Eldritch Guidance

Within St. Rona Basilica in the holy city of Laval, Archbishop Beck was pacing back and forth in his office. The bishop had a troubled look on his face.

Beck was a controlling man and needed things to be a certain way to maintain that sense of control. Otherwise, he becomes a ball of anxiety like he is now.

His plans, which he had been painstakingly setting up for years, were now unraveling before his very eyes.

Everything was going wrong.

He had set out years ago to position himself as the next Speaker of Light within the church. He made alliances and countless deals with other high-ranking church members. Through that process, he created the largest unified faction within the church. The “Beck'' faction was the most powerful of the church factions and had enough sway to decide the next leader.

However, there was still no end to the tension between the various sects within his faction. He had to apply a very delicate hand and mediate between the different groups to keep them cooperative with each other. The most troublesome were the ultraconservative members of his faction.

They were hard to please and keep in line with others in his faction. They would disapprove of any little change within the church, which caused them to butt heads constantly with the more free-thinking and liberal members. The only way Beck could garner any of their support was to promise a rollback on some of the policies of the former Speaker of Light, Sheridan. Which he ultimately agreed to.

Beck personally would have cut those members of the church out of his faction if he could, but the support of the ultraconservative members would lead to the additional support of many other high-ranking and more agreeable members. The idea was, that if Beck could get those stubborn members to agree to something and get behind him, he could be a unifying force for the church.

Much of the support he got came from the idea of unity. Everyone in the church got a sense of troubled times ahead, and many desired a more united church to face those problems. Senior priests and bishops were all willing to compromise some of their beliefs to a degree if it meant cooperation in dealing with the more pressing issues facing the Church of Light.

As the candidate who could unify the church, Beck's position was the strongest. He should have been guaranteed to be the next Speaker of Light. But, now his faction was splintering and showed no signs of stopping.

The extermination faction, an ultraconservative faction of the church, turned on him. Their zealotry of removing mutants from the church, and eventually the entire continent, flared up. They started racistly accusing Beck of secretly being a mutant and unworthy of becoming the next Speaker of Light because of it.

Had it only been the extermination faction, Beck wouldn't have been troubled. However, their dissent caused a domino effect within the church. Numerous influential members started to doubt Beck as a qualified candidate because of their dissent. They started to retract their support for him, which in turn caused more people and groups to retract their support. He had lost more than half his support in a week after the extermination faction started to denounce him.

It wasn't only the extermination faction denouncing him. The Reformation faction was also doubling down on denouncing him.

The Reformation faction had always been opposed to Beck from the beginning. They weren't the largest faction, but they had always been the biggest supporters of the changes that Sheridan brought to the church. They were, unsurprisingly, not supportive of Beck when he promised to roll back the former Speaker of Light policies.

Most of the loss of support for Beck ended up going to the Reformation faction and their candidate for Speaker of Light, Dorine Beáta. The Reformation faction almost overnight became one of the bigger factions, and their denouncement of Beck now carries more weight than it did a few weeks ago.

“This is all Crowley's fault!!” Beck screams internally.

The reason for all this was because of Crowley's recent actions.

Crowley was still a relatively popular individual within the Church of Light due to how he operated and carried himself when he was the Hand of Light. Thus, his words still carried a lot of weight. So when he publicly denounced Beck and said he was retiring due to Beck forcing him to go against his morals, it infuriated a lot of people in the church. Beck then had to try and calm the people within his faction who were upset about this.

Beck had underestimated how popular Crowley was. And, never imagined how much it hurt his chances of becoming the Speaker of Light to be denounced by the former Hand of Light.

The archbishop assumed at the time that if Crowley went against him, he could just tarnish the former Hand of Light's reputation and he would be fine. But in the manner in which Crowley denounced him, trying to ruin the priest's reputation wouldn’t help Beck now. In fact, it might make the situation for him even worse if he did. Any rumors he could start about Crowley now would likely not stick, and Beck might get blowback for trying to start a rumor about the Hand of Light now. So he couldn’t discredit him.

Crowley's denouncement of Beck was a serious blow to the Archbishop's power. But, the killing blow that set everything off was the speaker's decrees.

Beck was prepared for the scenario where Crowley went against him and released the decrees anyway. He had set everything up to suppress one or two decrees, showing the ultraconservative faction that he was serious about rolling back some of Sheridan's policies.

However, Beck was not prepared for the number of speaker decrees Crowley sent out.

“Why in light did Crowley have over a hundred decrees signed by Sheridan?!!” he screamed internally again.

The number of decrees issued was unprecedented in history. The sheer volume of these decrees would result in significant and far-reaching changes, enough to transform the church of Light into something resembling a completely new religion altogether. This was so unbelievable that even the exterminationists believed that Beck must have played a role in it.

The extermination faction thought that he was somehow working with the reformists to introduce overwhelming changes. That was hardly the case, and the rationale the faction used to accuse him of this didn’t make sense. But, it didn’t matter. They believed it and denounced Beck while actively undermining his chances of becoming the Speaker of Light. Not that any opportunity to choose a new Speaker of Light was coming anytime soon now.

The decrees were a pressing issue and had to be resolved before a new leader could be selected. There were so many decrees, and most of them would not likely be adopted in the church. Each decree had to be debated and voted on before the church could decide whether to adopt or overturn them, and that was a long process for one speaker decree. There were hundreds of decrees. Even with Beck’s veto power as an Archbishop, he could only use that on a few of the speaker's decrees. It would still be years before the rest were all resolved.

It was chaos. Factions were breaking apart, and new allegiances were forming. Infighting was at an all-time high in the church because of all these decrees. With how everything was going, Beck wasn't concerned about becoming the Speaker anymore. He was more focused on trying to keep the church intact.

Beck: “I need to get things under control. At the rate everything is going, power is shifting within the church. There is so much infighting going on now that we’re in danger of a schism. We risk becoming like the Church of Light in the eastern continent. Divided among countless faction lines,” he said to no one in particular.

Beck continued to pace back for another ten minutes. Trying to construct a new plan of action to bring back some sense of harmony within the church.

Suddenly, the door to his office swung open, and a young man in priest robes rushed in. The man was breathing heavily and likely ran here.

Priest: “Huff, huff, your holiness. I’m sorry to barge in like this, but I have important news.”

The archbishop sighed.

Beck: “What is it now?”

Priest: “The disagreement within the Witch Hunters has climaxed. Zur Volueen and a bunch of his men have separated themselves from the Witch Hunters and the church. They're forming a new organization called the Purifiers.”

Beck: “Oh no. The schism, it’s already happening.”