“All that is required is that she is still and handsome and dignified and no more. She is a species of statue.”
Those were Mother’s words to Papa all those years ago. Her education should be limited to the artistic, the religious, and the innocuous, Mother had argued. Play the lute, embroider beautifully, and recite large hymns of the Holy Light from memory. Keep her reputation beyond reproach until a suitable marriage was arranged. No more.
Papa had been kinder. He had been a brilliant man: strong, fair-minded, and sensible. Augusta acknowledged this and she had never held her papa’s decisions against him, even when his assessment of her potential was not any higher.
“They’ll eat you alive at Court, child.”
Poor Papa. He, like so many others, never realised that the Noble politics were a game of ninepins compared to what went on within the Church.
Within the Church, everyone agreed that the Light was divine; and not merely a school of magic like the Arcane. Everyone agreed on the importance of healing the sick and training holy warriors to mete out divine justice.
Beyond that, it was a snake pit of warring factions and furious accusations of heresy, impiety, sacrilege, doctrinal impurity, and heterodoxy. Debates raged on the nature of Virtue, on the validity of the Tome of Divinity, on the divisive issue of whether demi-humans had souls in the truest sense of the word. Was the Light merely a Natural energy or was it a blessing by some Divine Entity? Were the catastrophes of the recent times due to a lack of faith or was the Alliance’s very survival due to the Light itself?
And it was a fact that priests and paladins, sisters and brothers, were sometimes all too human. Bishops had taken lovers and embezzled Church funds; Paladins had abused their powers over commoners in disgraceful ways; initiates of both sexes ran away with peddlers or mercenaries or each other.
In Stormwind, the most burning issue was the largely secular matter of the Church’s capital move to Stormwind itself. This was undercut by the vast amount of lost knowledge caused when the libraries of Lordaeron’s Cathedral had burned.
Lordaeron had been the home of the Church of the Light, influencing all of the Eastern Kingdoms with its teachings. Its Cathedral was not merely a house of worship, but also the greatest library in the known world. Its texts were destroyed along with the Church, many of them burned, most of them buried under thousands of pounds of rubble.
Stormwind itself had been only in the early stages of restoring its volumes when Lordaeron was lost and now they face the titanic challenge of restoring the Church’s canon. With neither original nor copies available for transcription in most cases, the mantle of rewriting the pontifications on the Holy Light rests on diligent priests who claim perfect memories. Some self-appointed sages are taking up the mantle of rewriting the pontifications on the Holy Light. There are fresh looks at old ideas, as well new ideas that completely reject the former hegemony’s schools of thought.
With the wars, settling a new religious capital in Stormwind and dealing with frequent skirmishes, the remaining scholars and priests have struggled to work on transcribing old information into new books for initiates.
Most young paladins of the Holy Light learn by experience on the field of battle instead of in libraries surrounded by texts, unwilling or unable to old men argue about philosophy.
This is the tension within the Church; younger priests and paladins feel the Third War gave the Holy Light a chance to renew itself just as the Alliance was renewing itself in Stormwind, while others demand to keep the old traditions.
Augusta loved the Church with a deep and abiding passion, but she loved the Church Triumphant, rather than the Church Mundane. That is to say, she loved the Church of Heaven, rather than the worldly institution that was its pale reflection.