Name of Territory: The Deynai Order
Government: The Deynai Order is a unique institution of Bahai'Shido. It is best described as a quasi-monastic, quasi-military organization dedicated to providing education, health care, and protection to the Imperium's poorest and most defenseless populations. While Bahai'Shido has no clergy, the Deynai Order are regarded as living exemplars of the Eight Tenets, and abide by a strict code of conduct - the 'Ahad - that dates back twelve thousand years. Formally, the Order is quite loosely organized; one key principle of the 'Ahad is that every Deynai Magister is ultimately answerable only to his or her own conscience, and cannot be disciplined for violating instructions. Thus, most Magisters are a type of knight-errant: the legendary "Wandering Deynai," moving between planets stricken by war or plague or poverty, and offering healing and education and protection to those who need it most. Deynai who distinguish themselves by acts of great bravery, kindness, or wisdom are acknowledged by their peers as Elders; these Elders, in turn, are eligible to be elected to the Aegis Council. Members of the Council sit for life, and are elected by a vote of all Deynai. The Council can call for collective action by the Order as a whole, but its authority relies on suasion and respect, not on formal discipline or control. Nevertheless, its influence within Bahai'Shido is second only to that of the Galactic Council of Justice itself - the highest authority of the faith.
Capital World: Formally, like Bahai'Shido as a whole, the Deynai Order is headquartered on the Gaia world of Mar Elyas, in the Galactic Core. This is where the Aegis Council sits. But in fact, the Order's headquarters is the remote and secretive tomb world of Laghaz: a pre-imperial Solarian colony destroyed in some unknown calamity and lost to history. On Laghaz, with its crushing gravity and barely breathable atmosphere, Deynai aspirants undergo years of ritualized physical and mental conditioning; they are broken down beyond ordinary human limits, and reborn as Magisters. And in the ruins of Laghaz, the Deynai Order discovered its most jealously guarded secret: the Kabuto Gift, a personal shield/suspension generator of extraordinary power designed to be implanted into the user's body and controlled directly by thought. The Gift, combined with the Deynai's physical and autohypnotic conditioning, is what makes them such legendary warriors. And since it is beyond the capacity of modern Imperial technology to replicate, each Gift is unique: there are only twenty thousand of them in existence, and for a new Deynai to be consecrated, a Gift must be extracted from a fallen Magister.
Population: Because the Kabuto Gift is necessary in order to become a full-fledged Magister, there are only about twenty thousand true Deynai at any moment in the galaxy. When a Deynai dies, the Order will go to great lengths to recover the body and extract the Gift, in order to allow the fallen Magister's place to be filled by an aspirant. The Order is supported, however, by millions of clerks, cooks, accountants, and other deacons scattered across the Deynai refugii on every major Imperial world. As for the Magisters themselves: traditionally, all were orphans, taken in by the Order in their hundreds of thousands from all over the Imperium. Only one in every three hundred survives two decades of Aspirancy physically and mentally intact. The young age of aspirants is essential: only a child's body and psyche are malleable enough to survive the process. Today, most Deynai remain orphans raised by the Order, but some are the younger children of noble houses: offered at birth in hopes of winning the honor of having a Magister in the family, by parents willing to risk their child's all-but-certain death in exchange for a slim chance of prestige.
Economy: The Deynai Order has a nearly blank check on the immense resources of the Bahai'Shido faith. The treasure vaults of the Galactic Council of Justice bulge with donations and tithes from thousands of worlds, and with taxes from the handful of planets controlled directly by the Council itself. From this plenitude, the Deynai's requirements are fairly minor: each Magister receives a modest stipend, but nothing more. Deynai generally travel like any other Imperial citizen, booking passage on passenger ships or tramp freighters as they wander between war-torn and famine-stricken planets. They typically charge for their services in proportion to others' ability to pay: a penniless refugee will not be charged for first aid provided by a Magister, while a planetary governor seeking a prestigious tutor for his son can expect to spend a considerable amount. Bahai'Shido teaches that extremes of both wealth and poverty are blasphemous; accordingly, most Deynai live an itinerant but roughly middle-class lifestyle, and their decisions about when and how to require payment are aimed at making the rich poorer, and the poor richer.
Culture: The Deynai Order represents the highest aspirations of the Bahai'Shido faith. Magisters are taught to be deeply humane, broad-minded, and tolerant. The Three Onenesses - of God, religion, and humanity - require them to see all people and all faith traditions as equal, regardless of gender or class or subspecies. There is a deep strain of intellectual curiosity in Deynai traditions, based on the precept that each individual has a duty to seek truth independently; Deynai are particularly prized as linguists, since something about their autohypnotic conditioning gives them an extraordinary ability to learn and retain large numbers of languages. They spend much of their lives as teachers, healers, and diplomats, and are accordingly prized as tutors, negotiators, and physicians among the Imperial elite. They are, for the most part, mystics of a very practical kind: to a Deynai, God dwells in the inward fulfillment of good acts honorably performed. Meditation and prayer are guides to action and sources of strength, not ends in themselves. And as warriors, the Deynai exemplify the Eight Tenets: they neither seek out nor flee from combat, they fight only when it is consistent with conscience, they never break their word to those whom they have sworn to protect, and they kill with neither cruelty nor hesitation. Finally, their conditioning sets them apart, in certain subtle but profound ways, from ordinary humans: Deynai are capable of consciously choosing to "turn off" fear, pain, and hesitation. They experience the world, life, and their own psyches in a fundamentally different way, and their care for others is always tinged by an inescapable alienation.
Social Structure: Deynai are itinerant. They wander, essentially, in search of people in trouble. They may stay on a planet for a few months or a few years - running a medical clinic or school, tutoring a noble's child, brokering a truce in ethnic violence or labor unrest, protecting the poor from bandits or rapacious corporations. But when the immediate situation is resolved, they move on again: the 'Ahad is emphatic that a Magister cannot bind himself permanently to any home. Likewise, there are no Deynai children; while the Order permits love affairs, it forbids procreation, since a wandering Magister cannot adequately care for a child. When they receive the Kabuto Gift, Magisters are medically sterilized. Nor does any Deynai have contact with his or her parents: whether adopted as orphans or voluntarily given up in infancy, they never know the names that they were born with. Their only family is the Order. But the millions of employees of the Order - the deacons - live much more normal lives: they maintain the refugii and waystations across Imperial space that support Deynai operations, they try to keep up with the work that Magisters leave undone when they move on, and they have children and families. Deacons are respected members of their local Bahai'Shido communities, but they do not suffer the final loneliness of Deynai existence.
Territorial Size: The Deynai control the ancient, secretive tomb world of Laghaz, and no outsiders are permitted to trespass save by permission of the Order or the Emperor himself. The exceedingly high gravity and inadequate atmosphere of Laghaz are crucial to the conditioning of Deynai aspirants, and the Solarian ruins that cover the planet's surface hide many of the Order's ancient secrets. The Order also has a public, magnificent headquarters on the Bahai'Shido holy world of Mar Elyas. And the Order maintains refugii on almost every Imperial world, including the wild areas of the frontier. These are small compounds that offer lodging to Magisters who pass through, provide charitable services to the surrounding communities, and offer a line of communication to the Order for people seeking Deynai assistance. The modest refugius, usually in a working-class neighborhood or unstable region, is the only visible sign of the Deynai most Imperial citizens will ever encounter; famously, there is scarcely one Magister for every inhabited Imperial planet - "And Yet They Are Enough."
Military and Security Forces: The Deynai are a warrior order, and though they spend far more of their time teaching and healing than fighting, nevertheless it is their military exploits that have made them legendary. The Deynai emerged during the Shadow, and represented one of humanity's only successful military responses to the horror that poured out of the Magellanic Cloud. Every Deynai Aspirant endures brutal physical conditioning that leaves only one in three hundred alive, by which a child's body is molded by crushing gravity and toxic air and ritualized abuse into a living weapon; their strength and speed are matched only by Imperial Praetorians, and their grace and precision is unequalled by any. To these physical assets is added the autohypnotic conditioning that permits Deynai, through millennia-old rituals, to dissociate from fear, pain, or hesitation, and to focus with inhuman precision upon tiny details; it is said to be impossible to lie to a Deynai, because by choosing not to hear anything else, they can detect the slightest fluctuation of your heartbeat.
Finally, every Deynai receives the Kabuto Gift: a unique piece of archeotechnology found only on Laghaz, which operates as a combined shield and suspension generator of extraordinary power. It is implanted into every Magister at the back of the skull, and controlled directly by thought. Only aspirants with enough Solarian genetic material can interface successfully with the Gift; countless others, even after surviving decades of brutal conditioning, go mad and die during the implantation. But the benefits are great. So powerful is the Kabuto shield that it has been known to withstand brief exposure to orbital bombardment. The suspensor effect allows Deynai to take gravity lightly: they can run up walls, leap dozens of meters, and skim just above the ground at incredible speed for short distances. Because their shields allow them to shrug off even vast amounts of small-arms fire, Deynai typically use only the sword: each Magister wields a unique katana whose blade is actually made from a diamond matrix with a monomolecular edge that can cut through almost any known material. As light is refracted through the matrix, the blade often seems to glow softly; amid the Shadow, the Deynai were known as the "Blades of Moonlight." The Deynai way of the sword is a closely-kept secret of the Order in which every aspirant is exhaustively trained: it displays balletic grace, and is designed to be possible only for a fighter endowed with Deynai autohypnosis and the Kabuto Gift. In concert, a Magister's physical conditioning, autohypnotic techniques, Kabuto Gift, and skill with the sword make any Deynai a dangerous opponent indeed, and Imperial history is filled with tales - sometimes exaggerated, sometimes not - of a single Magister holding off whole battalions of crack troops.
