE, HE came first, and then argued with Destiny. The result was that will was divided from one into many, and Being became a separate existence from Abyss. What Iblis taught was a clear challenge to the established doctrine of the Eastern Syncretic Church, and thus the priest who authored such beliefs and spread them among the masses was cast out.
In time, the Immortal Cult's teachings grew further from THE ONE and The Many. They taught that in the beginning the world was colorless, and all was as it should rightly be. Things were destined, and followed their due course unquestionably. Then THE ONE came and introduced color, which was distracting and made the physical world deaf to Destiny's will. The cult claimed that THE ONE used color to seduce the physical world into disobedience against Destiny. HE then made music, bread and wine, and other distractions to erase the will of Destiny from the world, until a different consciousness began to occupy where Destiny rightly should have been.
Eventually, this dualistic philosophy crystallized into the mythology of two divine beings trapped in an eternal cosmic battle. THE ONE, whom the Immortal Cult's supplicants called Anu: God of Death and Light, and Destiny, whom the Immortal Cult's supplicants called Lişdom, or Lichdom as he was recorded by later western scholars: God of Life and Shadows.
Of course, the aforementioned theology is a true and faithful recounting of the cult's beliefs, but the founding at the hands of an excommunicated priest is disputed. Some believe that Iblis was not the founder of the Immortal Cult, but instead became its first Grand Hierophant, whose full title is the Grand Hierophant of Black and White. Of the original tales of the cult, the second most popular theory states that the Immortal Cult began when one of the Galahadrim of Avalanor came to Azunain as a refugee, fleeing from a land ravaged by war and famine.
The elf's name was Sahtar and he spoke of the Bone-Whistler Suah, son of Éamor the Black and the first of the giants. Suah was a bane to the elves of Avalanor and had tormented their dead by drawing resentment back into flesh with his bone-chilling whistle. Supposedly, Sahtar was a survivor of Suah's gloam, and taught the children and the poor of Kadųathet about the true nature of life and death. These listeners thus became the first supplicants, and from among them rose one boy named Iblis, whom Sahtar blessed with magic.
This tale is among the more mythical explanations of the cult's origins and it helps explain why the cult became so concerned with life and death, and eventual necromancy. The cult was always from its conception an organization that focused more on epistemology and ontology than ethics. This does not mean however, that they were always beyond morals or empathy. What they became is surely a tragedy. Their grand objective, as stated in their heretical texts, was to achieve a state of balance between the energies in their soul; equal parts positive and negative sustained without disturbance. This they called equality, for they believed an entity in perfect harmony with light and dark, good and evil, life and death… was one that could transcend the limits of either category by itself. To the Immortal Cult, a being who is both equally as alive as they are dead is therefore beyond the constraints of life and death intrinsically, for neither can sufficiently classify them, nor contain the ontology of their being.
The cult's arcane Ebon Trees, Vampyres, and other residues of their dark history were ultimately the results of such attempts to fuse life and death. Although, in scholarly circles, the former examples listed were considered the height of the Immortal Cult's success, the cult itself considered them to be mere failures. All undeath, in the end, was but a failed attempt at transcendence in their eyes.
But where the second fable does not satisfy is in explaining how the actual organization of the cult began. It is known that the first Grand Hierophant was called Iblis Al-Rasul and he lived for at least 200 years according to records of the Umarad dynasty. But the cult's organizational structure only began to develop strongly after the conversion of prince Azad Kassim.
The third and final theory of the cult's origin attempts to explain organizational similarities with the Eastern Syncretic Church, and the efficacy of Immortal Cultists in affairs such as exorcism. It supposes that a group of traitorous priests of Ankhamet the White sought to seize divinity by stealing it from the Primordial Dragon of White. Thus they began worshipping His primordial sibling Éamor the Black and changed Ankhamet's name to erode His divine identity. To this end, they called the White One Lişdom, which may have been some compressed adaptation of Lahas-Al-Domaar, meaning: Of the False Domain.
This does not however explain the phonotactics behind Anu, which bears no resemblance to Éamor's Azunain name, Émamoré. Some skeptical scribes have suggested that this origin tale was morally convenient for the Azunain people, who revered Ankhamet and ultimately exterminated the cult during the civil war. It may be possible that Anu is a derivative adaptation of Azunain's Greater God of Death, whose name is itself an adaptation of the western name 'Az' from old Aurian. But no exact phonotactical evolution has been reliably established for this, and Az occupies a different realm than Éamor, although both are associated with cruelty.
Regardless of the cult's exact origins, its fate and legacy are among the most pivotal events in eastern history. For the first two centuries its growth would be slow, until the Plague of Attachments struck Azunain, leading to an uncanny influx of ghosts and undead. It was in this time that the prodigal wizard Azad Kassim would change the Immortal Cult's fortune and bring about the pinnacle of its success.
The Rise of the Immortal Cult:
It was in the year 1546 of the Age of Many Empires that the desert kingdom of Azunain was plagued by an infestation of ghosts. At this time, the cult had no grand ziggurats or great congregations. They were scarce, local, and persecuted into secrecy. It was a time when an unusual number of dead souls retained postmortem attachments and went on to plague living society with their resentments. Exorcisms of the Eastern Syncretic Church were frequent but costly and time consuming, and ultimately the priesthood had a limited number of qualified exorcists. The infestation was no mere inconvenience either. Space was limited in a kingdom where much of the land was desert. Each place where a ghost settled became a land that humans could not safely inhabit, which made the affair troubling for the kingdom's reigning powers.
It was at this time that the young wizard Azad Kassim was taken from his rural town in the south and raised to be a prince of the Qanuun, or Sovereign-Judge in the common tongue. The Qanuun of that time was Fadun̈anar Al-Abyassar II, one remarked by scribes for a reign of both elaborate courtly intrigue and tremendous material wealth. But he lacked one thing among his many children. Fadun̈anar had few magicians within his many seeds, for he was not himself of an inherited bloodline of magic. Thus he depended on a number of concubines from renowned wizardly families to produce children of arcane talent. These he would place within the Royal Magia, a council of nine Magi who served as instruments of the Qanuun's authority. Yet it presented a problem for Qanuun Fadun̈anar. The shortage of qualified heirs and dependency on external dynasties vexed him, and thus he adopted a common child of Iseeri descent that was rumored to have unparalleled magical talent.
It was quite a scandal for its time. Adoption could occur among the noble houses of Azunain, but never had there been a reigning Qanuun who adopted a boy not of some blood relevance to the dynasty. It mattered greatly to the Ankhali aristocracy, since the Qanuun was a divine judge; a chosen ordinance descended from the White One Himself, by the scriptures of the Eastern Syncretic Church. That the Qanuun adopted a lowborn of foreign ethnicity, and elevated this boy of a different caste to be a possible heir, greatly disturbed the court. But Fadun̈anar was insistent, for he saw Azad Kassim as his counterbalance to the growing influence of particular concubines and princes within his court.
It did not help the Qanuun's opposition that Azad Kassim's talent in magic was truly genius. He could grasp subjects of the arcane with remarkable ease, and accomplished himself as both a scholar and a duelist among the aristocracy of Azunain. Azad could recite the classical literatures by age ten, and studied mathematics, astrology, and divination with remarkable precision, becoming the Court Calendrical Revisor by age sixteen. But his most accomplished subject was alchemy, in which he performed transmutations and tempering with substances such as lead, sulfur, and natron. The latter was often used in death rites and corpse exorcisms, which later Umaradi scribes suggest may have been the beginnings of Azad's greatest accomplishment and folly.
At age twenty, Azad's court adversaries had long become a threat. No less than fourteen assassination attempts made it into the official record following his adoption by the Qanuun. But though Fadun̈anar II's favor was a great boon in his political standing, the Qanuun had begun to wither and approach death by the time Azad had reached adulthood. By his mid-twenties, his patron and adoptive father was bedridden. It is also at this time that Azad mastered healing magics and alchemy, which was an impressive feat in his time. Magic of the third age paled in comparison to what the wizards of Azad's time could do, and among his talents were mystical arts such as resuscitation, and the restoration of cleanly severed limbs.
Azad's troubled life in court however, extended beyond his own safety. He had married on the eve of his sixteenth birthday to his wife Zarin Kassim, who became the target of many rival princes in the Qanuun's court. An account by the scribe Haraḃûlal Al-Tefethulum records that Zarin Kassim was killed on seven occasions, each more excruciating than the last, with the exception of the final death. Assassins repeatedly targeted her, as either retaliation or a warning to the adopted prince. But each time they did, Azad Kassim would resuscitate his wife from death and find her killers to lay the cruelest judgement upon.
In a perverse sense, his adversaries were instrumental to the success of his career as a court Magi, for their machinations and assassinations helped him to perfect his healing magics, and the assassins themselves were ideal test subjects for refining his arts. Eventually, he had devised such spells as Traumatizia, or Trauma in the common tongue. A simple spell designed to share one's own memories with a spirit or ghost, and by exchange acquire access to that spirit or ghost's memory as well.
It was a spell he originally devised to assist in exorcising ghosts during a period when appropriate resources and personnel were scarce. Although the spell was later outlawed for its associations with necromancy, it was a great boon during the time of Azad Kassim's early life and raised his standing considerably in high society. This was followed by other achievements as well. Puppet-Mastery, and later Attachment Resonance were spells that pioneered exorcism and made them both easier and safer.
Puppet-Mastery allowed one to compel flesh like a puppet by using blood from the associated body as a medium, although this spell required that the corpse be relatively fresh and could not enable complex commands. It was later developed into classical undead puppetry magic, but began originally as a paralysis spell that targeted possessed corpses and enabled safer restriction of embodied ghosts for subsequent exorcism. Attachment Resonance, however, was the true breakthrough which enabled one to directly subjugate ghosts by overcoming their attachments through willpower and bending them to one's own will.
But as much as these achievements were his own, they were also born from the blood and pain of his wife. Azad Kassim had tortured and slain countless of the assassins who came for his wife, but none of his hot retribution would heal Zarin's mind, which broke into pieces each time she resuscitated again. By the gruesome sixth revival, Zarin had tragically lost the will to live, and so following her latest resuscitation, took to the balcony edge of prince Azad's tower and descended from its highest point to the lowest base. Azad witnessed this affair personally, and grew consumed by grief thereafter.
He became jaded with the royal court and vanished from the high society of Azunain; a boon, as his adversaries saw it. But they were wrong. Azad then journeyed south and returned to his old homeland, from before the Qanuun adopted him. It is strongly suggested that he came into contact with the Immortal Cult at this time and grew attached to their philosophy of Immortality through the harmony of the energies of life and death. Azad had observed what can easily be considered a similar phenomenon in ghosts and certain embodied undead that he had helped to exorcise before.
But as he absorbed the cult's doctrine, power changed hands in the capital. From the high throne of Sultaan̈ari, Qanuun Daruşetem Al-Abyassar VII rose to power and purged his siblings from positions of influence. Daruşetem VII would eventually send a few assassins to hunt Azad as well, but he gave it little effort and eventually discarded any concern for this adopted son of a bygone king.
Qanuun Daruşetem VII's early reign was marked by genuine success. He invested greatly in assisting the priests of the Eastern Syncretic Church to exorcise ghosts, and personally quelled a rebellion in the Green Desert led by disgruntled miners who contested the Sovereign tax. Mining settlements were among the poorest in Azunain, due to their proximity to the desert and frequent molestations by bandits. Thus, occasional rebellions like this were nothing unusual in the time of Qanuun Daruşetem VII. But the young Qanuun had no knowledge of what was to come.
It was in the year 1568 of the Age of Many Empires that the Iseer Thalasocracy closed the grain trade temporarily to relieve mass destruction in the Isles of Iseer, caused by a great flood. With this grain trade cut off, Azunain experienced food shortages in the west and south. Meanwhile, the Immortal Cult began to gain serious attention from the public once they started exorcising ghosts with remarkable speed and efficiency. The presence of the Immortal Cult in the south eventually began to surpass that of the Eastern Syncretic Church, creating religious tensions on top of the food shortages.
At an unknown point, the former Grand Hierophant, Iblis Al-Rasul passed away, and Azad Kassim was ascended as the new Grand Hierophant of the Immortal Cult. He began to deeply study the arts of life and death, and became the founder of the School of Necromancy. Azad Kassim pioneered magics surrounding undeath and spirits, devising spells that could manipulate, sooth, enflame, or otherwise compel resentment. Yet the prominence of the cult swelled its adversaries along with its growing membership. As new supplicants swarmed, so too did dissidents from the church. The Eastern Syncretic Church made it clear that the Immortal Cult was heretical, and those who followed it or preached its doctrine were sinners.
But this only further spiraled things out of the church's control. Given the opulent abundance of the church's coffers and its closeness with the reigning Qanuun, many of the poor in the south had begun to resent the church for its perceived blindness to the destitution of their lives. In the year 1570 of the Age of Many Empires, a group of disgruntled miners drove church exorcists from the mining village of Damųat who had come to exterminate a specter that the Immortal Cult had already dealt with.
From the records of the church, a priest and several acolytes ventured to the village of Damųat at the request of a civil officer. One of the accompanying acolytes on the journey later reported that the priest, father Desuran, was frustrated by the long and dangerous journey through the southern desert. Upon arriving, the team of exorcists were exhausted. But the villagers were hostile to the church and reportedly scorned them. One acolyte reported being spat on by a villager, others claimed foul words were said. At the inn where the team stayed overnight, they reported beds that were infested with bugs, and rodent intestines were supposedly found in at least one acolyte's food. By the time the team confronted the supplicants of the Immortal Cult, they were already in a state of high stress.
It was at this moment when the dispatched team discovered that the specter they had come to exorcise had been taken care of the day before by the cultists. A conflict broke out and one of the church officials struck a Senior Qualmenite (a priest of the cult). The public observed this and ousted the church exorcists from the village, killing an acolyte by accident in the process. What followed was a harsh decree from the Qanuun, whose sovereignty itself derives from the legitimacy of the church. Having killed a member of the clergy, this was cause enough to consider an act of treasonous rebellion. Thus, he ordered the complete eradication of the village including the women and children. From then on, news spread about the execution and it became a bonfire for the disgruntled south.
Certain speculative comments from the diaries of Azunain court officials suggest that the eradication of Damųat village was publicized by the Qanuun's enemies at court. While the intention originally may have been to damage the Qanuun's political prestige, the result turned out far more disastrous than even its supposed architects anticipated. Following what was called a massacre in the south, a rapid series of riots spread, troubling the land and ultimately driving the Qanuun to order martial law over the entire southern region.
Rebel bands were treated by the Immortal Cult's healers, and their numbers swelled amidst the militant actions of the Qanuun. In time, a great number of rebels came to join the ranks of the Immortal Cult, both as devoted supplicants and ambitious adversaries of the Qanuun. But this only served to deepen the divide between the persecuted cult and the sovereign powers of Azunain. Eventually, the kingdom began to see the Immortal Cult as rebel organizers, and ordered their extermination. This was the last straw that drove the cult into militarism, and its complicated history with forbidden magic.
The Civil War of Elehaweryn:
By the year 1571 of the Age of Many Empires, the cult had already become foremost experts in the novel field of necromancy and they had enough organizational structure to lead a genuine rebellion. Thus, the southernlands of Azunain seceded and dubbed themselves the kingdom of Elehaweryn, later compressed by western scholars as Elwynn. A great civil war would ensue that brought strife to all of Azunain, and the Grand Hierophant of the Immortal Cult became known as the Dreadful Bone Emperor. Azad Kassim carried an extraordinary and frightening ability to puppeteer an army of skeletons and bones single-handedly, including that of a great wyrm among his host.
Azad was thus an army of himself, and his followers brought on a great number of corpse-puppets and ghosts as well. Their Acolytes prepared the corpses and gathered the required components for magic. The Qualmenites raised puppets to bolster their forces and shield their living members from harm. It was the Qualmarchs who functioned as generals and commanders on the field of battle, and led entire battalions worth of puppets through the mere utterances expelled from their mouths. It can be rightly said that this hierarchy formed the spine of later magic corps in other kingdoms. Such was the efficiency of a small but well-organized and disciplined force of magicians.
Their armies were not just flesh puppets however. In the initial years of the war, scattered rebels and volunteer groups frequently operated alongside the cult and eventually congregated in places like the Great Ziggurat of Basara to form a proper army. The majority of these rebels were miners or craftsmen, Elwynn would begin the war with a large force of mortal soldiers to accompany their army of puppets, granting the newly declared kingdom a veritable horde which the Azunain standing army was relatively unprepared for.
But following this, there came a demand for food which the Elwynn rebels could not accommodate. There were two major suppliers who provided food to the Elwynnites, one was a grain merchant guild from Iseer. Although the largest trade guilds had closed most of their major shipping routes during the disaster that struck Iseer, the southern Fathanor Coastal route remained open. But there was a problem. The Fathanor Coastal route provided grain for five other major port cities in addition to Kadųathet. The diffusion of trade meant that large shipments were difficult to acquire at an affordable price from the Iseeri merchants. Iseer also had existing and ongoing trade contracts with Azunain, which further complicated exchange with the Iseeri merchants for Elwynn.
The second major grain provider for Elwynn was the Gennani city-state of Daphlebeth, below the River Ankh. The Gennani people had little love for Azunain and the ruling Ankhalil caste. But the majority of Elwynn's citizens were from the Awanet caste, descendants of Aegytos which ruled the desert before Azunain. This made the Gennani, who were driven south from the desert by the Ankhalil, sympathetic to the Elwynn rebellion. While many of the city-states remained neutral, Daphlebeth explicitly sided with Elwynn and helped to sponsor their rebellion.
However, in the year 1581, the second Kar'kashan invasion began. Hordes of Karesshi beastmen came up from beyond the Great South Sea and began to raid the north. While imperial Helios, in the far west, was the Kar'kashan's prime target, smaller hordes also marched on cities like Thern, Lithopolis, and An'tia. Daphlebeth was among the cities targeted as well. During a prolonged siege, they had no choice but to close their grain trade with Elwynn. This was the beginning of when things turned for the rebellion.
By the time a decade had passed, the Immortal Cult was transformed from a mystic cult of spiritualists into a strong military force. Their Qualmenites became experts in necromancy and their bone puppets became more sophisticated in functionality. The Qualmarchs began summoning territorial specter ghosts to guard their ziggurats, and vengeful revenants to act as vanguards in battle. Despite the cult's tremendous achievements, they were a mere 2,000 mages, many of whom, in the early days, could barely command one or two puppets. It wasn't until another ten years of war passed that the Qualmenites refined their corpse puppetry and learned to manipulate dozens or (exceptionally) hundreds of corpse puppets. The Immortal Cult of Elwynn won many early battles in the civil war due to the unexpected scale of the rebellion and no small contributions by Azad Kassim personally. But they soon began to lose ground, however, once the standing army of Azunain started to adapt to their unusual tactics.
The war continued for years, and eventually half of the Qualmarchs had died in battle (around year 1621 it is reported that the cult had significantly declined and letters from Ramian ambassadors report skepticism about the cult's ability to pay back their lenders). This led the Immortal Cult to further spiral into undeath. They took the willful attachments of the dead Qualmarchs and imbued them into weapons, forging Wraithian Artifacts which enabled the deceased Qualmarchs to persist by possessing the weapon's wielder. Qualmarch wraiths were among the oldest lived members of the cult's upper echelons, with the oldest in recorded history being Qualmarch Qavar̈ameth, who was 167 years old at the time of final rest during the Battle of the Ebon Veil.
Wraith transformation had become a common method used by the cult to recycle its dead members and preserve the wisdom of those members after death. It was originally a punishment the cult enacted on criminals to make them persist in eternal imprisonment forever, without the possibility of heaven or earthly pleasure. Bound to an object, a wraith could only be acted upon, and never act freely of its own accord. Such drastic actions were meant to signal strong leadership and help consolidate the resistance within the cult by harshly punishing dissidents. But by the fourth decade of the war, the cult saw it as necessary to use this extreme method to preserve the previous generations of their own leaders.
However, that they took this harsh punishment and made it into a utility of cult memorialism and leadership during their twilight years, demonstrates how desperate the cult became over time. By the fifth decade of the war, the vampyres, who were originally aristocracy in Elwynn, numbered less than ten and were driven to extinction after Elwynn's collapse.
The prodigal Azad Kassim led the Immortal Cult as Grand Hierophant for eighty odd years before his apparent death in mid-way the seventh decade of war, though the veracity is speculated. Leadership was then passed on to Grand Hierophant Ramethet Al-Rezar. As the last Grand Hierophant, he persisted in futile resistance against the kingdom of Azunain for another five years of war. He gathered what was left of the faith at Kadųathet, yet by then, the cult was a shadow of its former glory. Concerning their rebellion, it became apparent that the writing was on the wall. Only the most faithful and vengeful remained after Ramethet Al-Rezar took over. Broadly, the south was under Azunain control.
In the end, Ramethet Al-Rezar took the remaining upper echelons of the cult and gathered them in the Great Ziggurat of Basara, where they planted the Ebon Tree. They drained the tree of its black sap and consumed it together, from there followed a grand spell which left in the wake of its sundering a great spiritual vacuum to cover the land. Life was drained and the area around Kesebet Bay, including the great metropolis of Kadųathet and the silver mines, were lost to the spell. The land thereafter became barren, gray, and utterly dead. The grass turned ashened, as did the trees, and the animals, and the very soil itself. The spell also swallowed a tremendous portion of Azunain's military in the process, crippling the kingdom for seven generations. Thus after seventy years of war, the Immortal Cult was declared extinct.
Hierarchy of the Cult:
Now that the historical summary of the cult is concluded, this section shall discuss the hierarchy of the cult, and how it came to be militarized following the onset of the rebellion.
First were Acolytes, or sometimes uninducted supplicants. They began as attendants to the Qualmenites, and helped with rituals, sacraments, and ceremonies. But following the cult's militarization, the Acolytes became increasingly responsible for managing the dead. Be it cleaning corpses, preparing them for necromancy, or acquiring the bodies from battlefields or graves, the Acolytes formed the foundation of the cult's great army of undead.
Their lives were devotional and deeply rooted in abstinence and chastity. Acolytes lived in modest chambers that could accommodate up to two other supplicants and they spent most of their time attending to the ziggurats. Items of prayer were commonly found among the belongings of those captured or killed by the Azunain. Evidence of cult leadership suggests that Acolytes were not initially forced to do anything for the cult. They were originally disciples or students of a Qualmenite who sought to deepen their understanding of life and death through observation of the Qualmenite's work. Over time, volunteer work became a kind of patriotic calling for young boys and girls, who gathered around the Qualmenites to show their support for the cult.
Militarization later drove the nobility of the Acolytes' volunteer work into extreme ends. By the late stage of the war, Acolytes were volunteering as test subjects for the cult's experimental necromancy. The fruits of these sacrifices culminated in the conception of the Vampyres, creatures born from mortal supplicants who sacrificed their mortal lives to transcend life and death. The exact ritual is lost to time but the process was sufficiently gruesome for a desperate cult of heathens. It involved the draining of all blood from the body of the sacrificed acolyte, which was then replaced with the tar-like sap of the Ebon Trees.
The Ebon Trees themselves were the result of early necromancy experiments which the cult performed under less dangerous times. They rooted these trees at the pinnacles of their ziggurats, great symbols of the cult's aspirations. The Ebon Trees were both alive and dead, and yet utterly suspended in stasis. The trees could not grow nor wither, nor live or die. These trees were the source of much of the cult's later necromancy.
Acolytes who tended the tree were often selected and could volunteer to become Vampyres, undergoing the ritual and, if they survive, being ascended from the lowest ranks of the cult into aristocratic status. They frequently served as heralds, ambassadors, governors, and circumstantially as commanders of living armies. The last of the vampyres were exterminated along with the cult, however.
But while Acolytes had a rather variable role within the cult, the Apprentice Qualmenites were rather straightforward in their roles. Apprentice Qualmenite was not originally an official status of the cult at all. It began following the decline of Daphlebeth's grain trade. Qualmenites were in short supply on the homefront and most on the warfront were either embroiled in dangerous ongoing conflict or died in battle. But someone had to perform the rites, maintain the faith, and manage the peoples' worries. Thus exceptional Acolytes with experience and responsibility would be granted a title such as Honorary Qualmenite or Temporary Qualmenite, and would serve as the keepers of faith among the general populace.
The Apprentice Qualmenites effectively became the nominal priests following the war. They served as community leaders, ministers, and scribes. Their most essential responsibility however was distributing food following the collapse of the grain trade. If not for the careful and often ruthless management of food by the Apprentice Qualmenites, the Immortal Cult may have collapsed decades earlier.
But the true magicians of the cult were the Qualmenites. These were men primarily in their thirties or forties. They served as the core of the Immortal Cult's military following the war, and raised the cult's armies of the undead. All of the Qualmenites were wizards educated in the arcane arts of life and death. Chief among the responsibilities of the Qualmenites was the movement and command of the lesser undead, ghouls and bone puppets primarily. After many decades, the Qualmenites transitioned from mystic mentors and novice necromancers to veteran war mages. From the seniors among their rank, Qualmenites may have commanded some of the greater undead of the cult such as revenants and specters, but the majority of the Qualmenites were officers of the hordes. They were also direct attendants to the Vampyres of the cult.
At its peak, the Qualmenites numbered about 2,000 by Azunain reporting, but they declined considerably by the fifth decade of warfare following the transition of power to Grand Hierophant Ramethet Al-Rezar. They numbered a mere 100 or so proper members during his leadership. In the last days of the cult, the Qualmenites were hunted by inquisitors of the Eastern Syncretic Church, and their artifacts and manuals of spellcraft were later sealed in the vaults of the Qanuun.
Then there were the Qualmarchs, who numbered seven in total. The Qualmarchs were the advisors of the Grand Hierophant and prior to the civil war, they served as leaders of important spiritual centers such as temples or ziggurats. They were also appointers of the Qualmenites and representatives of the faith at major conventions. It was during the civil war that they were elevated to commanders, and after the advent of the Higher Vampyres, who could create lesser undead spawn from their venom, the Qualmarchs became the chief researchers and stewards of the rebellion.
Qualmarchs were also the direct attendants of the Ebon Trees, and administrators of the Vampyre transcendence ritual, by which they produced their most powerful undead subjects. The management of undead hordes became the Qualmarchs most demanding responsibility, including the logistical problem of maintaining a large ongoing force. Unlike the Qualmenites who spent much of their time on the front lines, Qualmarchs spent their days in strategy rooms, councils, and courts. When making an appearance directly on the field of battle, the Qualmarchs were accompanied by hundreds of greater undead.
They were also the archivists of the cult's theology. Record keeping was among their most important responsibilities, but by the fourth decade of the war, they mostly relied on the preservation of knowledge possessed by older generations through wraithian artifacts. This was primarily due to the lack of time and personnel available to keep the records of the cult. It was an imperfect system, as the wraithian artifacts maintained only fragments of their original consciousness, and often lacked a perfect recollection of the past. But since the cult was diminished, they could not afford to store paper scrolls or leatherbound books anymore, and could not maintain a large library either. The last large archive of the Immortal Cult was housed in the Great Ziggurat of Basara in the city of Kadųathet and it was lost along with the city and Kesebet Bay following the cult's final desperate measures.
The last in the hierarchy of the cult was the Grand Hierophant of Black and White, who was Azad Kassim during the cult's golden years. The Grand Hierophant was generally responsible for interpreting the cult's doctrine and their theology, they were also chief representatives of the faith in matters of diplomacy and, during the war, supreme commanders of the cult's army. Azad Kassim himself was, in many respects, the true guardian of the cult's faithful. Historians argue that without him, the cult would have crumbled in less than three years under the assault of Azunain's military and the Eastern Syncretic Church's inquisition.
Alone, Azad Kassim commanded an entire legion of corpses. His bone and flesh puppets carried a phantom gloam in their eyes and brought terror to the armies of Azunain. Alone, he besieged the capital of Azunain, and brought forth his morbid host to the steps of the Marble Palace in Sultaan̈ari. Upon the wall of memories in the Qanuun's palace, a carving of the Dreadful Bone Emperor was immortalized, depicting his undead host following from his shadow, where he moved through the courtyard which once he called home in his own youth. Azad had long known that the cult would not prevail in a prolonged war against Azunain. He besieged the capital in the hopes that it could decisively cripple Azunain and give time for the cult to fortify its hold on the south. But in the end, Azad Kassim's attempt to conquer the city failed, and this became the beginning of a long, drawn out conflict, as he feared it would.
The failed siege at Sultaan̈ari made Azad Kassim into the number one public enemy of the faithful. Believers of THE ONE and The Many saw him as the face of R̄ësha, called The Obsidian Man in religious canon, or sometimes, The Deceiver. He was observed as an agent of Destiny, a schemer and seducer who forged a dark kingdom of evil. Armies of zealots flocked from not just the Azuna Desert, but from the Heartlands, from Arcticus, and even Troyan merchants from the far west helped to sponsor a war against the Immortal Cult and Azad Kassim. Before long, Azad was faced with adversaries across the known world.
Yet he never forgot his original purpose in joining the cult. Azad spent decades researching life and death with the Qualmarchs. Together they fought tooth and nail, expended countless resources and volunteers' lives, as well as those of prisoners and traitors; enemies and deserters; the unfaithful as well. The list of test subjects grew more and more gruesome as the cult became increasingly desperate. At some point in the fifth decade of the civil war, it was recorded by Azunain scribes that the number of undead in Elwynn had surpassed the number of living people within the realm.
All of Azad's research was recorded in his grimoire, Parma Cuilqualmë—The Book of Life and Death. His research was the pinnacle of the cult's necromancy and it culminated in Azad's theory of Immortal Undeath, which was dubbed Project Lişdom in his research notes. It pertained to resurrection magic, a subject which Azad had dedicated his life to. He desired to surpass mere resuscitation and create a body that was ontologically higher than death itself. Such a body, by his speculations, would never die and thus need not to fear death. His obsession went beyond spiritualism or theology, from his notes it was clear that Azad desired to make loss an impossibility. Project Lişdom was the ultimate goal of the cult and its leader, something which he failed at in the end, for the project was never finished before the cult's annihilation.
Ultimately, as impressive as their forces were, the Immortal Cult's defeat was a consequence of the unfortunate timing of their prominence. Capable as they were, the Immortal Cult was plagued by economic and logistical issues, and the troubles of organizing a massive religious community in the midst of war with a longstanding rival institution. They were the first organized army of magicians in history, and the first necromancers. But remarkable as these feats are, the reality is that the Immortal Cult was trying to build a foundation in a period of turbulence against a superior force. A force whose foundations, logistics, and economics were already established.
Thus the Immortal Cult was exterminated and its experiments were brought to an end. The terror and grandeur they once inspired are little more than ghosts of the past now, and necromancy as a practice has never been ascended to such heights of power ever again. So ended the Immortal Cult.