Nomarem

Nomare Godel
The Nomarem religion was founded one year after the discovery of the Eighth Oracle and God along the longest river in Atos Provit, when the self-proclaimed prophet Benjamin Jolias became the first of many to claim to have channeled the new and unnamed Eighth God.

Raised in a family that worshiped a small offshoot Church of Fiest, Jolias knew enough of the known Godels to incorporate them into his new religion based on his new Godal, which cast Nomare as the eighth and most ancient God and Jolias as a master of prophecy.

The Nomare Godel began by predicting events described in the supposedly later Godels, then events in recorded history before it vaguely described a variation on the apocalypse believed to be hidden inside the Godal interpretations of the prophet Sophos Feist. It's latter half contains detailed instructions on how true followers of the Gods should live, including following Ben Jolias, identified by name.

Nomarem and Gani
Since colonizing the SFT the Nomarem had fought the gani hives infesting its western mountains and forests, but it was decades before they dared confront the larger hives to the south, which combined in the spring into the army that invaded the southern jespin fields.

To fight the gani army, the Nomarem entrenched at Thin Creek's shallowest ford and built a defensive network modeled on pre-majery anti-gani systems, engineered to funnel the massive spring invasion over exposed travel lanes and into killing fields.

The outer defenses consisted of a grid of elevated roads broken by frequent gaps that were spanned by bridges, outlining many sunken fields equipped with pipes and sprinklers. During the gani spring offensive the bridges were removed and the the fields were flooded with a toxic  heavier than air gas called pitric.

As the gani invaded along the raised roads surrounded by pitric, they tried linking their bodies to bridge the gaps in the road under fire from the Nomarem defenders. Typically the gani filled the gaps with their dead and forced the defenders to fall back to the next line of defenses, until they reached the last wall protecting Thin Creek.

Unable to breach the last barrier, due to the cloud of pitric mist it expelled, the gani swarm diverted to the west through more kill zones and eventually reached forested hills that the gani controlled and from which they launched raids on the defenses further west along Thin Creek through the summer until the the last gani soldiers died.

Problems arose during retreats when the next line of bridges had to be removed ahead of the gani, during the lulls in the hatching when the defenders recaptured and reset the defenses, and whenever wind, rain, snow or technical difficulties interfered with the pitric gas, which usually killed and wounded more defenders than the gani did.

Nomarem Dialect
The Nomarem spoke old Tuvord with unique additions. Many of their terms, like 'bim', 'sert', and 'deay' were common throughout the SFT and appear throughout this work, but for purposes of readability, much all of their dialogue has been translated into modern Tuvord, including all the things said by or around the Je of Brethen.

Nomarem Pratery
The Pratery began as a council of advisers serving the Conclave, much like the advisers at a Je Order command table, but in time grew into a ninth Order in the Nomarem ruling system. While lacking a seat on the Conclave, the Pratery exerted influence on every sector of Nomarem society by enforcing doctrine on every citizen.

The Pratery kept meticulous records tracking the faith of every Nomarem until death. When the praters discovered a sin they reported it in the newspapers they censored, which also announced the verdicts of their trials and announced their public executions. Thanks to their regular faith testing of all high level clerics, the praters controlled the leadership of the eight orders and thereby the eight Conclave seats.

Nomarem Plyte
In place of modern technology, the Nomarem relied on manpower in the form of their plytes, which were boys between the ages of ten and eighteen. Every Nomarem male served as a plyte in one of the eight Orders according to their projected roles as adults, and recieved schooling from their cleric mentors as part of their service.

Despite the efforts of the Ditay Order, which was unique in that its clerics were women, the education of Nomarem girls was left to each community. Along Sunfield Road some attended schools staffed by Ditay clerics but in many areas they had no formal education. The girls serving the Ditay Order as plytes were wards of the state; a mix of orphans, juvenile delinquents and daughters of convicted heretics.

Risson Har
During the years the Nomarem hired mercenaries to fight the gani, it was common to find teams from the UER testing weapons or doing other research. The team led by Risson Har was the best funded and most ambitious. Their weapon was a battlesuit system combining X squad embeds with the padding used in Warball, and their goal was to perfect a suit that enabled a common solder to defeat a battle maje.

The project was inspired by the Paladins, the armored mounted clerics that had dominated battlefields prior to the advent of majery. I met Risson Har through Bruhl and Karis, and for a time he paid me to play a battle maje in live-fire tests of their suits. Within the UER Risson was Lieutenant Colonel Risson Jero Har of the Atos Special Defense Forces (ASDF), who officially he didn't exist but according to his memories he spent a decade in Shira where he had earned nearly every available commendation, which in keeping with ASDF protocol, he would be awarded posthumously after death.

Until then, Risson Har had made it his business to manage a team of highly skilled engineers in a hidden base five miles west of Smits Crossing. Aside the money, I agreed to help the paladin team because of the things I heard in Risson Har's thoughts, and the quality of his thinking itself, which to my ears was uniquely steady; as if decades of military service has honed his mind to function forever smoothly.