The Inquisition of Cleth-Aurix

The Inquisition’s first century was spent suppressing rival temple courts and establishing a single legal language for religious crime. Its influence grew after the Ember Concord, when the Draknaar priesthood granted Cleth-Aurix authority over unauthorized prophecy, relic trafficking, and contact with extraplanar entities. The order’s first major triumph came during the Glass-Tongue Crisis, when it exposed a prophetic movement that had replaced official scripture with living crystal tablets. Although the movement was genuinely dangerous, Cleth-Aurix destroyed entire libraries while eradicating it, creating the tradition of classifying inconvenient history as infectious doctrine. During the Ash Crown Interregnum, several inquisitors refused to recognize a priest-king accused of falsifying divine omens. The resulting civil conflict nearly destroyed the order. Its watershed moment came when High Inquisitor Serak Vhal ordered the burning of the Inquisition’s own central archive rather than allow a rebel army to seize records concerning the Vault of the First Tear. The act saved the regime but erased generations of evidence. Since then, Cleth-Aurix has treated control of information as inseparable from protection of faith. In recent decades, the order has expanded beyond spiritual policing. It now guards restricted ruins, monitors border traffic, supervises sanctioned scholarship, and uses emergency statutes to investigate political dissent. Its public reputation remains formidable, but internal factions increasingly disagree over whether the Inquisition should defend the Theocracy, defend the sacred law, or determine the difference between the two.