“You think God had something to do with this? Why would God send us to this terrible place with all these twisted creatures and horrors beyond the imagination? This was never God’s work! He abandoned us and left us to the mercies of the devil! So, if God abandoned us, then we have no more need of him, do we? No, we don’t. And fools like Bishop Marten and King Eadric want to go on pretending that nothing has changed. They’ll soon know the truth they’ve denied themselves…” Ranulf, defrocked priest, now a servant of darkness.
When the Europeans first arrived in this land, there were two dozen priests among them aside from Bishop Marten. Two of these priests saw this new land as a curse, a punishment placed upon the people for their sins. In their own despair, they turned away from God and his people, and began preaching against Eadric and his followers. They sought out darker powers and found them; they began to use unholy magic even as the Church discovered the power of their own prayers.
These priests quickly gained a small following among the local populace, some of whom saw the Europeans as a threat to their way of life. Hunted down by Eadric's knights in the months after the kingdom was founded, one of the two priests was captured, tried and executed for his blasphemy. The other, Father Ranulf, escaped, and secretly continued his seditious ways. He and his followers fled into the southern hills, and he anointed others to preach and blaspheme as he had done. Now this profane church has nearly a thousand followers, all of them in secret.
Ranulf was a faithful, devoted priest, albeit one with a rather inflated opinion of both his piety and his intelligence. He was the first of the Europeans to realize that they had not simply traveled to some unknown land south of the Equator, but rather to an entirely new world. And it was that knowledge that broke him and made him turn away from God and the Church.
Despite being a mere priest with no high rank in the Church, Ranulf has proven to be Patriarch Marten's equal with the power of his black faith. His new devotion to the dark powers that sustain him now has been rewarded, and he is the high priest of the new, blasphemous church of darkness. He holds masses in mockery of the Christian mass, and he plots the downfall of the new Meterran kingdom. His ultimate goal is to see the faith of the Europeans and the Ramai destroyed as his was destroyed, and for the kingdom to embrace the same despair and apostasy that has engulfed him.
In some ways, Ranulf is a tragic figure, but he does not seek redemption or absolution; he seeks destruction. As such, his is the most prominent on the lists of bounties offered, though none have been able to find a trace of the Apostate, much less attempt to collect.
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