Beyond the Western Deep

If you didn’t catch our announcement on social media, the next page of Chapter 4 has proven a little trickier than anticipated, so this week we’re going to take the opportunity to shed some light on some fun Western Deep DEEP LORE. Or is that just “Western Deep Lore”? I’m not sure.

Anyway, thank you all for your patience, and please enjoy learning some more about the felis and the Scholars of Gair!

 

To all citizens of these Four Kingdoms, the Scholars (with a capital S!) of the Spire are a common sight not just throughout the fair city streets of our capital of Gair, but the entire world. 

While we Scholars are out traveling and collecting the knowledge that will see the felis people one day ascend to the Vale, we are encouraged to do so without weapons or accompaniment by armed guard. The most honest accounts require subjects to be completely at ease, almost completely unaware that their deeds are being recorded. Sharp, pointy objects held in reserve tend to agitate most Dunians, after all.

The long and short of it is, we travel the land seeking to record history as it is; required to write our accounts in a very specific, objective way, employing a writing style that most non-Scholars would consider to be overly technical at best and downright unreadable at worst. But our goal is not to record history for popular dissemination or for educational purposes–our goal is to capture what happened as close-to-accurate as possible because our very existence, our very purpose, hinges on capturing this knowledge.

It’s not often stated plainly so I’ll reiterate it here just so it’s clear: the Scholars of the Spire, and many among the felis, do not believe in a singular high power. That is to say, unlike the commonfolk in the Dock Wards who believe in the Fisher God (a divine felis who never fails to make a catch and is capable of feeding all who ask), the Scholars believe that the entire world is the higher power, and we were put here to understand it. 

And so the belief goes: once we have fully comprehended the world around us, seen all there is to see, learned all there is to learn, the shackles of this reality will be broken, and the felis will ascend to a higher plane of consciousness.

Now, before you say anything, NO, not every felis Scholar literally believes that after objectively describing every single grain of sand in the world we will somehow spirit ourselves away to a grander reality. Most felis believe that a “total understanding of the world” is less about accounting literally everything and more about understanding the mechanisms that govern it. Rather, it’s not about counting every grain of sand, but understanding why the grains are where they are.

An oft-heard phrase you might hear within the Spire walls is “Paradise abounds.” This was once uttered in complete seriousness, intending to serve as a reminder that the secret to eternal bliss was secreted away in the mundane that lay all around us. Now, it’s more often heard as a kind of sarcastic quip, an idiom that serves as an effective shorthand for “Nothing we do matters, but it’s not like we have any better ideas.”

Yet. 

That’s just for the Scholars of the Spire. 

There is another sect within the Spire of Gair that is less understood, less appreciated, and also widely feared.

For while we Scholars go about our business of observing history, the Sentinels of the Spire make history.

Yes, it is not widely known, but the Spire of Gair does indeed retain its own military force independent of the Kishari army. These are not the guards holding court at the gates of the Spire–those are more ceremonial than anything else, a small cadre of ex-Kishari soldiers assigned to protect their most valuable national asset: knowledge.

Imagine, if you will, that a Scholar returned home to the Spire of Gair with their collected works written, all observed knowledge catalogued strictly to the standards required. This knowledge is checked, and double-checked. It is compared to the existing tomes on the subject, to ensure that everything written is consistent with what came before, and any proper throughlines that must connect past and present exist.

Now imagine that what was written, catalogued, and filed away was wrong. 

This happens more than any Scholar would care to admit–it runs counter to our way of thinking after all! But in this particular instance, there was once a Scholar named Gracchus who correctly and accurately observed a peace treaty between two vulpin merchant families in Navran. At the meeting, the entire affair was revealed to be a sham–a scheme by one vulpin merchant family to lure the other to a high profile meeting. As the story goes, assassins burst forth from the sand like elemental spirits, slaying everyone at the negotiation, including Gracchus.

It is not known who among the Scholars decided to take actions into their own paws, but truly their deeds echo well into the present: they renounced the robes of the Scholars and instead donned the clothes of commoners. They entered Navran under the guise of merchants and travelers, and they began a targeted campaign against both of the vulpin merchant families. They disrupted their trade, set fire to caravans, and even kidnapped members of both families demanding that the false treaty be recognized as truth. In effect, these rogue Scholars were editing history, turning reality to what had already been written, for the good of their people.

A new treaty was recognized after a matter of months, and both families sit together on the Vulpin Council to this day.

Nowadays, the Sentinels of the Spire do not simply seek to enforce incorrectly catalogued yet “felis-preferred” historical accounts. Quite the contrary, their aims over the last several generations have changed to be more… dare I say benevolent. 

There is evil in this world, and there always will be. As passive observers, it can be difficult to simply record it and acknowledge it as yet another line on a scroll to get filed away in a library.

The Sentinels are not passive observers.