再来一小坑，BH继续
By Jeff Tidball
The Order of the Silver Twilight was first publicly documented in 1692 in colonial Massachusetts, the year the Salem Witch Trials began. Its abominable roots stretch back to an aristocratic secret society of the Late Middle Ages, formed as a conservative backlash against the Renaissance and its nascent enlightenment.
To outsiders, the contemporary Order of the Silver Twilight is an elite social club built from cognac, Cuban cigars, and deep brown leather furniture. The Order’s rolls include leading politicians, charismatic socialites, persuasive civic leaders, and successful businessmen. Their world is forged of privilege, lubricated by money, and polished with the prerogatives of the upper crust.
The Order – now a global network – is made up of Lodges, a word that describes both the members of the Order in a locality as well as its headquarters. These edifices are most frequently extensive mansions or privately owned cultural buildings like museums. They are distinguished by cluttered studies, strange and disturbing laboratories, and massive libraries filled with ancient tomes. Some serve as the homes of the group’s senior members, or the prisons of its enemies.
Some Lodges, especially in Europe, are housed in old medieval churches or subterranean catacombs. The Lodge in Chicago takes up several floors of the Home Insurance Building in the public guise of an exclusive law practice. The Lodge in Barcelona comprises lavish houseboats moored in a private marina from whence they take to sea at each full moon for strange and elaborate rituals at which outsiders are unwelcome. The Lodges, although sharing certain traits, are widely diverse.
Each Lodge has an Inner Sanctum where its most senior members conduct their most secret and esoteric business. These sancta sanctora are protected by powerful wards and spells from both the spying eyes of human wizards and the influence of powers from Outside. Yes, the Order knows much of magic and enchantment. More, certainly, than men ought.
Lodges expand as members invite outsiders to social functions to be evaluated for membership without their knowledge. Those deemed unworthy remain in ignorance. The promising are investigated thoroughly by the Lodge’s network of lackeys and stooges. As before, the unsuitable are dismissed in ignorance. Those with satisfactory resources, however – those with reaching personalities, a hunger for power, a cunning intellect…those, in short, deemed worthy –are invited to become initiates of the outermost circle of membership.
There are myriad ranks of initiation, from 20 to 37, depending on the Lodge. Lower-ranking members pay dues both in money and service. They are given mentors and tutors, to mold their minds and bend their psyches. They are assigned sponsors to champion their advancement in the Order. Some advance. Others fail to do so. Many of the latter disappear under suspicious circumstances, never to be heard from again.
Outsiders who learn the secrets of the Order are dealt with harshly. Knowledge above one’s rank is punishable by death, regardless of whether one is a member or not.
Although many Lodges have ancient charters that suggest the Order’s original mandate was the protection of humanity as a race, these charitable aims have long since fallen away. Today’s Order is an organization that exists only to feed itself, grasping more broadly and reaching more deeply into outlying and forbidden realms of lore with each passing decade, reaping knowledge the mortal mind should not comprehend and in so doing damning themselves. Human sacrifice, unnatural tortures, perverse and hedonistic practices… No depth where power might be found has gone unexplored.
The Order is obsessed, first and foremost, with increasing its raw power in any and every sphere, by any and every means: the social, the political, the criminal, and the arcane…especially the arcane. Magic, the super-science of those from beyond the stars and outside the corners of time, is more powerful than any human force, and thus, its grasp and mastery is the Lodge’s most central goal.
The Lodge, surely, is damned. For its unquenchable ache for dominance, for the knowledge it has accumulated in seeking a goal that can never be reached.
Perhaps the Order’s supreme leaders sense this. Perhaps they know it to be true. But even if they do, their depravities have not ended…and they will not end soon.
