The Age
of Heresy

The world is wounded.

For more than two centuries, since the Sundering tore the Balkans open and made a breach between Creation and the infernal dark, the eastern half of Europe has lain beneath the shadow of the Great Deceiver. Through that wound came his Seven Sin-Generals and the long ruin that followed: kingdoms devoured, cities profaned, and whole nations swallowed into the Charnel Lands.

Against the abyss stands the Bureaucratic Synod of Strasbourg, throne and altar fused into one black-basalt machine. It has bound a wounded continent into obedience with bells, censers, rifles, and sacred paperwork, counting every birth, confession, tithe, and death, that no soul might pass into damnation unrecorded nor into salvation unfiled.

Between the living West and the fallen East runs the Sagittal Line, a scar of bastions, trenches, wire, and mass graves stretching from Königsberg on the Baltic to Constantinople at the Bosphorus. There mankind has made its stand for century upon century, fighting with bayonet and censer, relic and artillery, prayer and procedure.

Yet the war is not fought only at the front. The Synod wages it in every parish and every home, by bell and book, by confession and conscription, by ration, procession, pyre, and seal. To live in this age is to be one citizen among the ledgered millions: watched, measured, instructed, and, when required, sacrificed.

This is the cruellest age mankind has endured, and the most orderly. This is the age of mud and miracle, of paperwork and fire.

This is the Age of Heresy.