The Wrought Communion

The Wrought Communion

The Wrought Communion held Clockworks' religious life for roughly a century before the Church of TGII rose to replace it. Its core belief was simple enough to survive in fragments even now: that a well-made thing carries a portion of its maker's soul forward, and that a city built well enough might, given enough centuries, become something closer to alive.
  Its clergy were called Wrights rather than priests, and their temples were working forges as much as houses of worship. Congregants didn't pray so much as build, under supervision, believing the act itself was the devotion.

How It Disappeared

It didn't vanish through persecution, so far as the record shows, which makes it rarer than most extinct faiths I've documented. It was simply outcompeted.
  The Church of TGII offered something the Wrought Communion never had: comfort for people who weren't tradesmen, weren't builders, and had nothing to forge. A Wright could offer you meaning if you had a hammer in your hand. The Church offered meaning to everyone else, which turned out to be considerably more people.
  Within two generations, the last working Wright temple had been converted to a Church chapel, forge and all. You can still see the old furnace grate in the basement if you know to ask, which most current clergy either don't know or don't mention.
  I find something quietly tragic in a faith that lost not because it was wrong, but because it only ever spoke to people who already knew how to make things with their hands. Everyone else needed a different kind of god, and got one.
  I keep a small forged token from the old Communion on my desk, purchased from an antiques dealer who had no idea what it actually was. I like to think it still carries whatever the Wrights believed it carried. I've no way to prove it either way. That, more than most things I write, is simply faith.
  It sits beside my inkwell, which strikes me as fitting. One tool made by hand, kept because a dead religion believed the making mattered. Another tool I use daily to keep records of everything that religion's disappearance cost the people who once believed in it. Neither of us asked to end up on the same desk. I'm glad we did.