The Gilt Reliquaries

Relic-Forger Guild — Pilgrimage Markets and Reliquary Workshops#

"Every shrine on the Saint Aldric road sells bone fragments of the saint. Aldric was one man with a standard number of bones. I have stopped asking questions I do not wish answered." — pilgrim, 111 AR

The Gilt Reliquaries operate in the productive space between devotion and credulity, supplying the Reach's extensive pilgrimage economy with shrine goods, votive objects, devotional treasures, and certified religious relics at volume and quality sufficient to sustain demand across a hundred active pilgrimage sites. Their workshops produce everything from stamped tin pilgrim badges to elaborately jeweled bone-reliquaries indistinguishable from pre-collapse originals, and their provenance documentation — crafted by the same artisans who produce the relics — has passed ecclesiastical authentication in seven dioceses.

The guild's senior craftsmen maintain a secondary practice that pilgrimage customers never encounter: the reproduction of pre-collapse dynastic regalia. Seals, scepters, crown-components, provincial charter documents, blood-lineage medallions — the physical artifacts that constitute legitimate authority in a world where most of the originals were lost or destroyed in the collapse. The Gilt Reliquaries can produce these objects to a standard sufficient to launch civil wars, authenticate impostors, or provide noble houses with the missing genealogical hardware their claims require. They accept commissions with professional neutrality and keep no records of clients.

The guild's vulnerability is its archive of known forgeries — a master catalogue maintained by guild elders that documents every significant commission, including sufficient detail to authenticate or expose the objects in question. This archive is simultaneously the guild's most valuable asset and most dangerous liability: it guarantees quality control internally while representing, to the various powerful clients whose legitimacy depends on guild-produced artifacts, an existential threat. At least two attempts to steal or destroy the archive are known, and the guild's security division — disguised as shrine maintenance workers — is accordingly the most quietly dangerous corps of artisans in the Reach.