Compromise and Conceit

The last of the lost ones …

While they sojourned in The Reach the characters killed a death priest who was committing foul acts in the old tombs of many planets. They have been offered a job traveling back to the priest’s origin planet and avenging the damage he has done in other planets, as well as finding out why, but while they were in The Reach they had no idea who he was or where he was from. They recovered some documents of his but they could not read them, and they expected that they would need to retrace the priest’s journey from planet to planet to find out where he came from, a long and exhausting task. However, when they visited the Oracle at Niscorp 1743 they showed her the books, and she was able to immediately identify their origin. They were, she told them, books written in the language of the Cult of the Last Barrier. She told them all she knew on this Cult and its mysterious origins.

The Cult of the Last Barrier

My halo a crown, a crown of bones I’ll hate

I wear a robe, the robe of souls I’ll burn

Under the shroud

Where seeds of chaos will grow

Waking the dead, entering the ethereal

The Cult of the Last Barrier is the name commonly given to an entire society of nomadic remnants, who live in three giant sub-light spacecraft and travel from planet to planet like celestial nomads. The name is taken from the cultural history of these people themselves, but they do not refer to themselves as a society; they simply call themselves The Last Barrier. They are one of only a few remnant societies that are genuinely space-faring, but one of  multitude of nomadic space-faring societies scattered across the Confederacy. Unlike most of these societies, they do not consider themselves to be part of the Confederacy, and although they benefit from its post-scarcity society wherever they travel, they have little regard for its rules or norms, and they jealously protect themselves from interference. Although they welcome trade and allow some small anthropological research, they are a closed society who give away little to the outside world, and do the barest minimum required to be tolerated in Confederate space. They are rumoured to be older than the Confederacy itself, but little is known about their history. This secrecy is not uncommon in remnant societies, although it is rare in those with existing space travel, and there is some debate as to whether they can be considered uplifted. This scholarly – and occasionally legal – debate is intensified by their two genuinely unique properties: the common practice of necromancy, and their use of living spaceships.

From the Ashes of Angels

A new day is dawning

My world is prepared, barriers dissolving

They no longer hold

I know

Dreaming in symmetry

No gravity, the enemy

This resonance will be in exordium

The Last Barrier live in three spaceships that have been constructed from the husks of ancient interstellar Behemoths. Although these Behemoths appear not to be sentient, they are still in some sense alive, and appear to be in some form of symbiotic relationship with their inhabitants, though understanding this relationship is complicated by the Barrier’s insistence that one of the three ships is actually undead. The three ships reflect three aspects of the life that Barrier members live, and are divided between three separate religious cults:

• The Shared Creation is the ship on which all members of the Barrier are born, and is maintained by a cult of life and healing that claim to practice a kind of priestly magic based on worshiping life, the sun and the feminine forces of creation. The shell of an ancient Behemoth somewhere in form between a squid and a ray, this ship is also used to grow food and supplies for the other two ships. When the ships travel between planets in full sub-light travel mode, this ship radiates light and appears to act as the guide for the other two ships.
• The Lost Eden is the ship where members of the Barrier live the majority of their lives, primarily in quiet contemplation and study, or working in basic manufacturing and repair work to maintain their lifestyle. It is similar in shape to a giant mollusc or nautilus-like creature, though longer and thinner, and its many cavities and hollows offer many places for people to live and work. The Lost Eden is run by a cult of warrior monks, who worship order and knowledge. They provide the technical skills to maintain the ships, and organize the laws and rules of the whole society. Most outside observers liken them to a theocratic dictatorship.
• The Necromanteion is the ship that the Barrier claims is undead. Shaped like a huge dead spider or a kind of starfish, it radiates almost no light and its cramped hallways and tunnels are dimly lit and silent. This ship is run by a cult devoted to death, eternity, destruction and silence, and it is on this ship that the death priest must have originated. All members of the Barrier come here to die, or are brought here after their death, and it is at the centre of this ship that the Barrier is rumoured to maintain a kind of spiritual force that contains the memories of all the souls of all the generations of the cult of the Barrier – a kind of after-death backup, that never gets used for resleeving but is visited by elders of the death cult to seek advice and knowledge.

These ships are huge – perhaps twice the size of an Ocean class confederate ship – but sparsely populated, almost empty in the case of the Necromanteion. There are no recorded instances of interstellar behemoths of this kind ever being witnessed in the Confederacy, which gives many scholars reason to think that the Last Barrier come from beyond the Confederacy. The Barrier themselves deny this. They say that the ships are the bodies of their dead gods, and that they originated within the Confederacy. If challenged on this, their representatives argue that the ancestor memory at the heart of the Necromanteion would confirm it, if outsiders were allowed to ask.

This Priesthood

Time for initiation, the origin of all

To be revealed

Buried down

Deep in hallowed ground

The flame of life

Will burn out

The Last Barrier are controversial, of course, for their practice of necromancy. Because the Confederacy cannot accept fully the existence of such a thing, it is not possible for the Confederacy to oppose it or to demand it cease, but it is clear that the Last Barrier’s priests are incredibly powerful and up to no good. They are capable of sustaining their population through years of sub-light travel between stars, and are also able to somehow compel most of their society into a kind of quiescent semi torpor to reduce their activity during this stage of travel. They also claim to maintain a backup of the souls of all their dead stretching back to the beginning of time, which would require a degree of storage and energy that is unheard of even for the Confederacy.

Many scholars believe that the priesthood’s vast powers are drawn at least in part from the spaceships they occupy. These spaceships draw upon subspace power to move, to maintain body temperature and also to construct fields and atmospheres around their bodies which protect their hosts, and many scholars believe that the priesthood are able to draw on these powers when they work their strange rituals. If the Necromanteion is dead then this might explain also its ability to travel through space with the other two ships; they seem to exert some kind of subspace field over it, although there is also evidence of power generation of some kind happening within the ship. Unfortunately the organic structure of the ships and their strange functions prevents deep scans of their internal functions, in the case of the Necromanteion preventing even a proper understanding of the internal layout of the beast’s empty halls. Occasionally scholars have pushed for a military takeover of the vessels so that their full function can be explored, especially given the apparently unique ability of the Last Barrier’s priests to manipulate subspace and hyperspace, in contravention of most theories of how priest magic works. The Confederacy has resisted these demands, and for now allows the Last Barrier to move freely within its borders so long as it obeys basic laws.

Such a position of non-interference and the moral relativism underlying it would likely disappear if the Confederacy were made aware that the Last Barrier had been employing necromancy outside of its borders, and interfering with other remnant societies’ burial practices. Unless, of course, the Confederacy is keeping the Last Barrier free of interference for darker reasons of its own. Perhaps the authorities of the Confederacy see some value in courting the favour of those who can manipulate death itself. Or perhaps they know more about this mysterious society of wandering priests and necrophiles than they have been willing to reveal to their own scholars …

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