Ritual (Faction Paradox)

RITUAL (FACTION PARADOX) [Faction Paradox: Culture/ Technology] The Great Houses have their timeships: complex, majestic structures of architecture and engineered thought, which can cut a path from one side of the continuum to the other without leaving any mark on the intervening worlds or eras. Other species have developed more primitive vessels of their own, quantum-charged metal boxes designed to punch holes in the universe and hollow out tunnels from one section of history to the next. But Faction Paradox has no such machinery. The Faction’s agents only have their shrines, rooms with obsidian walls and the bones of great men and women set into the foundations, null-zone chambers shielded from the rest of history which slip in and out of the Spiral Politic at will and integrate themselves into the local architecture wherever they go. Through the shrines the Faction’s agents have almost unlimited access to the course of causality, and yet the rooms seem to contain very little actual technology. When the Faction’s agents move through history, they do it via ritual.

Ceremony is vital to Faction Paradox. The organisation sees the processes and equations of time as actual entities - the loa - and the rituals used to operate the shrines, with their complex chains of invocations and blood-lettings, are intended to access the loa’s power. Though this would seem to contradict much of known science, it has to be remembered that known science was (in part) created by the Great Houses, and it was always Faction Paradox’s agenda to defy the Houses. When House Paradox was first founded its Grandfather experimented with various alternative-time structures, working them into the framework of history much as the Houses originally “programmed” the universe with their own Protocols. Possibly when the Faction’s members perform the loa rites they’re simply tapping into the alter-time mechanisms created by the Grandfather, mechanisms made out of history itself, using ritual as a kind of access code.

Other rituals are more elaborate. Although the Faction doesn’t enforce rigid punishments on members who fail in their duties, the family-like structure of the organisation leads many Cousins to be driven by guilt and anxiety, and those who let the Faction down often commit a bizarre form of ritual suicide. They transpose themselves back in time to their own childhoods, and ceremonially murder themselves as children, forcing their own bodies into a state of “divine paradox” not unlike that experienced by the fluxes. Such an action will create a complex, fugue-like structure of causal equations, and in this perhaps the victims feel closer to the loa. The paradoxical dead survive only as shadows, visible on the walls of the alter-time Eleven-Day Empire but lacking any physical mass in the rest of the universe.

The most famous ritual in the Faction’s history is, of course, the Act of Severance by which the Grandfather brought Faction Paradox into existence. It must be a source of great irritation to the Faction’s elders that despite their love of ceremony, nothing they do will ever seem quite as important.