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The Cursed Blue Rose
Two things share the name of the Creed and they are not the same thing. The Infernal Creed is a faith: the veneration of the imprisoned Ancient Devil, who taught that strength is the only virtue that does not lie. The Infernate of the Creed is a state — the polity that faith built, which holds twelve charted cities in its own hand and gathers fifteen more into its bloc. A traveller may keep the Creed without answering to the Infernate. The distinction matters a great deal to those who must live under one, the other, or both.
Its adjective is Infernate; its people are called Infernal.
The faith was proclaimed at Flammund, the old irrigated lake-kingdom of the north, in 1028 DS — the year a grieving Flammunder rebel forced his way into the Pyreheart Nexus and came out as Galforonte, the First Demon Lord. His ascension is the Creed's founding proof: that a mortal will, exercised without limit, can climb out of mortality altogether. Its goddess is the Ancient Devil, sealed beneath the world since the Deity's Sacrifice; in Creedal telling she was betrayed, crippled and buried by her own kin, and every campaign the Infernate preaches is her long-delayed restitution.
The faith conquered before the state existed. In 1080 DS a queen came out of the Eldertomb's shadow with the Demon Lord's will behind her eyes, and for a hundred and thirty-seven years the empire of the Dark Queen spread with methodical patience until nearly a fifth of the continent's city-states answered to her. In 1217 DS she marched north against the Glacial Dominion and was frozen where she stood, near the fortress the world now calls the Blood Gate — and the empire that had known no other ruler in living memory shattered like the ice that took her.
What followed is remembered as the Satrapy Wars: three generations of successor warlords and sorcerer-princes tearing at the corpse of the Dark Empire. It was Kris, the Grand Hierophant — a zealot old enough to have watched the faith's birth — who ended them, seizing Merynon and grinding the core territories back into one order. Where the Dark Queen had ruled by conquest, Kris rebuilt with registers, roads, garrisons and rites. The wars were declared finished in 1292 DS, and the state that emerged from them is the Infernate as the world now knows it. In the same year he ordered ruined Kharbeta — a city of giants razed more than a thousand years before — rebuilt from its own black stone; ten years later it was a living capital again.
Merynon is the administrative and military capital, and was called Domarus before the faith took it — a city founded nearly two thousand years ago for the express purpose of pushing empire into lands nobody held. Soldiers are its chief export; what it is not paid for, it takes. Kharbeta in the south is the religious and thaumaturgical capital, subordinate to Merynon on parchment and obedient to nothing in practice. It is the seat of Rysalia, the Hierophant's younger daughter — High Commander of the Infernate, mistress of the Legion of Ash, and the true keeper of the Creed's rites though she holds no priestly title at all. Flammund is neither: an independent allied kingdom that rules under its own name, the birthplace of the faith, and the respectable face behind which the rest of the Creedal world can seem, to a careless observer, safely contained.
The teaching is the maximization of personal strength: exercise your will, take what you desire, and rise. It is not, whatever outsiders assume, a doctrine of individual liberty. Hierarchy is defended as a reciprocal advantage between unequals — and where reciprocity fails, as the plain arithmetic of who can burn whom.
Vice is not indulgence here but a test. Temptation is set in a man's path precisely to reveal whether he commands it or it commands him, and the Infernate promotes and discards on the answer. Restraint is no virtue; mastery is the only one.
Nothing expresses the doctrine like its holy city. Pilgrims come to Kharbeta by the thousand, voluntarily, carrying money and ambition and the certainty that they are among the strong. The city is built to weigh them. Its sanctioned pleasures are organized, not accidental — engineered to separate the disciplined from the merely zealous, and every one of them priced. Most petitioners lose their coin, then their credit, then their freedom: debt is the Infernate's single largest source of bound labor, larger than the captives it buys from the raiding peoples and larger than the raids it conducts itself. The strong emerge from the same furnace marked for the legions, the temples, the counting-houses and the sorcerous orders.
The faithful call this consequence — the weak revealing themselves, as the goddess teaches. The Infernate's enemies call it a machine that converts zeal and private wealth into slaves and officers. Both descriptions fit the same city, and Kharbeta has never needed its visitors to agree on which is true.
A fifth of every soul within the Infernate's reach — by some reckonings a quarter — is bound in some fashion: debt-slaves, purchased captives, compelled settlers, work-gangs assigned to ground no free family would take. They are moved where free people will not go: to the mines, the road-forts, the cisterns and the smelters. The state does not waste them, for in the desert a trained hand is expensive to replace; that is the whole of its mercy.
The Infernate does not hold continuous ground. What it holds is a lattice — mines, oases, roads, forts and the wells between them, strung across the dry heart of the continent. Control the water and the road and you need not own the ground between: the wastes belong to nomad herders, to the monstrous peoples native to the interior, and to worse things, and the Infernate taxes what moves rather than garrisoning what doesn't. It is the only great power that counts such peoples inside its order with hardly a shrug — a state that measures every creature by use has no spare contempt for shapes.
Water, in that country, is architecture. Four cities teach the four ways of it: Arodin lifts a great lake into the desert's throat; Derosam keeps the largest oasis in the world under a covenant it enforces with death; Portavena drinks from fractured stone that gathers the rain of a mountain gap; Rupater holds cisterns carved by dwarven masters who were never paid. The Creed's engineers reckon a cistern as its priests reckon a soul — by what it can be made to yield.
The central desert is poor in everything except what lies under it: rich veins of all four of the great metals — iron, silver, gold and tin — in a land that can barely feed the men who dig them. Iron goes preferentially to truesteel, the war-metal of the age; silver and tin feed the bright moonsteel of edges, scales and ritual blades; tin is the honest metal of every kitchen and caravan; and silver is money itself, the coin of the whole continent. Gold the Infernate hoards for a different hunger — it is the metal of thaumaturgy, and the sorcerous orders take it before the mints do.
This is the loop that turns the desert into an empire: Kharbeta makes labor of pilgrims; labor keeps the mines and the roads alive; the mines buy grain, timber, beasts and fleets from neighbors who despise the Creed and trade with it anyway; and the trade pays for the legions that keep the routes — by most reckonings, well over half of all the overland commerce that crosses the continent moves through ground the Infernate can tax, inspect, delay or close.
Its foreign policy is directional rather than uniformly hungry. It conquers east, where the ground is fertile and where Risbern and the Radiant Light give it a theological reason to march — to desert-hardened eyes the eastern lake-country does not merely look prosperous, it looks indecently blessed. It trades west, having judged conquest there not worth its cost; a demon-worshipping slave-state can be a scrupulously reliable trading partner when reliability pays better than war. It works the south by sympathy, through a sister-faith that finds the Creed's teachings agreeable. And it extracts from the centre, which is its own.
In 1338 DS it broke Eisvelde, a merchant city that believed its treaties with autonomous Flammund would shield it. The answer was a purpose-built sorcerous strike, assembled from the most disciplined killers the Infernate could gather, delivered without warning. Before Eisvelde the Infernate was a desert theocracy; after it, a landlocked power with ocean access, a severed eastern gold supply, its hand around nine-tenths of the continent's overland trade — and a northern frontier full of cities recalculating, overnight, what an alliance with Risbern is worth.