| This is a Left-Handed Legacy
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Flesh is weak, compassion is nothing, only the Movement is eternal.
The Guardians of the Veil sacrifice their own moral status so that other mages are free to cultivate Wisdom. It’s a difficult way to live, balancing the positive virtues that the order expects all mages to pursue against the immoral actions required for the greater good. Guardians must always be mindful of the line between necessary evil and self-serving cruelty. The legacy of the Austere crossed that line long ago. Theirs is a creed that eschews compassion and self-sacrifice, whose members seek to replace morality with machinelike detachment even as they modify their own bodies with mechanical constructs.
The first of these Clockwork Mages, an agent of the Dragon’s Eye who became known to his followers as the Prime Mover, developed a metaphysics that envisioned the Tapestry of Creation and the Diamond Wheel as an immense and intricate clockwork mechanism. In his view, the Abyss was a misalignment of key elements in this Eternal Movement. To restore the smooth functioning of the Mechanism of Creation, he concluded, mages must become Austere: pitiless, free of sentiment, even machinelike in their outlook. They must reject all trappings of mercy and compassion, which obscure one’s abil- ity to perceive and correct the flaws that prevent the smooth functioning of reality.
Further contemplation — or derangement — convinced the Prime Mover that simply attempting a detached, mechanistic view of Creation was not enough. He and his inheritors would need to become machines in fact as well as in outlook. By replacing their body parts with superior mechanical analogs, the Austere would advance their detachment from their own humanity and increase their sympathetic connection to the Eternal Movement. While the Guardians nipped at the edges of the Abyss with their subtle and ineffective schemes, the Austere would seize control of it by spilling blood without hesitation or remorse. Mages careless about Paradoxes would be eliminated; Sleepers who glimpsed hidden truths would be sacrificed. Murder, torture, terrorism and other immoral actions would be used as tools to shift the Eternal Movement into its proper configuration.
Attainments
- Mainspring
- Cog in the Machine
- Major Enhancement
