The Consecrated Order · The Soul-Bound
Within The Kingdom of the Sun-Kissed Crown, there exists a subfaction so secretive and so blasphemous that even other branches of the Church speak of them only in whispers.
They are known as the Holy Knights.
They are neither holy
nor knights
nor sanctioned by anything that could be called divine.
The Holy Knights arose from a single theological heresy masquerading as revelation:
If souls are divine property, then harvesting them for divine purpose is not sin — it is stewardship.
Using forced labor camps, death marches, and industrial-scale oppression, the Church created conditions where souls would break free from bodies en masse.
Those souls are not released.
They are captured.
The Unhatched Atrocity
At the heart of the Holy Knights’ power lies a massive crystalline structure, hidden deep beneath the Church’s most sacred citadel.
Official doctrine calls it:
A Divine Reliquary
The truth is far worse.
It is a dragon egg.
A living, unhatched dragon — one of the Neutral Gods by divine law — forcibly suspended in stasis and encased in a soul-binding crystal lattice.
Every soul that dies under extreme suffering within Sun-Kissed labor systems is drawn into the crystal, feeding the egg and empowering the Knights.
The dragon has not hatched.
Not because it cannot.
But because it is being used.
The Holy Knights do not draw power from faith alone.
They are empowered by:
stolen souls
compressed suffering
harvested death
As the crystal egg grows more saturated, the Knights gain:
enhanced physical resilience
soul-anchored abilities
unnatural endurance
divine-like resistance to magic and weapons
They grow stronger the more people die.
They do not care who those people are.
This act violates multiple inviolable laws of Atherfall:
Dragons are Neutral Gods and cannot be enslaved
Souls are not resources
Divine power cannot be farmed without consequence
Even the Pantheon of Order does not openly endorse this.
They tolerate the Sun-Kissed Crown.
They do not claim the Holy Knights.
This is not Order.
This is theft dressed as sanctity.