Wolves in the Desert tentative

Welcome to the Wolves.

Where we live is a desert, marked by occasional oasises. That's where we build our towns, separate from each other. The towns range from huge to even just a tiny villa. Around the center is the biggest city, Karap. It is there you recieved your training to become a Wolf.

Who are we? Well, we're a religious order, who worship the King of Life. Our long, huge name is "the Faith of All Things in the King of Life, Reborn" but seriously. Just call us the Faith. It'll be much easier on us.

What is a Wolf? Well, we give you a set route to go, to deliver mail, to bless babies, all that stuff. Of course, there always is something wrong with the towns these days, so you'll also have to enact judgement. Don't worry about breaking any rules of the Faith; one of the perks to being a Wolf is that you can live as lawlessly as you want, provided you still help the Faith, and your own morality can take it. You call other Wolves by Brother or Sister, by the way.

Being a Wolf is a grueling job. Sometimes, you have to talk and reason with people to get them to change. Other times, dragging the man and shooting him on the street would be the best action for you. You can quit at any time, and no one would blame you for it.

When is your judgement needed? Well, all towns fall the same path downwards. Someone's proud. When that person acts upon it, there's injustice. That leads to sin, whether it's by the victims or the proud. Sin stops the protection by the King and allows the demons to attack, ruining crops, making people infertile, all that kind of stuff. Soon, someone's going to crack, whether it's the sinner or the victim of the attacks. And, most likely, they aren't going to do it the normal, Faithful way. This is false doctrine.
When that's acted, we have corrupt worship. When that happens, the demons stop attacking, and the ball keeps rolling down. When the corrupt worship has three or more followers, we have false priesthood, which allows the leader to control demons, also knows as sorcery.
And of course, sorcery will lead to hate, and then premeditated murder. That's the demons' ultimate goal.

Your job is to stop that process.

The Faith looks up to you Wolves in a great matter. In every (Faithful) town you go to, you'll be celebrated. People will look up to you, want you to bless their babies, their marriage, they want you to participate in their community activities, they want you to solve all their personal problems.
 And sometimes, yes, you'll need to solve their problems, if you want to figure out what's really going on.

"Some Wolves serve faithfully until they’re released from service. At the end of faithful service you can expect just about any local-level office you ask for, if you’re a man.
Non-Wolf men can and do hold office in the Faith, but Wolves are always considered preferentially. Only former Wolves can initiate new Wolves, although non-Wolves can teach them skills and theology, technically, if no former Wolf wants the job — which is not the case now. Every teacher at the Wolves’ Temple today served as a Wolf himself.
If you’re a woman, you can expect prestigious suitors and far more say in your future than non-Wolf women have. No suitor can demand that you marry him, for instance, where most women — even if nobody does demand them, there’s always somebody who  could. The Prophets and Ancients of the Faith, the seventy old men, when they want another wife, they always court and propose to just-finished Wolves, for instance, and you can turn them down if you want to.
When you do marry, you can expect your husband’s respect, and if you marry an office-holder, you can expect to participate in the administration of his office. You can expect to be regarded as a spiritual advisor and, if your inclinations run that way, a theologian in your own right. If your husband treats you badly, you can expect the Faith to take your complaints seriously."

A good thing to note: "The Faith is the only true religion in the world. All other religions are a) actively demonic, cults created by Faithful leaders fallen into sin; b) corrupt and decadent, like the majority religions of the East; or c) idle nonsense, like most of the religions in the wider world."

Most Faithful (ie not you, although you will probably get some flak for it during your training) don't drink coffee, black tea, wine, or hard liquor. Beer is fine, and other lesser forms of alcohol, although barley tea is getting out of fashion. Only the old use tobacco, and they're getting flak from their Stewards as a result.

The Desert People are just like your Native Americans around there. But keep in mind that yes, they all can speak our language.

We also got something called the Authority. They ain't a religious bunch, I can assure you that. They only come up to the desert for two things: taxes and mail. If anything interferes with either of these two...
They also supposedly keep the law around here, so don't do something dumb like shoot a sinner in his street in front of them. You're a Wolf, though, so as long as the Authority ain't there, you're fine.

This excerpt from this book describes the East well: "The majority suffers poverty, disease, filth, crime, slavery — and even still are too blind to turn to the King of Life."

We got your non-believers too. We'll except them as part of our towns, of course, but we'd still like them to be converted. But that ain't your job, so you don't have to do it.

Oh, that's right. Each town has got a Steward. They keep the town running to the best of their ability. When it still falls apart, that's your job.

Let's talk about you for a moment, shall we? Most stories are pretty much the same: when you're 12-13, your Steward probably decided you were a good candidate for a Wolf. Now, keep in mind that Stewards, and a lot of people in the Faith, do something spiritual-intuitive. What that means is that the King guides these decisions, and sometimes they don't make sense to the average thinker. Until you're 17-19, he keeps watch on you and guides you the best he can. But he's not responsible to make you a Wolf-to-be. You are.
When that time comes, the Steward will interview you and call upon you to be a Wolf. You pack your things and head on over to the Wolf's Temple in Karap. There's bit about fifteen others training with you, but the schedule is rolling, as people don't magically arrive at the same time.
Your teachers won't necessarily love you, they love the people you're going to serve. While, again, you're responsible to making yourself a Wolf, they have goals. Those are:

To prove or cull you. They exhaust, humiliate, stress, hurt, disappoint, tempt, scare, provoke, and overwhelm you.
To train you. They'll teach you to ride, shoot, fight, preach, persevere, ask questions, be patient, notice, be discerning, and survive.
To educate you. You'll learn about scripture, doctrine, ceremony, theology, cosmology and demonology.
To initiate you. They set you apart, invest you with the authority of the Prophets and Ancients, consecrate you to your service, receive your oaths, and sanctify you.
To inspire you. At some moment, some thing that someone says will make your soul light up. Nobody can predict when or what that thing will be, but without it, you won’t make a Wolf.

Of course, if you already know some of these things, they'll just skip over it. The time to train to become a wolf isn't that set in stone, but the average is two months.
While you're there, back home, your family and your whole town will get to work making your coat. It's a longcoat, definitely, a thick one, but that's where all the similarities stop. The women are in charge, and the men do what they're told for this part. There's a party that's held when, whether or not the coat is actually finished, the community gathers together and they each put a stitch to the coat. Then, all the men bless it with consecrated earth, and the party ends.

Toward the end of your training, you'll get your coat and letters of well-wishing from the community. You'll complete your training, get paired with two or three others, get your route and set off. That's where your story starts.

And that's pretty much all you need to know. There's loads of other stuff, like ceremony, but you don't have to read it all yet. Let me know if you do, though. I'll be glad to help.