The Scriveners

In the city of Veldonia, capital of the Alderworth Kingdom and one of the most populated cities on the planet, there’s a guild that operates on the fringes of both medicine and forbidden lore: the Scriveners. To the public, they maintain the facade of an exclusive society of morticians and anatomical scholars, their services sought by nobles for the immaculate preservation of their dead. In reality, their craft is much more sinister: a form of divination that reads the past from the living flesh and bone of their subjects, as opposed to more traditional methods.

The Scriveners practice what they call “biological scripture”, founded on the belief that a life’s experiences—its sins, fears, and deepest secrets—are etched into the very organs and humors of the body. Their “reading rooms” are not libraries of paper and ink, but sterile, soundproofed chambers where subjects, often still living, are methodically vivisected upon marble slabs. Using alchemically-treated instruments to better preserve their subjects, the Scriveners do not merely cut, but read. They believe the freshest “text” is gleaned from a conscious mind, and employ arcane methods to prolong a subject’s agony and awareness as they peel back the layers of their being. A splash of a specific reagent might cause a lung to hemorrhage images of a whispered betrayal, while a carefully applied tincture to the liver can reveal a lifetime of greed and envy in shimmering, bloody patterns.

This grotesque expertise makes the Scriveners invaluable to the decadent and paranoid nobility of the Alderworth Kingdom. Nobles often hire them to ascertain the loyalty of their servants, inquisitors employ them to extract confessions from a heretic’s very bones, and a spymaster could deliver a rival agent to have their secrets flayed from them, one layer at a time. The information is said to be flawless, extracted from a source that cannot lie. This service, however, comes at an astronomical price, and not always in coin. The Scriveners are known to demand payment in the form of “unclaimed” subjects from a noble’s dungeon or the delivery of rare specimens, their gruesome collection of anatomical knowledge ever-expanding.

The origins of their craft are unknown, though some scholars at the College of Arcane Lore suspect they are practitioners of a debased and twisted form of Vaelorian anatomical science, their founding texts perhaps plundered from the upper crypts of Ker Nethalas. Regardless of their origin, it is a fact that the Scriveners thrive, especially while the powerful not only don’t bother stopping their activities, but actively fund them.