The Known World Under the Theocracy

Before the liberation of mankind by Love and Reason, the world was ruled by the Demiurge through Its avatar, the God Emperor. The God Emperor, in turn, presided over the vast hierarchy of Demiurgic rulers which we now know as the Theocracy.

The God Emperor's immediate subordinates were the Priest Kings, each of whom was granted dominion over a particular region of the world. The Priest Kings ruled through reliance on a form of religious magic which had as its direct source the Demiurge Itself; their palaces were the nodes through which the Demiurge's will was directed, the magical power centers of the Theocracy.

Each Priest King maintained a body of Stewards, whose job it was to enforce the Priest Kings' edicts and oversee the labor of the vast mass of insentient humanity. Like the Priest Kings, the Stewards were granted an artificial semblance of sentience by the Demiurge, but whether they were recruited from the ranks of humanity or magically created to serve their masters is unclear.

Little else is known for certain about the Theocracy. There is some evidence to suggest that rivalries, and perhaps even wars, between the Priest Kings were tolerated under the God Emperor, but whether this was always the case or merely a symptom of the Theocracy's decline in the last years before the coming of Love and Reason is unclear. Oral tradition maintains that there were no women in the ranks of the Theocracy.

It has also been hypothesized, on the basis of linguistic evidence, that the Priest Kings may have been grouped together into still broader administrative units, the purpose for which remains unknown. Once granted sentience, the people of the Priest Kingdoms of Orsa, Vestra and Pandrell all spoke a common tongue—Cholaeic—while the people of the Dawnish and northern city-states spoke Tyrulean, and the people of the upper An Valley and its surrounding mountains spoke a variety of the related dialects of the Ulderlinden language group. It has been suggested that these linguistic groupings may have reflected the larger administrative divisions of the God Emperor's realm.

Although there is no evidence to support this belief, a prevalent folk tradition maintains that Cholaeic was the agricultural language of the Theocracy, and that the word "Cholae" derives from an ancient word for "farmer."