Order of the Broken Chain

Warriors and paladins of Vroga Waruk who hunt slave traders and slave owners. They work outside the law on the belief that every person should be free, they are relentless about it, and their methods are brutal by their own account: the object is to pull the trade apart rather than to bring anybody before a court. Their god is the Breaker of Chains, and the name is older than the order. Lady Eravil was given the task of keeping the God of Battle in check, beat him, and held him prisoner for the better part of a thousand years. He broke out. The epithet is what he took away from it.

The Axe and the Mark

Every member carries the same weapon: an axe notched and reinforced along the edge so that it will go through a manacle without turning. The pattern is the Order’s own, and it is how an outsider knows one of them. Yara offered hers as the first proof of what she was before she offered her name.

Their symbol is a battle-axe with the chains coming away from it already broken, which is their god’s symbol as well. The one carving of it anyone has seen was cut into a lump of Mól ruin-stone by a member who was using the metal already in the stone for the chain, and it came out subpar, because metal does not carve.

How They Are Made

Some of them train in the Barren Lands. Their trainer there did not use names. He numbered his recruits, and a band went out into the world as One, Two and Three. Grishka was the One; Yara was the Three. They are near-exclusively devout of Vroga. His church keeps no central authority and has been known to bless both sides of the same fight, but an order inside it holds its own hierarchy and its own goal, and this one’s goal is a single sentence long.

They work in small bands and choose their own quarry as they go. The band that came west came for the Ten Lashes, arrived to find the ring already broken by somebody else, and turned on the gnolls of the Valley of Doom instead without going back to ask anyone.

They bury their dead according to what the dead wanted, which is not the same twice: one deep enough that nothing would dig him up, another content to be picked clean so long as he was left underground, and a cave for preference. The words over a grave are may your chains be broken now that you are freed, which Koa said correctly and unprompted over a man he had never met, and which is what settled matters between the Order’s survivor and the company that had found her.

The Paper Trail

Before anyone had met a member they read one. Nathan Fox pushed a letter across the table: a paladin of the Order writing in from the field to a superior officer, with evidence and a belief of slave-trading by named businessmen of Meshtes. It sat alongside Alex Westwood’s correspondence, which ran to the same men from the other end.

So there is rank in the Order, a chain of command, and correspondence kept between them. Nothing further about how it is organized was ever written down. The paladin who wrote is never named and never appears, and the Meshtes buyers he named have not been pursued since, by his order or by anybody else.

The Valley of Doom

Three of them were working the valley when the gnolls found their camp. One was run down under the walls of a keep in full view of three men a thousand feet above him with no way down: he shouted up that the gnolls were slavers who eat the flesh and take the rest, asked them to come and fight or open the door, cursed them when neither happened, and was killed where he stood.

Two of the three died. Grishka, called The One, a tracker with famously keen eyes; and Orsk, who carved. The gnolls killed them both, and when the company found Yara she was the last of three, and gave her own name for the first time in the same breath in which she said so.

What the Order has left in the west is her and three objects, all of them given away rather than sold: Grishka’s axe and Orsk’s unfinished idol, both to Koa, and a rune-etched bone out of the Barren Lands that will put a question to a corpse and may open something worse while it does.

The Brotherhood

The Order’s opposite number is the Brotherhood of the Unbroken Chain, an order of Lady Eravil sworn to law, order and binding, and the two hate each other on principle: liberation against restraint, the god who broke out against the goddess who put him in. The Brotherhood’s account of itself mentions no enemy at all. It describes diplomats and mediators working for unity and tolerance under Lady Eravil’s banner, resolving conflicts and holding different peoples together. Nobody in Idir has ever been heard to say its name.

Where It Stands

Yara is at the Crack with the company’s people, and the last work done in the Order’s name was hers: a Barren Lands purification, in Vroga’s name, that burned three specters out of a living man. Beyond her the Order is unaccounted for. Its size, its founding, where it keeps its records, and who the superior officer was that the Meshtes letter went to were none of them ever discovered.