Quoted By:
The Navarch
Upon the god-Ark of old, the First Navarch bound his soul to the mast, became as the living mast of his vessel, to hear the alluring call and song of the deep.
To this the Void returned only silence. The Waters Of Death withered his ship, made the timbered harp of its hull and keel tremble with fear and foreboding. Cold flooded the Ark, set the wind-steed rearing from bilge to orlop to portsill; scorching cold that set the ship burning upon the water. The Navarch repaired the long timbers and strakes of his mind. Yet the tempests and storms of the Void were relentless; again and again the Navarch mended the vessel of his thoughts, renewing and replenishing the Ark at harbour from forests until not a single plank of the original ship remained. The Navarch no longer knew if this vessel was even his own, or had been transformed over time into that possessed by another.
From this arose a twofold impiety: the first, the Perdurant Heresy, claimed the Ark was the same as the original, and that whilst those frames and time-slices writhing as worms through spatial and temporal dimensions of being may differ, all instances of the Vessel Of Thought remained contiguous, one and the same in continuity. Followers of the Perdurant Heresy oscillated between the shameless embrace of decadence and a later contrivance of puritan, minimalist modesty, though always in the manner of artifice.
Amongst these were the followers of the Annulari, who believed the Ark followed the rhythm of endless cycles; that every walking mortal was but the inverted reflection of one already ascended, and that to spare the Afterlife from Sin, one must commit the most debauched and abominable acts in life, for the coming future to remain pure and unsullied: to reach Heaven through violence.
The second, the Renunciant Heresy, claimed that all change rendered the world transient and unknowable. There was no self, no permanence; only suffering. Perhaps the Ark of mortal thought never even existed at all. From this Exile came the Anargyroi, and their inheritors: the Silverless Sect.
