This is a summary of West vs. Dawn: The First Manerean Schism, ninth chapter of A Brief History of the Order. The original is divided into 18 parts.
- Over the next twenty years, debate over Covenant Prima Lux dominates Order politics, and the Manerean Schism becomes a shibboleth for political affiliation within the Order as a whole. The Annalum Cristofereans and the Plenilunials emerge as the proponents of peace, while the traditionalists call for a war on the Dawn. As Quintus Opacan knowledge about the powers of the Dawn Priesthoods circulates throughout the Order and concerns about Prima Lux's alleged diabolism rise, diabolism comes to replace theocratism as the great bogey of the Cholaeic Order.
- By 330, Houses Aegidius and Savacion have come to support action against Prima Lux, and war seems imminent. Uncertainty over the possibility of winning a war against the Dawn, however, saps public support for military action, and relations between Dawn and West are somewhat normalized by the diplomatic coup of the Annalum Cristoferean Caesius, who brings Dawnish Manereans back to the West and engineers the discrediting of Mediastinus at the Twenty-first conjugation of 334. Mediastinus is succeeded as Primus by a moderate, Pedisequus, and Order-wide support for mage-war disappears.
- While the Plenilunials achieve diplomatic success in these years, many of the schools and sub-Houses of the late third century associated with them fall into decline. Both Amicitianism and Nephythusianism begin to be perceived as failures. New ideas, however, continue to emerge to take their place. The Melian Elizabeth of Po attacks the very idea of the Houses in this period by joining all the Houses of the Order, the founders of the covenant at Felchester expand Order conceptions of what a covenant can be, and the Circulan Lemmites propose new ways of looking at native magical aura.
