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A god-emperor known as Cosp the Undying waged a jihad across the known galaxy, promising an endless dawn of godhood for all slaves to "the Eternal Work", of which Cosp considered himself merely the First: but the god-emperor vanished. His pan-galactic caliphate, headless, fell; the gateways--from whence the bounty of a thousand worlds flowed into the heart of empire---Cargula, the golden city--were broken; and the fu'raaz-adi, the slave-sorcerers that arm and govern the Eternal Work, splintered into two factions. At war to this very day.
The empire's reformed theocracy, La Respiracion, is governed by the descendant of the first governor of Cargula hand-picked by Cosp Himself, the emperor interim and head of the church, the Gran Saa'cri-adi.
The empire's entire governing structure is slave-based, the slaves systematically "offered" to the theocracy by the populace. Families that submit their children are taxed less exorbitantly than those that refuse an official inspection and induction of a prospective sorcerer into the ministry. Children from the same families or communities are instructed in separate temples to strengthen their divorce from their former lives; there they are disciplined and tested. Those few who survive exposure to a Fu'Raaz-adi's remains, who successfully bond with their eldritch implants, are raised to sorcerers.* To stop the implants from devastating their bodies, the sorcerers of La Respiracion must take daily doses of elixir, as vital as it is addictive. The supply, naturally, controlled by the Gran Saa'cri-adi, its means and synthesis brutally guarded.
To expand the theocracy, more eldritch implants are required, more children sacrificed, but a cult of sorcerer heretics, the Corloks, are terrorizing the empire. Whereas the empire's slaves are voluntarily gifted to the theocracy, the Corloks take them. Stealing the choicest children, the ones most likely to survive an implant, from their very beds, and leaving the emperor's citizens nothing to protect them but the dregs. The children abducted do not require elixirs to safely bond to their implants, and, once indoctrinated into the blasphemies of the brotherhood, these Corloks are able to uncover and ransack holy sites, sabotage the theocracy, and assassinate its agents, their central tenet being the destruction of "the grand heresy", La Respiracion: and so the holy war between Cosp chosen servants and their sworn enemies is waged: but La Respiracion schemes of a way to perfect its slaves, and end the arms race forever.
