The Stillwater Order

Ascetic monks and the unarmed player's door — the one faction whose answer to a grasping, collapsing world is to want nothing, owe nothing, and so be beholden to no power. In years when every other power is bought, the Order is the only voice no one can buy.

Be still water; let the world's storms pass through you, the Order teaches. While the houses scheme, the companies sell their swords, and the desperate grab for whatever's left, the Stillwater monks empty themselves of want until there is nothing in them for fear or greed or grief to take hold of. They take no side and own almost nothing, which makes them everyone's conscience and no one's ally — the only people who can tell House Vandahl or the Gaunt Ledger the truth to their faces, because they want nothing those powers can give or take. They fight with empty hands and a calm that unnerves louder men. Their hardest discipline is keeping their own: brothers who go chasing the power they renounced are how the Order loses people to worse things.