Mother Abbess of the Monastery of Blessed Ensah in Uryula — a historian of the period before the founding of the Empire, and the specialist Countess Balventia pointed the party toward for older religious history.
What We Know (all S7)
- Her scholarly focus is the period before the founding of the Empire (pre-583 MCY).
- Her thesis: the Empire was founded on top of the Church, not the other way around.
- Old Imperial was perhaps the Church’s liturgical language, adopted by the Empire for purposes of legitimacy.
- The realm that appears in the records between the Second Crusade (ends 347) and the first references to what became the Empire may have been a theocracy, which evolved into a larger secular state that used the faith of the Maker to legitimize its rule.
- She dislikes the Malconti calendar, especially for dates before the founding of the Empire — she thinks, for example, that there must have been much more time between the Wrath and the founding of the Church than the calendar implies.
- The party did ask her about the Order of the Dawn, the Courts, and the old orders — she didn’t know anything about them. (S7, per Justin — the exchange didn’t make the original notes.)
- Research pointers: the Grand Abbey of Chlumzen has an excellent library, “as does the holy city of course.”
- Countess Balventia recalled the Abbess making comments indicating she might have knowledge of older religious history — the reason the party sought her out.
Naming collision
Shares a patronymic with Zahir ibn-Zahir, the Eagle knight-lieutenant from the riot aftermath — Zahir is a very common name (GM), and no relation was mentioned. Also note the monastery’s namesake — the historical Blessed Ensah — is not Princess Ensah.
Speculation
Her thesis lands squarely on the party’s problem. A Church that predates and produced the Empire is a Church old enough to have organized itself around the Five Courts before any emperor patronized the Holy Orders of the Five Courts — and her distrust of early Malconti dates would stretch the pre-history further still, back toward whatever the sanctums actually are. But note the shape of what she doesn’t know: the party asked about the Courts and the old orders and got nothing — so her period is the party’s period, and even a specialist in it has never heard of the court orders. Either the material only survives in the great libraries she named (The Holy City, Chlumzen), or it was scrubbed thoroughly enough that a pre-Empire historian can miss it. The Balventia shelves, notably, still have it.
Relationships
- Lusia Balventia — the Countess knows of her and her interests.