the Submerged Order

The Submerged Order

“What is forgotten does not die. It waits, salt-wrapped and dreaming, beneath the breath of waves.”
— Archsalt Ezzarion of the Vault’s 13th Seal

Overview

The Submerged Order is an arcane brotherhood of underwater seers, grief-harvesters, and memory binders who dwell in the flooded ruins surrounding the Vault of Salt—a vast, submerged repository said to house the erased and exiled memories of Aeternum’s dead and damned. Their domain lies in the churning deeps near the drowned coast of Manathar, where thought and tide intertwine.

To outsiders, the Submerged Order seems obsessed with oblivion. In truth, they are protectors of what was too painful, too powerful, or too corrupted to remain remembered. Unlike other grief-bound factions, they do not transmute sorrow—they contain it, bind it, and ritually drown it. The Order reveres the ocean not as water, but as memory’s final veil.

Core Tenets

  1. The sea forgets only in silence.

  2. All grief sinks or it poisons the sky.

  3. Memory must be salted before it is safe.

  4. The drowned past may yet rise.

  5. The Vault must never breathe.

Roles within the Order

  • Tidebinders – Monastic custodians who record and preserve memory-scrolls within the salt-crystal tombs of the Vault.

  • Saltseers – Emotion-readers who divine sunken truths through brined visions and oceanic trance.

  • Grief-Harvesters – Cloaked divers and ritual assassins tasked with extracting dangerous or heretical memory fragments from living or dead vessels.

  • Vaultkeepers – Armored deep-wardens who protect the inner sanctums of the Vault and perform Salt-Seal rites.

Structure & Hierarchy

The Submerged Order is led by the Archsalt, a figure chosen not by age or seniority but by their proven ability to resist memory resurgences. Below them are the Thalassic Circles, each circle responsible for one of the Thirteen Seals of the Vault.

Members rise in rank by surviving grief immersion trials and completing Salt Harvests without succumbing to hallucinations or becoming “Saltmad.”

Associated Classes

  • Duskfarer – Explorers of the broken, the drowned, and the forsaken. Often tasked with forgotten-path recovery.

  • Fragmentalist – Crafters of mnemonic devices forged from fractured memories. The Order’s greatest toolmakers.

  • Soulmidwife – Those who guide souls to restful silence—especially those whose stories were removed by force.

  • Hollowwright – Harbingers of identity collapse, used to seal away volatile echoes or render memory null.

Important Locations

  • The Vault of Salt – A drowned cathedral-library of salt-encrusted memory coils, guarded by seals and rites that kill the unworthy. It breathes only once per year.

  • The Thalor Cradle – A semi-submerged fortress and initiation site where grief-harvesters are ritually drowned and revived.

  • The Shivering Gulf – A bay stained with psychic unrest, home to hallucinations and leaking dreams of the forgotten.

  • The Spiral Descent – A stone corridor carved downward into abyssal silence, used for banishment and self-erasure rites.

Relations to Other Factions

  • Allied with:

    • The Cyclekeepers (mutual guardianship over dangerous pasts)

    • The Altarbound (aligned in ritual, differing in philosophy)

  • Opposed to:

    • The Emberleaf Conclave, whose belief in emotional combustion is deemed reckless and heretical

    • The Ledger Guild, seen as dangerously obsessed with accumulation rather than sanctity of memory

Secrets and Rumors

  • The Vault of Salt may hold pre-Cycle memories—forbidden glimpses of the world’s first death.

  • Some suspect the Order secretly extracts memories from living Echoen to feed the Vault’s hunger.

  • A rogue Grief-Harvester, known only as the Pale Current, was said to have stolen an entire life from someone still breathing. Her whispers still reach from the tide.