Despite the name, this organization accepts both men
and women in its ranks (although the leadership positions are traditionally
reserved for females). In its heyday,
members of the Sisterhood could be found throughout the British Empire: with
the loss of Britain's overseas possessions, the group has retreated to the
United Kingdom, with a few cells in Canada (and one beleaguered one in Hong
Kong). This has not really affected the
Sisterhood's core, however.
To keep the British Isles free of foreign invaders.
The Sisterhood of the Waves is fairly small (about
500 active members in the United Kingdom, with another couple of hundred
abroad): the organization is based around a group of families that have kept
their secret for literally millennia.
Recruits from the outside are fairly rare, if only because it's hard for
the Sisterhood to recognize likely candidates.
All Sisters (note that this is a genderless
designation) must have at least six Forces: the Sisterhood has developed
elaborate tests and rituals that can determine suitable initiates. Unfortunately, said rituals are
family-specific, which makes it difficult for the organization to expand. As partial compensation, most of the
families involved in the Sisterhood have a much higher proportion of six
Force humans. Those in Heaven that are
aware of the group suspect past Grigori involvement; indeed, it may even be
true.
The hierarchy is fairly informal: each family has a
leader (usually female) who handles local activities. A group of ten of the most influential families is traditionally
vetted with supervising national and international affairs: they in turn choose
one of their own number to make the final decisions. Currently, the 'leader' of the Sisterhood is one Dame Frances
Hodges, a seventy-five year old grandmother who lives quite comfortably in her
Glasgow flat with three cats, one dog, two parakeets... and a innocuous-looking
button wired to some very illicit high explosives embedded in the Chunnel. She also knits.
The Sisterhood is a very secret organization
- if only on the corporeal plane.
Unlike the vast majority of secret societies and conspiratorial groups,
its members have never been interested much in amassing temporal power or
influence; it is possibly the only group of its kind in history to be primarily
orientated towards a defensive posture.
Its members tend to be wealthy, although not notably so: the men folk of
the group gravitate towards the middle-upper ranks of civil and military
service, while the women concentrate in the social arena. It's an open question about which sex is
more effective.
As mentioned earlier, all active members of the
Sisterhood are six Force humans: their initiation rituals also provide
Symphonic Awareness. Aside from this,
members seem to have access to the Songs of Dreams, Healing, Motion, Shields,
Storms, Tongues... and Water. Most
Sisters may only perform the Corporeal versions of said Songs, but Sisters with
Ethereal Connection are not unknown and one with Celestial Connection has been
discovered on at least three separate occasions. How they have accomplished this is apparently clouded by
Superior-level ineffability: inquiries to the relevant Heavenly authorities are
not answered.
Interestingly enough, the Sisterhood's claim to
millennia of continual existence is valid: its ceremonial language is clearly
an early variant of Indo-European (with the inevitable loan words) and its
archives are a historian's dream. Some
of the scrolls and documents held by the Sisterhood only otherwise exist in
Yves' Library, and the recorded organizational history goes back for at least
two thousand years. Quite a few Sisters
have used this advantage to carve out for themselves some very respectable
academic positions.
The Sisterhood is quite firmly in Heaven's zone of
influence, if not complete control. The
Seraphim Council has determined that the organization should be allowed to
fulfill its core mission without undue influence or interference. Whether this is due to enlightened policy on
the Host's part (as opposed to caution over the ineffability issue) is a matter
for some debate.
Sisters are still Soldiers of God, however. They retain contact with Heaven, are aware
of the War and will assist the Host in whatever operations take place on their
part of the corporeal plane. The
Sisterhood usually works with Destiny, Stone and Trade; it took the Sword
centuries to work past the institutional prejudice caused by the Anglican
schism, and the damage from that is still not completely healed. War has some contacts, but both the Sisters
and Michael are tight-lipped about it.
The existence of the Sisterhood is hardly a secret
to Hell, of course: if nothing else, the faint trickle of Damned Sisters would
take care of that. However, the diffuse
organization of the group makes it difficult for Hell to infiltrate and/or
destroy it. There is also the
earlier-mentioned issue of Superior-level ineffability about the whole
situation: this does nothing to aid Diabolical activity. Finally, there is the problem that the
Sisterhood is precisely ruthless towards their (rare) Fated traitors as one
would expect an organization of worried grandmothers to be: there's been a
whisper or two that the punishment for treason involves grim matriarchs, a
captured Coffin of Undeath and a large wooden stake...
However, possibly the most potent defense of the
Sisterhood is the fact that it seems to have such a narrow focus. After all, when it comes down to it... does
anyone besides Baal actually care too much about invading Great
Britain? For that matter, the Demon
Prince of the War has derived a great many benefits from having an unconquered
British Isles present to muddy the waters of European politics. There's even a reasonable chance that he
might continue to do so in the future.
Why rock the boat?
The Sisterhood can be quite tolerant towards
ethereals, all things considered; after all, some of them have been living in
the British Isles for millennia, and are willing to defend it at need. This has led to some disputes with the Host,
but nothing that can't be worked past.
Needless to say, foreign ethereals had better be on their best
behavior.
There is one other 'other', as it were. There are a lot of weird things that seem to
be associated with the Sisterhood, from their remarkable cultural longevity to
the odd haze of ineffability surrounding them to their anomalous access to metaphysical
power. There's also a suggestion or two
that they might have some sort of access to Oannes' old resources, or possibly
an Orphan Servitor or two, or possibly even...
No, it couldn't be: Oannes is Truly dead. There isn't even a chance for a Remnant:
everyone knows that soul-killed Kyriotates and Shedim don't leave behind that
sort of residue. Surely that's even
true for Superiors, right?
Right?
The basic story of the Sisterhood is well known to
the Host: they are descended from Oannes' first Soldiers. The Archangel of the Waters was always fond
of the British Isles: in the days when Superiors could operate more openly, she
had the island chain as her primary base.
Naturally, the Archangel recruited among local tribes for assistants. Fully one third of the current Sisterhood can
reasonably claim descent from those original Soldiers.
The death of Oannes caused these first Soldiers to
become dispersed: Heaven was not really prepared for the aftereffects of the
Thera explosion, and by the time that anyone thought to look for them, her
servants in the Isles had been apparently been destroyed or scattered to the
four winds. Heaven eventually stopped
really looking for them after a few years.
However, the groups that would later become the
Sisterhood still survived, although it took almost a thousand years before a
researcher of Knowledge stumbled across a set of interrelated tribes with
highly distorted customs. The
realignment of these tribes with the forces of Heaven was not particularly
difficult: they had retained their essential civility and selflessness over the
intervening time period, and were quite prepared to rejoin the War against
Hell. They made (and make) quite good
Soldiers, which is one reason why Uriel used them extensively during the Roman
period. Unfortunately, the Sisterhood
did not quite appreciate the honor; both the Republic and Empire were at times
not too solicitous of the native population, and the eventual withdrawal of Rome
from Britain had disastrous effects on the Isles. The Sisterhood eventually decided that they would have to work to
keep England free from similar invasions.
It has gotten quite good at it, too: it is no
accident that no foreign army has stood on English soil since 1066. Indeed, the only reason for that
particular aberration was that the Sisterhood had not quite recovered from the
disruptions of the Roman withdrawal.
Even that invasion ended in an essential victory for the Sisterhood:
thanks in no little part from their efforts, the Norman invaders were
assimilated into the existing framework of the Isles and transformed into
Englishmen (and Englishwomen, of course).
Everybody else has frankly had their heads handed to
them. The British Isles have always
enjoyed the natural protection of the sea, and the Sisterhood is apparently
able to improve on those protections at need.
The storm that disrupted the Armada was no accident. Neither was the 'Protestant Wind', or a
hundred different stormy days that persuaded Napoleon and Hitler to hold off
the invasion for just one more day, or the acceptable weather that permitted
the D-Day invasions, or a thousand less-publicized examples. For that matter, what temporal power that
the Sisterhood has is currently invested in retarding the current integration
of both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland into the European
Union. They also plan to vaporize the
Chunnel at the first sign of real trouble, as well.
Not that they have anything against
foreigners, you understand. They just
have this thing about foreigners telling the English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh what
to do: the bloody Americans are quite enough, thank you - even if they are
cousins, of a sort.