How do we even have the Church of Rust and Heme?

One of the special things about humans as a Kin is that they argue about religion. Other Kin pay respect to Gods mostly as concepts – give praise and thanks to Clay, Wail and Flow, for instance, but mostly in hope that the harvest goes well – or as symbols of a Kin as a whole: e.g. dwarves know that they were made by Huge, and sermons by the priests of Huge are about dwarfdom as a whole, and specifically about the community they’re preaching to. Only humans have multiple, rival theories of who they should worship, and more importantly why, and what that means for your personal life: with the corollary that if you disagree with this, you are therefore deeply wrong and need to be persuaded or chastised.

The main human religions all start with the common story that a raven and a snake flying together brought the humans to the Forbidden Lands, then get into bitter arguments about the precise details, in ways that should not surprise anybody with a Christian, Jewish or Muslim cultural background. The Church of Rust and Heme pays lip-service to being from the same tradition, but then quickly devolves into moustache-twirling evil and blatant internal contradictions.

My theory is this is a result of Zytera’s meddlings: they needed a religion that was deliberately off-putting, as a way of maintaining their domination during the blood mist. But now that the blood mist has gone, the Church of Rust and Heme is in big trouble.

The current Church is weird by anybody’s standards

The Congregation of the Serpent is staid and conservative: part of the established political system. The Raven Church, meanwhile, is the kinder, gentler version; female-led, community-based, mendicant and poor, and hated by the Congregation of the Serpent for exactly the same reasons that the Catholic Church hated the Cathars: it shows them up and suggests that a more relaxed religion is possible. Or, from a modern perspective, the Congregation of the Serpent corresponds to paternalist right-wing movements like One Nation Tories in the UK, Christian Democrats in Germany or Italy, or Rockefeller Republicans in the US; whereas the Raven Church has the vibe of Christian Socialists and anti-poverty campaigners.

The Reapenters, meanwhile, are a much later Ravenlands cult arising from the horrific Fourth Alder War, deciding that clearly humanity being here at all was a tragic mistake, and very much have the vibe of a kool-aid drinking cult.

So far, so good: these are religions that we can easily get a grasp on.

And then the book starts talking about the Church of Rust and Heme, who have a murderous hatred for the Raven Sisters that’s enough to make even the Congregation of the Serpent say “steady on, chaps”, pal around with demons to the point of grotesquely mutilating themselves, and in general exist for when the GM wants to say “OK, you don’t like this particular NPC here, but tell you what, these guys over here are pure evil, and this guy is a saint in comparison”. Its belief structure is so weird, and the behaviour of its members is so cartoonishly evil, that it’s hard to understand why anybody borderline sane would ever become a member in the first place, and therefore why we have this church at all.

So of course the answer is right there: it can’t have been like this originally.

What could the original Church have looked like?

It’s worth remembering how the church first became popular. The GM’s Guide (p. 22) tells us that “some twenty-five sweet years of good harvests and plenty of children were followed by ten cold and lean years. The humans in the south soon found themselves with less and less space, and food was running out. Religious revivals of rites including mortification of the flesh and practices of penance flourished.” It goes on to say “At this time, Alderlanders worshipped the god Rust”, but then continues (p. 23) “the Rust Church grew in numbers”, so it’s fair to say that while the Rust church existed in some form at that point, its worship wasn’t as widespread as it eventually became.

As to what the tenets of the Rust Church were originally, it seems to me the most important ones are the emphasis on iron and wood as “gifts to humankind so they could make tools and weapons and thus dominate their world. […] Humankind must, like iron, be worked and purified and tempered in order to reach their conviction” (GM’s Guide, p. 38). Compare this with the Serpent and Raven Churches, who gently promise that things will get better soon if you trust them; and various new sects desperately casting around for ways for people to say sorry for their transgressions that they clearly must have made, in the hopes that the good times will come back.

The Rust Church instead says the good times will only come back if we make them come back. The original Rust Church is a voluntarist movement of self-improvement, all about rolling your sleeves up and making things happen with enterprise, hard work and a solid dollop of self-belief. You can see why it would have appealed to rulers casting around for new solutions: the leaders of the Rust Church at this time will have been charismatic outsiders promising that if you only let them have a go at running things, they can sort everything out.

The original Church is unusual for not worshipping its Gods

The interesting thing about this movement is their rejection of the idea of Gods as examples to be followed. Rust and Heme are as much to be hated and opposed as they are to be respected and feared: “Iron is power and might, while wood is life and disease”, and while obviously disease is bad, if you think that both “power” and “might” sound like positive things, think again about how your opinion might change if it’s some other bastard who happens to have the power and the might and is using them against you. Centuries later, when Pyronax claimed that “the goddess Heme had spoken to him in a dream, and told him that the Blood Mist was her gangrenous breath, smothering the land” but “true believers could venture into the Mist without fear” (ibid., p. 34), this was very much in the original tradition of Rust and Heme as gods who are deliberately putting obstacles in your way, daring you to prove yourself against them.

This, I think, is the true reason why Rust and Heme are depicted as crude, roughly-hewn and misshapen idols: not because they’re so perfect that failing to depict their true beauty would be blasphemy, as the book suggests, but because they are not perfect, and you must never fool yourself that they are.

I mean, the dead giveaway is the name. What should followers of the church do? Work, temper and purify themselves, ridding themselves of imperfections, like you temper and beat iron ore, with heat, hammer and anvil, over and over again, to make a metal you can make tools out of and dominate the land.

And what is the most obvious sign of iron gone bad, the most visible imperfections in a metal tool? Rust.

If people are to see themselves like iron, then Rust is the embodiment of how people fail. The crude rusty statue of Rust in the chapel is a cautionary tale: if you don’t take pride in yourself, if you don’t constantly strive to become a better person, you’ll end up like that.

And lest you think “OK, but Heme is a nicer, female goddess”, think about what it means for there to be a goddess of both wood and blood. Heme isn’t a nice big friendly tree standing in a vast grassland park where she can spread her limbs and become huge, raining petals down on happy children in the spring and looking on benignly as they gorge themselves on her fruit in the autumn. No, she’s one of the scary trees from Snow White, and if you end up nailed to a tree in one of Heme’s sacred groves, it’s not so you can achieve enlightenment after days of suffering, Odin-style. It’s so you can give your lifeblood to a tree, during days of suffering (the priests make small incisions and come back regularly to re-open them, so you don’t die too quickly), and send a very strong message to everybody else: try very hard to not be nailed to a tree. (Pour encourager les autres.) Even the phrase “sacred grove” should be considered as a threat: after all, who wants to be directly exposed to a God?

The first schism: seeking dominion over other people

The original Church of Rust is a demanding one, and for it to become a mass movement it needs to add some more doctrines that are easier to follow and understand. This is the first change, when people like the Ferrale Teramalda started saying things like “the god Rust and his wife Heme had brought humankind to this land in ancient times, but […] the Ailanders, allied with treacherous elves and dwarves, had tricked them and so stolen half of the land that had been promised.” (ibid., p. 23). If your crops are failing and your neighbours’ crops probably aren’t, then a semi-plausible excuse to invade is just the ticket.

Similarly, the original Rust Church almost certainly didn’t care about stupid ancient myths about birds and snakes; but the nobility of Alderland wouldn’t take kindly to embracing a religion that was too different from the established church, which is probably where the idea that “the raven that led humankind to Ravenland was made of iron and the snake of wood” (ibid., p. 38) came from: an iron-and-wood spin on the old tale that everybody knew.

Nobody will have been looking too closely at the precise details, in a situation where the established religions were struggling, new ones were popping up left, right and centre, and the King had just thrown his weight behind a bright new shiny belief that promises us that we can sort things out if we just try a bit harder. But it’s worth noting that if you’re trying to convert the establishment over to your new ideas, surely the easier move would have been to say that it was the snake that was made of iron: they already believe that the snake was divine, and iron (Rust) is more important than wood and blood (Heme) in the Rust Church’s doctrines. So maybe the fact that the first leaders of the Rust Church were women (e.g. the Ferrale Teramalda) is important here: it’s a sly wink to theologians, and/or possibly a recruiting tool for followers of the Church of the Raven.

The second schism: Zytera reforms the Church to be demon-friendly

Only a few years after Zygofer and Therania were stuck together on the back of a giant spider, Zytera decided that what they needed was a ruling theology. The book says (p. 33) that Zytera had a grudge against the established religion: “The Congregation of Serpents had a scattered presence throughout the human villages after the influx of Alderlanders, but Zytera held it responsible for the war against Alderland.” To my mind, that misstates things: Zytera wanted a religion that reflected their own opinions, and the Congregation of Serpents was too staid and boring for their taste. So they resurrected the Church of Rust and Heme.

It’s unclear whether the original Rust Church thought much about demons, but you could make equally-plausible cases for them being for and against them. Demons are very much not human and not necessarily allies you’d want to trust, especially not grafted onto your body. But Zytera likes demons, and demons are plausibly just more tools that you’d be foolish to discard out of hand: isn’t grafting demonic parts to your body just another way of striving for personal improvement? If the Church of Rust and Heme teaches you to stand firm on your two good feet, and strive to make your life better with the force of your two good hands, then surely it must be even better if you find a way to get more legs and arms, right?

In the immediate aftermath of the end of the Alder Wars, this may well have been good enough. “Sometimes confused villagers joined the Brotherhood, who had been given control of the city Alderstone with its ruins, undead and half-demons.” (ibid., p. 33)

But then the Blood Mist happened.

The setback of the Blood Mist

This must have been a catastrophe for Zytera and the Rust Brothers. What’s the point of raising an army, summoning up terrible demons to fight your wars for you and tricking them into becoming your blood-sworn servants, if other demons you can’t control then make you have to hide in your house at night? We stole this country fair and square, but now we can’t have it!

Fifty years pass, and a lot of the sheen must have gone off Zytera’s new Rust Church by then. Enough, maybe, that people started dusting off the old stories, and hearkening back to the founding principles of the church: of resoluteness, faith in oneself, of defiance of adversity. Eventually, one of those throwbacks decides that their faith is strong enough to resist the Blood Mist, and to everybody’s surprise she proves it.

It says here (ibid., p. 34) of the Rust Prince Pyronax, that “Strong in faith, he walked alone in the Blood Mist one night, singing and swinging a rusty censer. To the surprise of all, he survived. Many followed and many of them were slain, but some remained unharmed. So the Mist became the initiation rite for the Rust Brothers for the next two centuries.”

Bullshit. History is written by the victors, and no way was the first person to successfully risk walking in the blood mist the head of the Rust Church. No, that sort of person would be a trusted lieutenant of Zytera, and there’s no way they’d risk their own life on a crazy scheme like this when they could try risking hundreds of other people’s lives instead.

Also, think of the twin nature of Rust and Heme in the original Church’s doctrine. Clean iron and blood pumping in your veins are good; rusty iron and blood outside of you are bad. When fighting a thing that seems to be made of blood somehow, the last thing you want to bring with you is rusty metal: the symbol to you of failure at best, something that would attract it and give it strength at worst.

The name of the person who defeated the Blood Mist for the first time is almost certainly lost to history. But we can be pretty sure that her followers, at least, will have given her the title “Ferrale”, even if posthumously.

The third schism: turning the Church unpalatably evil

Once Zytera and Pyronax realised that someone had managed to defeat the Blood Mist, they’ll have been determined to find out how. Zytera will have experimented upon the poor Ferrale in their normal way, by grafting all sorts of demon parts to her, and that won’t have worked. But someone sending dozens or hundreds of hapless followers into the woods at night will eventually have realised that it was about strength of will and belief.

Zytera’s task is now to exploit this new knowledge, while keeping it secret. On the one hand, if their trusted servants can walk at night among the blood mist and nobody else can, that’s a huge advantage, military but most importantly from an internal security point of view. If you can project power across your entire realm, but your internal opponents are limited to the numbers they can muster from a small village, you can easily put down any rebellion.

But it wouldn’t do for everybody to believe in Rust and Heme, because then the Rust Brother police would lose their advantage of being the only ones able to travel. So the truth of how you could travel at night had to be hidden.

This is when the Rust Church changes for a third time, mutating into a grotesque travesty of a religion that nobody of a sound mind would ever believe in: a bad guy religion of domination and control. Everybody knows that the Rust Brothers are immune to the blood mist? Well, that’s because they believe in all sorts of crazy shit, like Zytera their messiah, and they do terrible things as well: to other people, to themselves. If you’d prefer to live a quiet life and not be cartoonishly evil, well, maybe you’re not that fussed about hiding from the blood mist after all.

So rusty metal, previously the subject of cautionary tales of what happens if you don’t respect yourself or succumb to temptation, is now celebrated. It is now canon both that demons fear rusty metal, and that you should become Misgrown and adorn yourself with rusty metal. Surely, if you’re part-demon, all of this rust should hurt you? Yes, that doesn’t make sense; and that’s because Zytera actively doesn’t want to attract thinkers. They want bullies, psychopaths and murderers, and the new theology is designed to attract exactly those people. The arbitrary nature and cruelty of religious rites is deliberately dialed up, to the point where the arrival of Rust Brothers or Heme Sisters should strike fear into everyone who doesn’t know for an absolute fact that they’re not in trouble.

This is when the worst examples of the Rust Church’s protection rackets start, like how each village gets an effigy of Rust and Heme that’s said to “bless” their crops if they’re model citizens, but in fact is a demon that really wants to rampage through their crops and farm animals, and which the Rust Brothers have temporarily subdued (Raven’s Purge, p. 163).

The setback of the end of the Blood Mist

All good things come to an end, alas, and the Rust Brothers are now facing an existential threat: they can no longer rely on outnumbering their internal opposition. If everyone can travel overland, trying to suppress a rebellion with any kind of popular support is an uphill task: no matter how many rebels you manage to capture or kill, enough will survive and flee, spreading the word to neighbouring villages, and in turn inspiring new rebels.

But the problem isn’t just that the Rust Brothers’ protection racket is losing its strength and effectiveness. That’s a medium- to long-term problem, that Zytera hopes to find a solution for by yet more experiments on demons. No, the other problem is that of a crisis of faith.

The problem with encouraging a religious belief, backed with holy scripture and righteous sermons, is that people believe their religion. Zytera and maybe a few high-ups might be cynical enough to understand that it’s all part of a deliberate con, but most people have been surrounded by belief in the Church of Rust and Heme their entire life, and it was deliberately structured to be something that they’d want to believe. (Otherwise they wouldn’t have had the force of will needed to discourage the blood mist from attacking.) And many things they’d been taught are now, very clearly, no longer true.

If Heme sent the blood mist to screw over everybody who didn’t have faith, and ancient Rust Brothers found a way, uniquely, to walk abroad at night, then something desperately bad has happened. Has Heme has decided that those filthy dwarves, elves and orcs are no longer to be punished? Has she withdrawn her blessing from her followers? Have the dwarves, elves and orcs somehow foiled Heme?

Or maybe you think that the blood mist is clearly demonic, and Zytera, as a master of demons, found a way to give their followers mystical protection. Have other Kin somehow stolen that secret? Have enemies of the Rust Brothers somehow managed to weaken their bloodling allies?

The final schisms: the shattering of the Rust Church

This is where the weakness of limiting membership of the ruling Church to truly unpleasant people becomes apparent: yes, you managed to make sure that only a select coterie of mad bastards followed your religion, but that means you’ve never bothered to control the beliefs of the rabble you’ve been oppressing.

Which means that all of the previous versions of the Rust Church still have followers. There are proud individualists, whose relationship with the current Rust Brothers is on a spectrum from “they have defiled our ancestral religion for centuries” to “they’re still our brethren, if tragically misguided”. There are unthinking racists, who don’t have much truck with Kartorda and Zytera, but are thankful that they kept the goddamn dwarves, elves and orcs out. And there are people who were seriously thinking about signing up for a tour of duty with the Rust Brothers because there’s money and prestige there, if you can stomach the demonic brutality.

And that’s before you consider the influence of the Raven Sisters, who will have been quietly trying to do good and persuade people that there was an alternative to living under tyranny. Or the Congregation of the Serpent in the Ravenlands, whose vast libraries in Falender weren’t entirely lost when that ancient city burned down, and who will regardless have decent records of the various recent heresies and internal debates of the Rust Church in their new home in Farhaven. A small group of adventurous scholars going from village to village in Harga, quietly whispering things like “let me tell you how the Heme Sisters first discovered the truth of the blood mist”, may not be as obviously effective as a bunch of Robin Hood-style bandits waylaying Rust Brother patrols and then vanishing into the woods or hiding in villagers’ attics, but only a fool would downplay their impact in the medium term.

Even the worst Gestapo-like police force still has some contact with the people they’re oppressing: they hear what people say in the pub when they think they’re not being overheard, and they have family who don’t entirely toe the party line. In the middle of a crisis of faith, they’ll necessarily be exposed to these new ideas.

The Hail Mary play: ostensibly reforming the church from within

Chances are good that the Rust Church will just collapse. Certainly Kartorda is too much of a figure of authority to be able to plausibly pivot away from supporting Zytera and the established order; and he’s old enough that he might gracefully accept that the fate of a tyrant is to live a life of luxury for many years, and then be hanged from a tree by a violent rebellion.

But there’s scope for a younger leader to plead forgiveness and reconciliation, and try to reform the Church and the Harga polity from within, in the style of Mikhail Gorbachev. (That Gorbachev ultimately failed should be an indication of how difficult this task is going to be.) The pitch goes like this: yes, a number of Rust Brothers mutated themselves with demons so they could walk abroad at night, and, yes, behaved absolutely terribly. But in truth, they kept you safe, at the expense of their body and soul. Remember that time when your village was threatened by a plague, or hit by a deadly mudslide? Rust Brothers came and made sure the sick were tended, that people were rescued from their collapsed homes, that the flocks were rounded up and safeguarded. We should mourn the circumstances that required those people to make such a tragic sacrifice on behalf of the people they were sworn to protect.

Truly they were heroes.