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The Cursed Blue Rose
Two things share the name of the Creed and they are not the same thing. The Infernal Creed is a faith: the veneration of the imprisoned Ancient Devil, who taught that strength is the only virtue that does not lie. The Infernate of the Creed is a state — the polity that faith built, which holds twelve charted cities in its own hand and gathers fifteen into its bloc. A traveller may keep the Creed without answering to the Infernate. The distinction matters a great deal to those who must live under one, the other, or both.
Its adjective is Infernate; its people are called Infernal.
The Infernate does not hold continuous ground. What it holds is a lattice — mines, oases, roads, forts and the wells between them, strung across the dry heart of the continent where sixteen of the region's twenty-eight settlements have no water of their own. Control the water and the road and you need not own the ground between.
Merynon is its administrative and military capital, and was called Domarus before the faith took it. Soldiers are the city's chief export; what it is not paid for, it takes. Kharbeta in the south is the religious and thaumaturgical capital, autonomous in all but name. Flammund is neither — an allied city that rules under its own name, and the birthplace of the faith itself.
The teaching is the maximization of personal strength: exercise your will, take what you desire, and rise. It is not, whatever outsiders assume, a doctrine of individual liberty. Hierarchy is defended as a reciprocal advantage between unequals — and where reciprocity fails, as the plain arithmetic of who can burn whom.
Vice is not indulgence here but a test. Temptation is set in a man's path precisely to reveal whether he commands it or it commands him, and the Infernate promotes and discards on the answer.
Its foreign policy is directional rather than uniformly hungry. It conquers east, where the ground is fertile and where Risbern and the Radiant Light give it a theological reason to march. It trades west, having judged conquest there not worth its cost. It extracts from the centre, and works by sympathy and sister-faith in the south.
In 1338 DS it broke Eisvelde, a merchant city that believed its treaties with autonomous Flammund would shield it. The answer was a purpose-built sorcerous strike. Before Eisvelde the Infernate was a desert theocracy; after it, a landlocked power with ocean access, a severed eastern gold supply, and its hand around the overland trade of a continent.