Missionary-Abbot Orland Skae

Six decades ago, as a young missionary,
Orland Skae left the relative comfort
of his post in the high churches of
Scintilla. Following what he felt to
be his vocation to preach the
Emperor’s word, he travelled
to Iocanthos. For many
years, he operated with little
support, and his crusade to
bring the vying warlords and
clans of Iocanthos more solidly
into the Imperial fold and to
fully abandon the “old ways”
has been a hard and sometimes
bloody struggle. In this time, he did make friends with the warlord Seth the Voice, though now they are friends no longer. His slow but
genuine gains have merited further
promotion and support from
his distant superiors, eventually
becoming impressive enough to
garner greater resources from the
Ecclesiarchy. This, in turn, has been
enough to allow for the establishment
of Iocanthos’s first cathedral in the Imperial settlement of Stern Hope. If Skae is successful,
he will be named its bishop by his masters---Iocanthos’s first of that rank.
Pride and burgeoning ambition, however, has
been Skae’s downfall. In searching for a site for the
cathedral’s location, he was drawn to an ancient
valley that legend told was a former stronghold
of the old gods he was determined to eradicate.
Unfortunately one of those “old gods” found him,
in the shape of the entity known as Tsyiak, the
Dancer at the Threshold. Since then, the Daemon
has slowly whispered in Skae’s mind, fanned the
flames of his desire for greatness, eroded his sanity
and slowly corrupted him, bending the abbot’s
own plans for the cathedral to secretly fulfil its
own designs. Although the abbot is outwardly in
control, the Daemon has worn away Skae’s mind
to shreds, and now appears to him in visions in
the guise of Saint Drusus, and convinced him that no
sacrifice or deceit is too great a price to pay for
bringing about the miracle of the saint’s return.