A pain in my ass, that’s what the church is; a sword hanging over the head of every poor freak who calls the frontiers home.

It began a long-blooded time ago; something like four-thousand years by now. Could be less, I suppose. Even the nephilim can’t remember anymore. People say it was the ‘Era of Discord’. I’m not calling it that. Makes it seem more impressive than it really was. They throw around big words like ‘occult sorcery’ and ‘cataclysms’ and ‘apocalyptic power’. That’s window dressing, and about as useful as a lock on a coffin. A bunch of stupid people got high on their own authority and ruined everything for the sake of power.

That isn’t special. It happens every day.

The point is, the world was well and truly fucked. Well, more than it is today, I guess. Half the folks were dead and the other half were killing each other for what the corpses owed them. All that before a bunch of monsters realized that they could just take it all for themselves. Everyone who thought they could get out from under the thumb of the mage lords found the claws of nephilim waiting to crush them instead. I’m sure there were plenty of heroes at that time, rising up with the promises of a better tomorrow. They wound up in mass graves or eaten alive. History is built on the powdered bones of those who wished for better. It’s written by the victors. That’s the Paradise Church.

They were the first to spread that idea that humanity deserved its suffering. Says a lot about who we are that it’s what stuck. Nobody is free of sin. We’re all tainted by birth. That’s their creed, and they’ve kept to it. They saw the chaos that magic brought and rallied against it. They toppled the few mage lords that remained and the bloodiest nephilim vying for control of the Heartland. Don’t mistake them for heroes, though. Saints are only called so after the fact. They were shining thugs; a force of zealots united by belief. You can’t be one without ‘the other’, and nothing kindles conviction like hate. Their codex was penned on a hatred of magic: specifically, magic in our hands. We reached for the stars and were punished for our arrogance, or so they blather. Ironically, they would go on to become the greatest source of magic in the world.

To their credit, it is different. Blood and belief power sorcery, and where traditional sorcerers and nephilim rely on the former, the faithful use the latter. Spells that reject spells. Barriers, bindings, the incineration of the mystical. Disorder smothered by dogma. It allowed them to crush what they didn’t subjugate, turning their own powers against them. Church magic destroys nightmares too; burns them without silver like something out of a fairy tale. They only thing it doesn’t do is kill humans; they do that the old fashioned way.

The first time I saw a paladin work, I’ll admit, I was impressed. It was only my second time in the sun after escaping the undercity, and I was determined not to go back. I stumbled through the streets of Veridian; a gangly little shit half wide-eyed to stare at the sights and half squinting because I’d never been in daylight. That’s when I came across a crowd. They stood outside a run-down old shack that I only later learned was the city church. It didn’t see much use in the Baal family capital; not a huge appetite for it among vampires. Despite that, people gathered and watched a man in prayer. He was a beacon, lifting hearts with a word and bringing forth power without so much as a drop of blood spilt. He conjured a flame that didn’t burn him and chanted a hymn that purified a body stained with nightmare blood. I was a stupid little girl who had only ever seen mages eating corpses in the depths. Still, sometimes I think about that day and I remember being so…afraid.

 It was warm like friction, or a fever. It was light like a lamp, not the sun. I went back to the undercity after that. The church hates its enemies; and that’s something I can respect, but deep down, those pious believers hate themselves most of all.

If it was out in the frontier, I might understand. Here, you stray too far from a city or town and a nightmare will eat your organs. With that threat, it would only be natural to look to prayer. But the church operates in the ‘Paradise’ they sanctified, where those things are rarer than an innocent in the undercity. There is no goal to be achieved. They pray. They torment. They live and die. Punishment is their reward. There’s no more grand goal to be achieved. They hurt themselves because they think that if they don’t, somehow the world will end. Some say there’s power in that; comfort in taking the pain into their own hands. Maybe there is. But it’s not something I can ever do. Maybe we do deserve to suffer, but I’d rather find strength in defying destiny than accepting it.