Father Belias is the priest of the Temple of the Divine Decade in Ritornello, a fervent frontier cleric of the Decadian Orthodoxy whose fate after the town’s fall is disputed.
| Type | Character |
| Era | From about 2980 AEP |
| Spanish entry | Padre Belias |
Background
The diocese of Narsileon sent him as a young priest to strengthen Orthodoxy in the town newly united under Baron Argus; he has led the temple since about 2980 AEP. The Decadian archive records: “Ferviente en la fe nueva” (“Fervent in the new faith”).
Faith
He professes the Decadian Orthodoxy without compromise. Unlike rural clerics who tolerate the Old Faith of the Twelve, he forbids private prayers to Horus at dawn or to Bastet at the cradle: all devotion passes through the Ten, among them Asterion, Nemea, Zahon, Sutekh and Mithra.
No refined theologian, he will not discuss the Eleventh (the Sortian heresy of a god above the Ten), denies that the Ten are the Twelve in disguise, and treats rural double allegiance as treason. Some colleagues find him “rigid”; others call him “the last priest the march needs this century”. The Decadian chronicler classes him as the “fervent priest”, a frontier type, doctrinally useful but pastorally abrasive. Above him stands Basileus Drusus IX.
Baron Argus
Argus was a public devotee. Every decadía (the feast of the Ten, each tenth day) he sat in the main pew with his guard, received the blessing and gave a regular donation. Their relationship was cordial but not intimate.
The one exception came before the fall of Ritornello: when the bomb egg went from the baron to the faction that detonated it, he confessed privately to Belias. The priest kept the seal but wrote in his diary: “El barón teme algo que sus soldados no pueden detener. Que los Diez le concedan claridad.” (“The baron fears something his soldiers cannot stop. May the Ten grant him clarity.“) The fragment survives in a file kept in Narsileon.
Fall of the temple
Ritornello fell to Kerbog Khan’s bomb-dragonfly in the first year of the Hiatus. The temple collapsed; its bronze dome, cast in Narsileon, was among the first structures charred.
Conflicting accounts
On his fate:
- He died in the temple during the morning office, charred with the chalice in hand; the body was not recovered.
- He fled north to the Thorcin cabins, hidden by parishioners, and served the early Hiatus as a clandestine priest in the valley already sewn into the Mist domain of Valakhan.
- A minority version places him in Estellara or Valdemora, under Pope Alejandro Sixto once the Pope settled in the Palace of the Prism, a shift Narsileon has not recognized.
On his name:
- Some copyists link “Belias” to Belial, a minor pre-Decadian deity neutralized by the reform; the diocese tolerates it.
- Clandestine theosophists suggest he is a convert from the old cult who kept the name with a minor change. The Decadian chronicler rejects this but records it.
Open questions
- Whether he survived into the present cycle is unconfirmed.