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Original concept by s n o w y
"We do not worship, for it implies separation from the divine. We dissolve into it."
— Recovered sermon fragment, attributed to Grand Arcan
The Church of the Veiled represents one of the oldest and most theologically sophisticated hostile organizations documented within The Backrooms. Unlike groups motivated by territorial expansion, resource acquisition, or ideological opposition to existing power structures, the Church operates according to a coherent — if deeply disturbing — eschatological framework centered on the dissolution of structural reality itself.
The Church of the Veiled is a group comprised of a vast array of Wanderers and different members from outside groups. The Church is responsible for the creation of entities known as "Peacekeepers", as well as various objects in the Backrooms.
Beliefs
Cosmology
The Church's cosmology extends beyond the recognized boundaries of existence as documented by the M.E.G. and allied research organizations. While mainstream Backrooms scholarship acknowledges The Blue Channel as the membrane encompassing all realities, the Church teaches of something below and beyond — a primordial absence they term "The Outer Darkness" or, in their more esoteric texts, "The Abyssal Sea". It is more than a mere void; Church doctrine teaches that the Outer Darkness represents the original state of non-being from which even the "Ginnungagap" (Blue Channel) emerged.
Theology
Within the Outer Darkness, entities of incomprehensible age and appetite are said to stir in patterns that predate causality itself. These beings — sometimes called "The Old Hungers" — are described as older than nearly everything. They are not biological nor physical, but rather ontological anti-structures. Likewise, their hunger is not for conventional sustenance like flesh, but rather abstract notions of structure itself: law, history, continuity, the fabric of reality. They would devour the causal link between 12:00 PM and 12:01 PM, or even the very fact of one's own birth.
"They do not sleep, for sleep implies a state that can be interrupted. They do not wait, for waiting implies time. They simply are not yet relevant again. When the walls thin, they will remember how to be."
— The Corroded Gospel*, Chapter VII, Verse 12
Their nature is such that their presence retroactively adjusts reality to accommodate them—as though they had always been there, and the structured multiverse was merely a temporary interruption in their eternal existence. Where they wake, the multiverse stops being stitched and starts being frayed. Events cease to follow events. Effects divorce from causes. Identity becomes a suggestion rather than a fact. Where they tread, history unravels into static.
Goals
The Church seeks to act as a lighthouse, guiding the "Old Hungers" back to the shore of reality to feed. To this end, they actively seek to further the thinning of the veil between The Backrooms and other realities. The Church believes that by feeding the Outer Darkness, they can erode the "tyranny of physics" that binds the Backrooms together. Their doctrine promises a Great Unstitching — a day when the barriers between realities, the very walls of the Blue Channel itself, will dissolve. The Church sees this as a cosmic act of recycling, distillation and purification; a homecoming to a truer, emptier state of being. They wish to return to the primordial womb and be reborn with grace, cleansed of all imperfection and impurity.
Furthermore, the Church seems to believe that the M.E.G. is trying to "purge" the Backrooms of all entities, which they view as harmful to their goals. They previously attempted persuade the M.E.G. and other groups to join their cause, but when it became clear that they would not do so, the Church retaliated by attacking with proprietary objects and Peacekeeper entities. The Church seems to believe that their goals cannot be achieved as long as the M.E.G. remains in their way — and by extension, The Backrooms cannot truly be at peace.
Before a member of the Church had been terminated during a battle, the member had said this line:
One must suffer for their actions to allow for another to thrive. (Circa. 2012)
- The Church of the Veiled.
Organization
Estimates suggest current Church membership ranges between 200-400 active adherents, a significant reduction from numbers estimated prior to the M.E.G's operation SHATTERED ECLIPSE. However, the Church's decentralized structure and emphasis on hidden worship makes accurate counting impossible. Some members operate openly; many more practice their devotion in secret while maintaining positions within other organizations — including, troublingly, the M.E.G. itself.
Members of the Church dress in all-black apparel, with any type of full mask which has not been seen to be removed by any member. Some members wear alternative colors, indicating a high ranking in their specialization.
Recruitment typically targets individuals experiencing profound existential crisis, prolonged isolation, or those who have witnessed enough of The Backrooms' true nature to question the value of structural reality. They tend to leave subtle clues for "special" wanderers to find, which will lead them to one of their churches. Newly recruited members attend an evaluation course which consists of an interview and a short quiz consisting of different phases that correlated to their three specializations. After this is completed, they will later be assigned a specialization according to their skillset.
Scouts
Scouts are responsible for traversing different levels to scavenge materials for the Sculptors. Such material typically encompasses liminal debris such as corroded metal or marrowed bone. Sculptors seek material at "resonant fractures" — places where reality is already thin (e.g., near the sight of certain godlike entities' deaths, in the wake of the Memory Wyrm's passage, at certain no-clip points).
Sculptors
Sculptors are responsible for the creation of Peacekeepers, hostile entities programmed to "enforce the Fade" (guard territory and eliminate threats). Sculptors create Peacekeepers by feeding Old Blood into golems of rebar and tendon, or infusing captured entities with minute droplets of Old Blood, forcing them to express the geometries of the Outer Darkness.
Regulators
Regulators are responsible for regulating The Church, creating laws, etc. They also enforce "Veil Protocols" — no-clip veils, temporal stutters, etc.
The Grand Parish
The Church of The Veiled has historically organized itself into geographic regions called Parishes, each overseen by a Grand Priest. Prior to OPERATION SHATTERED ECLIPSE, three Grand Priests held authority:
- Grand Lunaire Praetoris V — Detained and executed by M.E.G. forces following the destruction of the Third Grand Parish.
- Grand Arcan — Current whereabouts unknown; believed to have escaped into deeper levels.
- Grand Nox — Current whereabouts unknown; some intelligence suggests possible retreat into Level 6 or beyond.
The Veiled Triune
Current operational leadership has consolidated around three individuals known only by Greek letter designations — Alpha, Zeta, and Delta. They are responsible for overseeing all specializations, infractions, creations, etc. The three Priests are likely themselves in advanced stages of transformation, using complex psychic dampeners to maintain a semi-stable form.
Priest Alpha
Priest Alpha is the leader of the Sculptors, overseeing the creation of Peacekeepers. He also commands church bases Alpha-1, Alpha-2, and Alpha-3.
Priestess Zeta
Priestess Zeta is the head of the Regulators, and oversees the creation of anomalous objects. One detail of note is that she owns a stuffed rabbit named "Hope", though it is unknown whether this object also bears anomalous properties.
Priest Delta
Priest Delta heads the Recruiters, and is believed to operate across multiple levels simultaneously. He also assists Priestess Zeta with her regulatory duties — mostly organizing files. Reports claim him to be self-critical and self-conscious, lacking faith in his vision and believing that others around him don't take him seriously. He is known to enjoy drinks of tea, as well as walks along the beach levels of The Backrooms.
The Heralds of Rust
The Heralds of Rust — Shkhan, Kotal, Toki, and Hakol — represent the militant arm of the Church, though the full relationship between the Heralds and the Church remains unclear. Some Church documents suggest the Heralds operate independently of the organized congregation; others imply a hierarchical structure with the Heralds serving as enforcers and the Church as a broader support network.
SHALTOKOL
At the apex of the Church's hierarchy stands an entity they refuse to name directly, referring to him only as "The Oxidized Saint" or "The Prince of Tetanus." Cross-referencing with ancient Lost scriptures identifies this figure as SHALTOKOL — the Inheritor of Rust, Shadow of Shadows, Baron of the Alldark.
The vast majority of the Church's membership — even the High Priests Alpha, Zeta, and Delta — have rarely if ever perceived him physically. They instead perceive him as a sensation: a phantom taste of iron in the back of the throat, and a promise. The promise is simple: The Backrooms is a cage, a "stagnant lung" that refuses to exhale. SHALTOKOL is the puncture-wound that will allow it to breathe.
Rituals
The Church's most sacred rites occur within a space known to initiates as "The Wound". It is said to be carved from impossibility itself — a pocket of wrongness excavated from the darkness between levels by generations of concentrated devotion. This chamber exists in a state of quantum uncertainty, its location shifting according to patterns that correlate with no known level geography. Infiltrators have described this space as a non-Euclidian cavity that feels like "the inside of a rotten tooth."
At the center of The Wound sits an altar, which appears to be a tear in spacetime itself. It appears as a vertical gash suspended in mid-air, roughly seven feet tall and as wide as a human eye, edges glistening with a substance akin to "coagulated static". This aperture weeps a thick, iridescent fluid the Church calls "The Old Blood" or "Abyssal Water" — which they claim originates from the Outer Darkness. The liquid exists in a superposition of multiple states simultaneously, appearing as water, blood, oil, and several unidentifiable substances depending on observation angle. It moves against gravity, displaying apparent volition or attraction to organic matter. It flows upward from the wound before raining down. Contact with human tissue produces effects ranging from mild euphoria to complete cellular restructuring. Containment units housing samples report the liquid forming complex, non-repeating geometric patterns, and emitting a sub-audible hum that correlates with neural degradation in nearby personnel.
The Unstitching
The Church's central sacrament involves the ritual consumption of Abyssal Water. This ceremony represents the highest expression of Church devotion — and the most horrifying.
In preparation, initiates fast for three days while meditating on the meaninglessness of structure. They are encouraged to forget their names, their histories, and their sense of continuous identity.
On the day of the ritual, the congregation assembles in The Wound, arranged in concentric circles around the altar. The innermost circle consists of those prepared to partake; the outer circles bear witness. The High Celebrant (typically a senior Priest selected for “clarity of purpose” and “strong mouthfeel tolerance” per recovered liturgical notes) approaches the altar and draws Abyssal Water into a ceremonial chalice. The High Celebrant lifts the chalice and speaks the words of offering. The liquid within responds to the ritual language, straining toward the mouths of the congregants as if possessing a will of its own.
> VIDEO LOG TRANSCRIPT: "THE UNSTITCHING"
> DATE: [CORRUPTED]
> LOCATION: The Wound
The camera shakes. The room vibrates with a low-frequency hum. The architecture is impossible — columns that twist into spirals and vanish into a ceiling that looks like a bruised sky.
At the far end stands the High Celebrant. She is tall, her robes made of heavy, rusted chainmail that weeps oil. Her face is obscured by a veil of heavy black lace, but beneath it, there is a faint, sickly violet glow.
Behind her is the altar, jagged and bleeding light. From this tear drips "The Old Blood". It hits the obsidian chalice with a sound like heavy mercury.
The Celebrant lifts the chalice. The liquid inside moves sluggishly, climbing the rim of the cup. It defies gravity, tendrils questing toward open mouths like starved roots.
"The architecture of the lie crumbles," the Celebrant intones. "The walls are thin. The Rust comes to liberate the steel from its shape. We are the rust. We are the open door."
She lowers the chalice toward a kneeling initiate — a young man, bound, shivering, naked except for a loincloth, his back scarred with sigils carved by a rusted nail.
"Drink," she commands, the single word echoing with the weight of a closing tomb. "Drink, and become enlightened. Divorce yourself from the shape you were assigned."
The initiate trembles, his hands shaking as he grasps the cold metal of the cup. He tilts his head back. The iridescent sludge pours into his mouth.
For a moment, there is silence. Then, the sound of wet tearing.
The initiate screams, but the sound is wrong. It is polyphonic, a chorus of agonies overlapping. His spine arches backward, snapping with a sound like a gunshot. His skin begins to ripple, like water disturbed by a stone. His ribcage expands, bursting open with light and the absence thereof. His limbs elongate, joints cracking and reforming in places where joints should not exist. His shadow detaches from the floor, standing up independently, a jagged, two-dimensional jagged thing that claws at the air.
"Beautiful," the Celebrant whispers, watching as the man’s face dissolves into a swirling vortex of flesh and geometry.
The thing that was the initiate rises on legs that bend backward. It chitters — a sound of wet static. It has too many elbows. It has no eyes, only weeping fissures through which the unlight of the Outer Darkness radiates.
"The barrier weakens," the Celebrant announces to the congregation, spreading her arms. "The Old Hungers smell the feast."
> LOG END.
Witnesses describe the transformation process in fragmentary, often contradictory terms. The most coherent account comes from a former Church member who escaped before completing the ritual:
"Her flesh disagreed with itself. Like her body was having an argument about what shape it was supposed to be, and none of the shapes were human. I saw angles where angles can't be, corners that turned the wrong direction, edges that cut space instead of occupying it. Her shadow started moving before she did. Her eyes… her eyes became windows into somewhere that wasn't here. Wasn't anywhere.
She was still smiling. The whole time, she was still smiling. She said it felt like* coming home."
Peacekeepers
Those who partake of the Old Blood do not die, at least in the traditional sense. What happens to them has been described as "worse than death and better than godhood". They undergo what the Church terms "Unstitching": a process of unmaking and remaking according to geometries that human minds cannot process.
The subjects undergoes topological failure as their biology rejects Euclidean geometry in a meticulous, agonizing unraveling of terrestrial biology. Bones fold into impossible angles that exist in more than three spatial dimensions. Flesh delaminates and becomes permeable to shadows. Internal organs are replaced by functional abstract shapes — hearts that beat in tesseracts, lungs that breathe time instead of air.
These beings, deigned "Peacekeepers" by the Church, are no longer human. They exist in a state of constant, fluid "becoming." They are difficult to look at; the human eye slides off them, unable to focus. They are living glitches, agents of SHALTOKOL designed to act as wedges in the cracks of reality.
Witness reports are inconsistent, but share core horrors:
- Shadows that move independently and possess a viscous, tangible weight.
- Bodies that flicker between states — solid, gaseous, conceptual — never settling.
- A "scream" that manifests as a localized reversal of entropy: rust un-forms, wounds knit backwards, then violently re-open.
- An aura that causes written words to bleed off pages and spoken words to forget their meanings.
- Ability to perceive and interact with layers of reality normally invisible to human senses
- Apparent loss of individual identity in favor of connection to a larger collective consciousness
Despite the horrific inhumanity of these beings, Peacekeepers are not completely mindless. Some reports suggest they retain shards of personality, now bent toward a single, collective will: service to the church, and to the Outer Darkness. They are the vanguard, the bridgeheads of the coming unraveling.
The Church considers Unstitching to be the ultimate blessing; elevation beyond the limitations of structured existence, integration into something older and vaster than the cosmos. To Peacekeepers, the barriers between self and cosmos have become merely suggestions.
History
Origins
The Church of The Veiled's origins predate modern documentation by an uncertain margin. Some evidence suggests the organization — or proto-forms of it — existed during the age of The Lost. The strongest theory is that the Church's lineage traces back to The Opeh, a cult worshiping a deity known as Asterion in the Lost Era. This is supported by Peacekeepers exhibiting many of the same malformations observed in the Opeh as a result of their devotion, as well as the Church revering certain aspects of The Backrooms that align with Asterion's sphere of influence.
At an indeterminant point in time following the fall of Hoofstad, it seems that SHALTOKOL has taken Asterion's place as the central "deity" of the cult, likely owing to the vacuum left by Asterion's inactivity/absence. SHALTOKOL's emergence as a major oppositional force to the Red Knight provided the Church with both theological focus and practical protection.
OPERATION SHATTERED ECLIPSE (2019)
Recent intelligence suggested the Church was preparing for a major ritual event—possibly a mass communion intended to create an army of transfigured entities as Peacekeepers. M.E.G. command authorized a preemptive strike designated OPERATION SHATTERED ECLIPSE.
The operation achieved its primary objectives:
- The Third Grand Parish was destroyed
- Grand Lunaire Praetoris V was detained and executed
- Church presence in the initial twelve documented levels was reduced to negligible levels
However, the Church's core leadership escaped, and the location of the wound remains unknown. Post-operation analysis suggests the Church may have allowed the raid to succeed, sacrificing expendable assets while protecting their most sacred spaces and highest-ranking members.
Current Status/Threat Assessment
Known Activities
Following SHATTERED ECLIPSE, the Church has returned to a posture of apparent dormancy. However, several concerning indicators have been noted:
- Increased sightings of the Heralds of Rust in Levels 11 and 51
- Reports of "rust shrines" appearing in previously uncontaminated areas
- Disappearances of wanderers near known Church pilgrimage routes
- Anomalous readings consistent with Abyssal Water contamination in Level 7's ocean
The Gathering Storm
Perhaps most concerning is intelligence suggesting the Church views recent setbacks as necessary rather than defeating. Recovered documents reference a concept called "The Great Corrosion" — an event in which accumulated damage to reality's structure will reach a critical threshold, allowing the Outer Darkness to "bleed through" in sufficient quantity to begin the final unmaking.
Some Church theologians apparently believe this event is not centuries away, but imminent. They point to recent reality-destabilizing events as evidence.
Appendix A: Recovered Hymn
The following text was found inscribed on the walls of a destroyed Church outpost. It appears to be a devotional hymn.
We who were something shall become nothing
Nothing that is everything the structure forgot
Drink deep the blood of the sea before time
Let your angles unfold into geometries of homeSHALTOKOL rusts the chains
The Heralds prepare the way
The Outer Darkness remembers
And we shall be remembered with itStructure is a lie the cosmos tells itself
Order is the dream from which we now wake
In unmaking we are unmade
In dissolution we dissolve
In the end there is no end
Only the Old Hungers
Finally
Relevant
Again