The Sealed Choir

A militant reform church and the faith player's guild — grown rich and powerful in the Lean Years by being the thing that actually shows up: feeding the hungry, tending the sick and the dead, and keeping order where the failing house and the absent empire do not. Charity in one hand, doctrine and growing worldly power in the other.

When the harvests failed and the house closed its grain stores three months too late, it was the Choir that opened a relief table in every town — and it has been quietly running the Vale's almshouses, sick-wards and burial grounds ever since. That is real power: feed a frontier and it owes you, and the Choir means to be owed. They are wealthy, disciplined, and growing, taking in the destitute as choristers and the orphaned as wards, pressing the houses for tithes and land 'for the relief,' and judging, always judging, who is faithful enough to help. Their founding creed is older and stranger — that a death left unfinished is a wrong that lingers, and that the Unclosed must be properly shut: eyes closed, doors latched, the last rite sung all the way through — a doctrine that still drives their hardliners — but the work that built their power is bread, order, and the grave, and it is as the faith player's door that you'll meet them: divine healing, a roof, a cause, and an institution on the make.