Cults and Such

The Weeping Way

If the loss of one can save the countless, is it not a worthy sacrifice? The acolytes of the Weeping Way worship the Red Lady - whose sacrifice of her own child helped save the world from being consumed by the horrors of life. When the Calamities - evil, disease, and suffering - were unleashed upon the world, the Red Lady bound those curses into her brand new babes, then slit their throats upon an altar to spare the rest of the world and its inhabitants from hopeless destruction. The world was saved, but the Red Lady was ruined. Now, she is depicted in all her iconography as a beautiful woman with face scarred by eons of weeping for her children.

The Red Hands - as the members call themselves - see themselves as tragic heroes like the Red Lady. They do what is immoral and unthinkable - tarnishing their own reputations and traumatizing themselves - to protect the world from certain destruction. They see themselves as martyrs - in a sense - as they do the things that the “moral” peoples will not in order to stave off the inevitable darkness. What are the lives of six children in juxtaposition to the lives of the rest of the world’s population and all that might come after?

Practice of the Weeping Way is outlawed in Sembre, due to its “barbaric” ritual of annual child sacrifice to hold back the tides of Calamity for one more year. Cases of serial killings are often tied to copy-cats who claim faith in the Weeping Way to justify their crimes, but true acolytes of the Sacred Tears know this is not so.

Arenea’s Web

Arenea - the Mother Spider - weaves her web through the spiritual plane, uniting all living things. We are all interconnected and held safe within her tapestry. And we are all, thusly, responsible for making an important decision: to become predator or prey.

Unbelievers declare the first acolytes were elves on the cursed island of Kor’kuuna who unfortunately stumbled into the malevolent giant spiders that lurk in the subterranean spaces while exploring the darkness beneath Halyth. There, the web-walkers fed on their minds while their poison-filled cocoons digested the elven bodies.