In the primal ages before the Gods left the world, the Intercessor was the Deus Irae, the God of Wrath. He was the master of vengeance and fury; those who crossed him in the strange feuds between the gods at the dawn of time seldom lived to regret it.
When a human being dared to murder a God, it was only right that the Gods would turn to the Deus Irae to lead them against mankind. The Deus Irae refused; perhaps he realised that the Gods had been mistreating humanity, or perhaps he secretly knew that if the Gods went to war against mankind the Gods might *lose*. Instead of fighting the humans, the Deus Irae loudly refused, and in doing so convinced the Gods to leave the world. The former nature of the Intercessor is a great mystery, although it is known that there was a Deus Irae in the dawn of time.
In doing so, he was effectively renouncing his very nature. This did him a serious cosmic injury, and he had to withdraw from the world utterly - even more so than the other gods. He left behind a message to humanity, the One Message that the Church of the Intercessor still follows today:
I AM THE INTERCESSOR YOUR SAVIOUR. I HAVE HELD BACK THE HAND OF WRATH;
THIS ONE DEED I WILL DO FOR YOU.
DO NOT PRAY FOR I WILL NOT HEAR. IF YOU WISH TO GIVE THANKS, YOU WILL
FORGE A BETTER WORLD.
I HAVE LAID ASIDE MY POWER AND FORSAKEN MY AEGIS. THOSE IN MY CHURCH
WILL DO THE SAME; ANY PRIEST OF MINE WHO LAYS CLAIM TO AUTHORITY,
TITLE OR INHERITANCE IS NO TRUE PRIEST.
I HAVE WITHDRAWN FROM THE BATTLES AND ABDICATED FROM THE FEUDS. THOSE
IN MY CHURCH WILL DO THE SAME; ANY PRIEST WHO FIGHTS SAVE TO DEFEND
OTHERS IS NO PRIEST OF MINE.
I SAY TO YOU THAT THERE IS NO JUSTICE AMONGST THE GODS; DO NOT, THEN,
THINK YOU MAY ACT IN THE NAME OF JUSTICE IF YOU ARE A PRIEST OF MINE.
YOU WILL NOT BE A JUDGE, NOR AN ADVOCATE, NOR A POLICEMAN IF YOU ARE A
PRIEST OF MINE. BUT IF YOU ACT INJUSTLY MAY YOU BE CURSED AND
DESPISED.
I GIVE YOU ARTS OF HEALING. YOU WILL USE THEM AS YOU SEE FIT. IF YOU
SELL THEM, YOU ARE NO LONGER MY PRIEST.
I SEND THREE AVATARS. THEY ARE MY LAST GIFT TO YOU AND IT IS THEIR
PLACE TO SERVE YOU. IF THEY DEMAND WORSHIP OR OBEDIENCE YOU MUST KILL
THEM.
I SAY TO YOU THAT THERE IS NO LOVE FOR YOU AMONGST THE GODS. SPEAK
AGAINST THE OTHER GODS WHEREVER THEIR AVATARS AND DAIMONS ARISE. CAST
THEM OUT; THEY MEAN ONLY HARM TO MEN.
IF YOU WISH TO THANK ME AND SERVE ME YOU WILL LEAVE THE WORLD,
RENOUNCE ALL POWER, HEAL THE SICK, ACT JUSTLY BUT DO NOT ACT AS
JUSTICE, LIVE IN POVERTY AND PERFORM GOOD WORKS.
IF I SPEAK UNTO YOU AGAIN, LISTEN NOT. THERE WILL BE ONLY LIES.
(This is probably too long: it would be nice to trim it down a lot.)
Crippled by his own self-betrayal, the Intercessor brooded at the outer rim of everything for millennia. Then he got stuck in a box by a bunch of humans fusing clockwork and steam power to make a godtrap.
The Intercessor is now presented with a dilemma.
On one hand, he's been stuck in a box. This is irratating.
On the other hand, it's nice to see human beings do this sort of thing. It vindicates his belief that they would one day exceed the Gods.
On the third hand, he's been stuck in a box. This is really irritating.
On the fourth hand, he's *doing* stuff for the first time in millennia. He's deliberately abandoned the world and abdicated any involvement in it for a very long time, but just because he had very good reasons to do so doesn't mean he was never tempted to get involved again. Okay, granted he's at the beck and call of a machine which prods him and pokes him until he performs the relevant miracle, but in a way that's even better: he gets to do stuff, but he has no choice about it and so he isn't actually betraying his principles.
On the fifth hand, he's been stuck in a box. This is really fucking irritating.
So he really doesn't know what he'd do if/when he gets out. He's not sure if he wants to. At least here, alternately nourished and tortured by the Grey Order's machinery, he is protected from the inexorable march of time. Perhaps the Grey Order will survive and prosper; perhaps eventually the only active Power in the world will be the Intercessor, having become a willing Deus Ex Machina, dispensing miracles at the request of the polite bureaucrats of the Grey Order. Cosmology will be decided by committee; the value of 2 + 2 will be optimised according to precise mathematical formulae devised by Order philosophers. The very path of the Stars in the heavens will be voted on by the Order's central committee, to maximise the astrological benefit; the world will be a vast office with Grey managers overseeing the Rune-ruled masses.
His barge is strange, thanks to his changing nature. Initially it was decorated with murals, statues, and other pieces of artistic value depicting terrible vengeance. These were all smashed, shattered, slashed and defaced when he became the Intercessor.
And now the Grey Order have captured him. Now, were you to explore the barge, you would eventually find places where gears and steampipes are jutting violently out of the walls. If you explored *further*, steam and clockwork would begin to dominate, to the extent that you seemed to be walking through the belly of a machine.
At this point there is no hope for you. Whatever direction you go in, inevitably you end up with the Intercessor within the Grey Order's machine. And since you aren't a god, you end up being killed by the machine's processes.
The Intercessor raised three people to avatarhood back when he left the world. No new avatars have arisen, although it's entirely possible that someone could end up pursuing the path of the Intercessor and become a new avatar (or even the path of the Deus Irae that was, or the Deus Ex Machina to come).
RICHARD THE FIREBRAND was a hunter by trade who was charged with seeking out and eliminating avatars of other gods. For several years he operated in secret and successfully hunted down a good number; however, he allowed himself to become too involved in the world he had been ordered to protect. He married an Imperial guard commander who had aided him tracking down an especially gruesome avatar of Lacrymosa; and Lacrymosa seized upon the opportunity to ruined him, and had the lady killed. The hunt for avatars became personal for Richard then; he was no longer following the path of the Intercessor, but the path of the Deus Irae. At first his furious vengeance was aimed solely at avatars, but soon he became less and less discriminate; stories circulated of a wild man wandering the countryside who would burn entire towns to the ground if slighted. Eventually he was slain, cut down by a hail of arrows from the archers of [Vicky's province]'s militia.
The story of Richard the Wild, avatar of the Deus Irae, is well-known: in the archives of the Church of the Intercessor the true tragedy of Richard the Firebrand is written.
THE WISE PRIEST has secretly run the Church of the Intercessor from the beginning. The leaders of the Church of the Intercessor are all members of the Order of the Withdrawn Cardinals, a group that is basically the Church's retirement package: once priests become too old to rush around performing good works they are made Cardinals in recognition of their efforts and are cared for in the House of the Cardinals in the City. There they look after the Church's accounts, assign resources, plan where the next hostel is going to be built, discuss how they are going to react to current events, that sort of thing. Imagine a collection of kindly old uncles in cardigans who devote their lives to chatting about what needs to be done to help the poor and the downtrodden over cups of tea, who all wear full-face masks.
Oh yes, that's the other thing: the Withdrawn Cardinals make a big thing of withdrawing from the world, just as the Intercessor did when his work on earth was done. They only ever appear in public wearing jolly smiling facemasks - ostensibly because in withdrawing the world they renounce their former idenities. In fact, the whole thing is a ruse to help the Wise Priest disguise his true nature. The Withdrawn Cardinals are all in on it; the Wise Priest is always the head of their order, the Cardinal of Cardinals, and whenever he needs to "die" to maintain the pretence he simply waits until one of the other Cardinals dies and assumes his identity - taking care to make sure that the priest in question has few close friends in the outside world who are likely to come looking for him.
When the Grey Order kidnapped the Intercessor, the Wise Priest felt it immediately: the dim, distant presence of the Intercessor at the edge of his thoughts was no longer there. He assumed - understandably - that the Intercessor had died, and after a brief period of mourning continued going about business as usual.
LUCRECIJA is a figure of myth, a wise witch-woman who turns up to lend a helping hand whenever all seems lost but never saves the day outright; she merely pops up, gives people handy advice, and leaves again. She rides through the sky in a brightly painted caravan drawn by two large winged cats.