Religion in Sunfall is not unified and has not been unified since the Vel Sorath astronomical faith collapsed along with the civilization that maintained it. What exists in its place is a spectrum of responses to the fundamental question that the Descent poses: if the universe is not rational, if its deepest structures are not accessible to human understanding, if the things that move beneath the surface of the world are neither benevolent nor malevolent but simply incomprehensibly other — then what does one do with a human life?
The Covenant Holds answer this question with what they call the Doctrine of the Closed Eye: you do not look. You maintain the rituals of the Meridian Age, you preserve the appearance of rationality, you refuse to acknowledge the evidence of the irrational not because you believe it does not exist but because acknowledging it would dissolve the social fabric that makes human life possible, and the social fabric matters more than the truth. The Doctrine of the Closed Eye is philosophically dishonest and practically effective. Most of the inhabited world operates on its principles without ever having heard its name.
Against this, and in deliberate opposition to it, the various cults that have proliferated across Sunfall since the Descent represent the full range of responses that become available once one decides to open the eye. Some cults open the eye and see an opportunity: the old rationalist order collapsed because it failed to understand what it was dealing with, and a new order could be built that incorporates the truth of the Lattice, that treats the Abidants not as incomprehensible horrors but as facts of cosmic ecology to be worked with rather than denied. These are the most dangerous cults, not because their theology is the most extreme but because it is the most reasonable. They are right that the old order failed. They are wrong, in ways they have not yet discovered, about what working with the Abidants entails.
Other cults open the eye and see only the void that the Doctrine of the Closed Eye was built to exclude, and respond with an ecstatic nihilism — the conviction that the meaninglessness of human existence is not a tragedy but a liberation, that the crushing of the self against the scale of the Abidants is not destruction but enlightenment, that what looks like madness from the inside of the dominant culture is actually the only sane response to a correct understanding of the universe. These cults are the ones that produce the imagery — the spiral symbols, the geometric inscriptions, the rituals conducted at locations where the Lattice distortion is strongest — that the Covenant Holds classify as dangerous and the Tidemarks classify as unlucky and the Wandering Assemblies classify, with the grim pragmatism of people who have catalogued too many things, as active.
And then there are the ones who open the eye and cannot close it again. These are not a cult. They do not organize or recruit or conduct rituals. They are simply people — scholars, sailors, travelers, dreamers — who encountered the truth of Sunfall at too close a range and were changed by it in ways that cannot be reversed. They move through the world with the particular quality of attention of someone who has understood something that changes every subsequent perception, the way a diagnosis changes the meaning of every prior symptom. The Wandering Assemblies have a term for these individuals: the Lucid. The Covenant Holds call them the Broken. The Tidemark Settlements do not name them, because naming them would require acknowledging what they are, and the Doctrine of the Closed Eye is more practical than it is formally observed.