Orders of Life
Orders of Life
Overview
The Orders of Life are a continent-spanning faith institution devoted to birth, healing, endurance, and controlled renewal. They are not a single church with one ruler. They are a network of temples, heal houses, field stations, and trained servants who follow shared rules and accept local oversight. In Oblivion Vale, they are valued because sickness, injury, and hunger are constant. They are feared because they decide who receives treatment, who receives water first, and who is refused when supplies run short. The gods never speak, but blessings are real enough that rulers tolerate the Orders even when they hate their influence.
Core Doctrine
Life doctrine is strict because scarcity punishes mistakes.
Preserve the living when action can save them.
Prevent waste of water, food, medicine, bandages, and clean tools.
Protect births and the survival of infants, even in hard seasons.
Limit suffering through pain relief and humane triage, not promises.
Contain sickness when it threatens a whole settlement.
Their central tension is simple: saving lives often requires harsh control of supplies and harsh choices at the gate.
Blessings and What People Recognize
Life blessings do not arrive as voices or clear messages. They appear as repeatable outcomes tied to strict conduct.
Commonly recognized signs include:
Wounds that close cleanly when infection should take hold.
Fever breaking after rites that match the Order’s rules.
Patients holding on long enough to be moved to safety.
Unusual endurance in healers during long shifts and ration nights.
These miracles are narrow. They do not end the Drying. They do not cleanse the Plaguelands. They do not protect a town that refuses basic sanitation and ration discipline.
Structure and Ranks
The Orders of Life use practical ranks that match their work.
Novices: sanitation, water boiling, bandage work, record copying.
Hands: assistants in births, wound care, and supply management.
Chirurgeons: trained surgeons and trauma healers.
Midwives: birth specialists with authority inside birthing wards.
Vow-Keepers: discipline officers who enforce taboos and ration rules.
Wardens of Relief: leaders of store rooms, distribution lines, and escorts.
Abbesses / Abbots of the House: the local head of a heal house or temple.
There is no single continent-wide head. Councils meet when travel is possible, but each House survives under local law and local threats.
Houses, Stations, and Daily Operations
Most Order presence is built around survival services.
Heal Houses: triage halls, fever wards, bone-setting rooms, and clean rooms for surgery when supplies allow. They keep strict cleaning rules and burn soiled materials when needed, even when it angers the hungry.
Birthing Houses: protected rooms for labor, infant care, and post-birth recovery. In many towns, these rooms are guarded like cisterns.
Relief Stores: sealed cabinets and vaults for alcohol, antiseptics, dried herbs, pain powders, and clean cloth. In some kingdoms, these stores are audited like state depots.
Field Stations: small outposts near roads and forts that stabilize the injured and decide who is moved onward.
Tally Desks: records of patients, ration use, and contamination events. These ledgers make the Orders useful and hated.
The Orders do not provide unlimited charity. They provide controlled aid, because uncontrolled aid can destroy a settlement’s supply chain in a week.
Water Triage and “Measured Mercy”
Life doctrine treats water as treatment. In many places the Orders run, supervise, or advise on:
Priority drinking rules for infants, birthing mothers, and the fevered.
Hydration allotments for the injured who will die without it.
Quarantine rations for the sick that must be isolated.
This practice is called “Measured Mercy” in many Houses. It is also the main reason mobs attack Life sites during ration panic. When water is law, deciding who drinks first is political power.
Relations with Crowns, Courts, and Other Orders
The Orders of Life survive through uneasy agreements.
With human crowns: tolerated, taxed, and watched. In strict kingdoms they operate under guards and inspectors. In frontier kingdoms they are pressured to treat soldiers first.
With contract courts and ledger houses: constant conflict over records, debt, and ration notes. Some courts demand patient tallies to prove “who deserves aid.”
With the Orders of Death: cooperation during outbreaks, conflict over methods. Death pushes burn lines and hard quarantine. Life pushes care and controlled isolation. Each side accuses the other of causing more deaths.
With the Orders of Fate: conflict over inherited punishment. Fate officials may deny rations due to debt or oath status. Life Houses sometimes resist this, then face legal seizure or closure.
Stance on Magic and the Plaguelands
Life priests accept that magic exists, but they treat it as dangerous and limited.
Licensed healing magic is welcomed but recorded and monitored.
Unregistered magic inside a heal house is treated as a contamination risk and a political threat.
Plague-touched miracles are the most feared. If a blessing appears in a way the House cannot classify, Vow-Keepers isolate the patient and report it to local authorities in many regions.
The Orders do not claim to understand the Plaguelands. They treat it as a permanent wound on the continent that can only be managed, not cured.
Schisms, Corruption, and Failure Modes
The Orders of Life are not pure. Scarcity shapes them.
Common internal conflicts include:
Mercy-first Houses that accept higher risk and higher loss to treat more people.
Measure-first Houses that restrict access hard, preserve supplies, and survive longer.
Corruption is usually practical:Selling medicine from relief stores.
Trading treatment priority for favors.
Hiding outbreaks to keep donations and protect a patron.
When a Life House fails, it fails loudly: a riot, a burned ledger, an emptied cabinet, and a town that loses its last stable source of skilled care.
Symbols and Identifiers
Most Houses use plain, recognizable marks so people can find them fast:
A simple white band or pale cord on the arm.
A cup mark for water triage authority.
A wrapped hand symbol for heal houses.
Dress is practical and washable. Cleanliness is treated as a moral duty, not a preference.