Exemplaris: the Radiant Dominion

Divine light. Righteous empire. The bulwark, and the boot.

The Exemplaris believe they stand at the summit of creation, and they are not entirely wrong, and that is the horror of them. They are the masters of divine light, and their magic does not merely burn. It judges, and it finds almost everything wanting.

They worship Harmony as a living law and themselves as its hand. Their empires are vast and beautiful and expanding, and where their legions pass they call it Purification: the felling of the crooked, the cleansing of the strange, the cauterizing of anything that will not sing in tune. They are wrathful, lawful, and utterly certain, angelic host and inquisitor's fire in one gleaming column. They believe every cruelty they commit is a benevolence, because they believe the world will be kind once it is finally, perfectly the same.

And yet they are the wall. It is the Radiant Dominion, and no one else, that holds the tide of the restless dead from washing over the living lands. When a farmer sleeps a dreamless sleep instead of waking as a thing in the dark, it is an Exemplaris blade on the border that bought it. They are the greatest bulwark the good and the frightened have ever had, and they will remind you of it while they burn your grove for heresy.

The heresy of peace

Within the Dominion there is a fracture, and it is the most interesting thing about them. A quiet, powerful faction of the faithful has begun to preach a heresy of their own: that Harmony does not mean everyone like us, but everyone at peace. That the endless war is itself the great disharmony, and that a true servant of the light would end the killing between all peoples rather than win it. They are hunted softly, by their own. Whether they are the Dominion's conscience or its undoing, no one yet knows.

Where they stand

• At odds with: the Warclans above all, a holy war generations deep; the Graveborn, their sworn purpose; and everyone crooked, which is to say everyone.
• Cool toward: the Arcanists, whose lawless magic is everything the Dominion exists to correct.

See Exemplaris in the wiki for its units, buildings, and leader.