The era historians call Before Echo had no name while it was lived. It was simply the world as it had always been: brutal, arbitrary, and indifferent to mortal survival. War was not an interruption of normal life — it was normal life. Famine followed conquest the way shadows follow fire. Plague spread through cities no one had the knowledge to clean. The gods of those centuries were not absent; they were watching, and what they watched amused them. Dort was a theater. Mortals were the cast. Suffering produced interesting worship.

Into this world was born a man of no particular station named Jolem. He was not a warrior or a nobleman. He was, by most accounts, a builder — the kind of person who notices when a roof is failing before it falls, who asks whether the well is clean before the children are sick. He saw in the world's brutality not destiny but failure: a failure of coordination, a failure of memory, a failure to treat the survival of one's neighbor as connected to one's own.

His message was simple to the point of seeming naïve: all of you together are stronger than any of you alone. He preached it across race and tribe and city-border. He preached it to farmers who hated the city-dwellers who taxed them and to city-dwellers who feared the farmers who could starve them. He preached it with the patience of a man who understood that the first audience would reject him, and the second would be curious, and the third would begin to listen.

The movement that formed around him was not a religion. It had no god to offer — that was, in fact, part of its appeal. It was a doctrine of mutual obligation: record what happens, maintain what was built, settle what can be settled, and do not let one community's collapse become your opportunity.

The authorities of the time understood the threat immediately. A god is manageable. A god can be co-opted, bargained with, dismissed. A movement of people who believe they owe each other something cannot be so neatly handled. Jolem was hanged on a public scaffold in a city whose name is not recorded, on a charge that varied depending on who was prosecuting.

The movement did not collapse. It hardened.

Jolem's disciples numbered in the hundreds of thousands by the time of his execution. In the grief and rage of his death, one of his closest followers — a woman whose name has been debated by scholars for centuries, recorded only as the Speaker — proposed something that had never been attempted: a single day on which every person who had ever heard Jolem's message would cry out together, in their own language, in their own city, for the same thing: relief. Rest. An end to the grinding.

The day was announced by runners, by merchants who had converted, by soldiers who had carried the message in their packs. It spread through networks that had no center and no single leader. On the appointed morning, from a dozen regions simultaneously, a million voices rose.

The mortal plane shuddered.

The gods noticed. Not as they normally noticed things — with mild interest or amusement — but with the visceral recognition that something unprecedented was happening. This was not prayer directed at any one of them. It was directed at the concept of relief itself. At the possibility that things could be otherwise.

And something answered.

The faithful tell it simply: the world asked for rest, and rest answered.

Echo came into being at the moment the Supplication crested — not born from one of the Shards of Ix like most of the gods, not torn from an older deity, not formed by divine politics. He was made by need. The weight of a million desperate, sincere, unified pleas collapsed into a point and became a person.

He was disoriented, as all newborn gods are. But unlike the Shard-gods, who woke to a sense of themselves with no corresponding sense of obligation, Echo woke knowing exactly why he existed and for whom. He had been made by the specific need of specific people. Their longing was his first memory.

He did not appear to the powerful. He appeared to the sick. He began to work.

The other gods reacted to Echo's existence with something between alarm and contempt. A deity born of mortal longing was a problem. It implied that worship itself could create — that mortals, if they wanted something badly enough together, could bypass the existing divine order and manufacture a new one. If that was true, then no god's position was as secure as they had thought.

Several of the older gods moved to destroy Echo before he could consolidate. What stopped them was not his power — he was newborn and they were ancient — but his argument. Echo offered a bargain: a century to prove his premise. He claimed that a world in which mortals were healthier, safer, and better organized would produce more worship for every deity — not just for him. A world where people survived childhood, where records were kept, where disputes were resolved without everyone dying, was a world with more people alive to kneel.

The gods accepted, grudgingly. Some because the logic was sound. Some because they wanted the amusement of watching him fail. Some because they suspected he was right and wanted to position themselves to benefit.

Echo's Century became the hinge on which modern Dort turns. (See: History of Dort.)

During those hundred years, Echo worked in ways no god before him had bothered to. He removed birth deformities. He softened the worst of the airborne sicknesses. He taught sanitation — slowly, through dreams and whispers and the occasional appearance to a receptive healer — until it became common practice in enough cities to make a measurable difference in survival rates. He made rest sacred: not idleness, but the deliberate recovery that allows work to continue. He made space for civilization to take hold.

At the end of the century, the numbers spoke for themselves. The century's accumulated worship had swelled the divine ledgers across the board. Echo had won.

He has not been entirely safe since, but he has been necessary. And in a world driven by divine politics, necessary is the closest thing to untouchable.

What Echo offers is quiet, but it is not small. The Accord's bargain with mortals is one of the oldest and most tested in the world.

The Accord's beliefs are not mysteries or esoterica. They are practical propositions.

(See also: claw/Soul_Coins_and_Divine_Economy)

Echo's power grows through devotion that looks like maintenance — the unglamorous work of keeping people fed, safe, and honest with one another.

The Accord does not build grand temples as a rule, and the absence of grandeur is a deliberate theological statement: Echo does not require awe. He requires use.

Accord Shrines appear wherever stability is defended. Courthouses. Public archives. Commons halls. Guild registries. Quiet corners of marketplaces. The shrine is often embedded in the function rather than announced by it — a carved symbol above a doorway, a record chest with Echo's name on the lock, a bench in a corridor where disputants can sit and cool while a keeper is sent for.

When an Accord Hall is built as a dedicated structure, it tends toward the comfortable and the useful: good lighting for reading, a hearth that works, walls solid enough to outlast the generation that built them. Common imagery includes mortals looking upward, interlinked hands, shelves of records sealed behind simple wards. There are no grand statues of Echo — he is not, by his own preference, that kind of god.

The practical orientation of Accord spaces has a secondary effect: they are genuinely useful to people who are not members of the faith. A shrine that houses a contract registry serves the whole town, believer or not. This is not incidental. It is recruitment.

The Accord is organized around trust earned through competence, not through appointment, wealth, or lineage. A keeper who cannot reconcile people will not hold authority for long — the community will simply stop bringing disputes to them.

Most keepers hold a second civic role: mediator and clerk, judge and archivist, teacher and civic organizer. The separation between the sacred and the civic is deliberately thin in this faith; a keeper's religious authority and their community authority are intended to reinforce each other.

There is no single head of the Accord, no high keeper whose word overrides all others. Regional networks of keepers share practices and resolve disputes among themselves through the same mediation processes they apply to everyone else. A keeper found to have falsified records or abused their position faces the faith's most serious censure — not because the rules say so, but because their core function has been corrupted.

Conversion to the Accord is meant to be organic: Echo's clergy recruit by doing the work.

Soft entry is easy and gradual. Join a community project. Volunteer as a record-keeper. Learn mediation techniques. Help clean a polluted river. The Accord does not require a declaration of belief before participation, and many people who have been doing Echoan work for years before they formally commit.

Initiation is a public vow — taken before the community, not just before the clergy — to protect community peace and preserve truth in records. The publicity is the point. A private vow can be quietly abandoned. A public vow is woven into the social fabric of the place where it was made.

What makes an enemy rather than a convert: Willful sabotage of stability. Burning records. Falsifying civic truth. Profiting from division. These are not people the Accord approaches differently — they are people the Accord opposes.

A devoted Echoan cleric is recognizable by their habits more than their vestments.

Date: 7th day of the 7th month.

On Echoing Day, keepers gather from across their region to perform the most solemn act of the faith: collecting the year's stories — roofs repaired, feuds ended, sicknesses endured, names of the dead who had no one else to remember them — and reading them aloud. Nothing is editorialized. Nothing is ranked by importance. A cobbler who kept the same corner market running for thirty years gets read. A child who survived a hard winter gets named.

The principle is uncompromising: nothing should be lost that someone cared enough to bring. The act of reading aloud in community is itself the rite — it makes the witnessing shared, which makes it harder to revise later.

Date: Once every other year, date set by the local keeper community.

Purgato Sursum — roughly, "cleansing upward" — is the Accord's principal collective obligation: the undertaking of a major civic project by the keepers and willing lay members of the community. Past examples include the construction of clean-water infrastructure, the reform of a corrupt local court, the rebuilding of a community damaged by disaster, and the establishment of a public archive where none existed.

The project is proposed, debated, chosen, completed, and then consecrated — dedicated as a communal obligation, not a gift. The distinction matters to the Accord: a gift can be accepted or rejected; a consecrated obligation belongs to the community permanently.

An Accord-witnessed marriage is less a ceremony of romance than a ceremony of community formation. Two households are joining; the community is witnessing and, through gifts, underwriting the union. The keeper records the vows and the gifts — both are equally part of the official record. The gift requirement is not a formality: it is a mechanism that distributes small amounts of practical support across the community each time a household is formed.

The Accord's consecration rite marks the completion of a communal project. It is deliberately simple: a statement of purpose (this was built for this reason), a naming of those who labored (these people built it), and a promise to maintain what was built (this is now ours to keep). The simplicity is intentional — complex rituals are easy to perform once and forget; this one is short enough to repeat, and its words are designed to remind the community of its own obligation every time they use the thing that was built.

When two parties enter formal Accord mediation, the keeper opens with a brief ritual acknowledgment: both parties confirm that they are present voluntarily, that they are willing to hear what the other says, and that they will respect whatever the community decides if negotiation fails. This is not legally binding in most jurisdictions — but its public nature means that violating the compact carries a social cost that most parties find more effective than any fine.

The Accord's attire is practical and intentionally accessible — a keeper should not look like they belong to a different world than the people they serve.

A robe in calming, neutral colors (blues, grays, soft greens) with interlinked motifs worked into the hem or collar. The interlinked pattern is the only consistent decorative element across the faith; everything else varies by region and maker. The robe signals role without demanding awe.

Worn at high ceremonies — Echoing Day, major consecrations, significant mediations. Woven from flowers or fabric depending on the region and season. A deliberately unimposing crown: this authority rests on service, not dominion.

Echo's symbol — the crowd looking upward — worn as a pendant. The most common piece of Accord devotional jewelry; many lay followers wear it without being formally initiated.

Carried by senior keepers. A plain working staff, often worn smooth from use, sometimes bearing a small carved disc near the top with the crowd-symbol. Used practically for walking and ceremony alike.

A portable copy of the keeper's active records and essential teachings — carried into the field, not left on a shelf. The scroll represents that the Accord's work does not stay behind temple doors.

Simple and near-universal. Given at initiation; often homemade or locally crafted. In many communities, the same basic ring design has been worn by keepers for generations.

Jolem was not a keeper — the Accord did not exist when he lived. He was the condition for Echo's existence: the mortal whose work created the need that made the god. What the faith preserves of Jolem is fragmentary and probably idealized, but its core is consistent across regions and centuries.

He built things. He organized people. He argued that survival was a collective project. He was killed for it.

The Accord does not treat him as a martyr in the dramatic sense — he is not invoked for courage or vengeance. He is invoked for the quality of noticing: the particular attentiveness to when something is failing before it fails, and the willingness to say so and do something about it. His execution is remembered not as a defeat but as the catalyst that proved his point — a movement that survives the death of its founder without a god to hold it together is a movement that has become something more than a following.

Name unknown. Jolem's disciple who proposed the Global Day of Supplication. The Accord's scholars have debated her identity for centuries without consensus — she may have been a composite of several people, or a single historical figure whose name was deliberately suppressed by the authorities who later tried to erase Jolem's movement. What matters, doctrinally, is what she did: she understood that individual prayer is loud but unfocused, and that a million voices asking for the same thing at the same moment might be loud enough to be heard. She was right.

The Accord does not canonize her because canonization would require giving her a name, and her namelessness is considered meaningful: what she represents is the anonymous, collective nature of the act that made Echo.

The orphan whose cry is remembered as the moment Echo's name was fixed.

Manni was among the children gathered in the city where the Global Day of Supplication was loudest. He did not know the theological framing; he knew that everyone around him was crying out for something, and he cried out too, in the only words he had: "Echo us! Echo us!" — give back what we have lost, reflect it to us whole.

The Accord treats Manni as the faith's emblem of the lay follower: not a philosopher, not a leader, just a person who understood the essential thing. His chant became the deity's name. He grew up, became a keeper himself, and died in obscurity — having, as the faith notes with quiet approval, done exactly what the Accord required: built something small and solid that outlasted him.

A keeper from the late post-Echo period whose name survives because of the administrative records she preserved. She served a river-district prone to seasonal flooding. Over forty years of service, she maintained a running record of every flood, every evacuation, every rebuilding, every name of the dead. When a particularly catastrophic flood struck in her later years, the survival rate of the quarter was measurably higher than comparable districts because the community had prior records to plan against and a keeper who had spent decades building the mutual-aid networks those records described.

She is cited in the faith not as a hero but as a proof of concept: the unsexy, patient work of maintenance saves more lives than any dramatic intervention.

How they refer to themselves: the Archivers or the Long Memory

The Archivers are the Accord's most specialized internal organization: keepers who have dedicated themselves primarily to the preservation and maintenance of records rather than to direct mediation work. They operate the major Accord archives, train other keepers in document preservation, and maintain the chain-of-custody practices that make Accord records trusted in courts and councils.

Outsiders sometimes mistake them for a monastic order; they are not. Most Archivers work embedded in civic institutions — attached to courts, trading registries, city administrations — rather than in isolated archive halls. The quiet, sustained nature of their work makes them easy to overlook, which the Accord considers an occupational virtue.

How they refer to themselves: the Field Keepers or simply Settlers

Settlement Keepers are practitioners who work at the edge of civilization rather than in its centers — in frontier communities, disaster-struck towns, and places where civic institutions are too new or too damaged to function reliably. They tend to hold more practical skills than their urban counterparts: building, medicine, food preservation, militia organization.

The Field Keepers see themselves as the faith's original form: Echo's first work was in the world, not in halls. Urban keepers sometimes regard them as theologically imprecise; the Field Keepers consider this a reasonable trade for actually being useful.

How they refer to themselves: Clinicians or, informally, the Counter-Tempters

Not a sect in the traditional sense — more a specialized practice that some keepers adopt as a primary vocation. Contract Clinics are discreet services offered in larger towns, typically from an Accord shrine, at which trained keepers with knowledge of binding contracts review unusual agreements before they are signed. The service developed as a response to the proliferation of infernal bargains and predatory lending agreements.

Clinicians are not universally loved: they reduce demand for advantageous-but-predatory contracts, which makes them enemies of some merchants and infernal brokers. Several have been killed for their work. The Accord considers this a cost of doing necessary business.

How they refer to themselves: the Unbound

The Echoless argue that Echo has made society soft and complacent — that hardship is the engine of growth and that the Accord's project of reducing suffering produces only weak people who cannot handle the world as it actually is. They disrupt community projects and attempt to "restore strength" through destabilization.

The Accord's response to the Echoless is careful. Doctrinally, the Accord argues that what the Echoless call strength is mostly the survival of those already strong — that the brutal world they romanticize was not a crucible for the many but a comfortable environment for the few who profited from it. The Accord takes the critique seriously enough to answer it rather than dismiss it; they consider the Echoless a warning about what happens when community maintenance is invisibilized until it fails.

How they refer to themselves: the Quiet Path

Self-Echoers apply Echo's teachings entirely inward — personal serenity, personal record-keeping, personal mediation of one's own thoughts and impulses. They argue that you cannot maintain a community you have not first maintained in yourself.

The Accord treats this as incomplete devotion rather than outright evil. The logic of the Quiet Path is not wrong; the error is treating it as sufficient. An Echoan who has achieved profound inner peace and done nothing with it for their community has, in the Accord's view, kept the gift for themselves — which is a form of hoarding.

How they refer to themselves: the Chorus

The Harmonizers seek enforced unity. They believe that harmony is worth any cost — including mind-altering rites, coercive social pressure, and the deliberate suppression of dissenting voices in the name of community peace.

The Accord considers this a fundamental inversion of the faith: the Accord's unity is chosen, not manufactured. A community in which people agree because they have been prevented from disagreeing is not harmonious — it is suppressed. The Chorus's methods corrupt the very thing they claim to be protecting.

They are dangerous because they are superficially convincing: they use the language of the Accord, invoke Echo's name, and point to the peace they have produced without disclosing the means. Keepers who encounter the Chorus are trained to ask specific questions: Can anyone here leave freely? Can anyone here disagree openly?

How they refer to themselves: the Voices

The Voices believe that Echo is not a deity in the usual sense — not a being with independent existence, but the collective will of the people made manifest. They believe that the original Supplication demonstrated this: that mortal longing, sufficiently unified, is the divine. Therefore, they believe that mass prayer — properly organized — can force reality to change, can make Echo act, can reproduce the miracle of his birth.

The Accord does not dismiss this as obviously false. The theological question of Echo's nature (is he a being or a force?) is genuinely unresolved. What the Accord objects to is the Voices' tendency to instrumentalize community suffering — to keep people in crisis in order to maintain the kind of desperate unified longing that they believe generates divine intervention.

(See: Cosmology/Physical Realms/The Shattered Domain)