Domains: Captured sunlight, oath-bound light, the mirror-and-glass infrastructure (Aureum); inverted to dark-sun and light-as-domination (Nydor heresy).
Era of ascension: Great Expansion. Cohort: current. Aurigeum rose when the Aureum's break from the Uline coincided with their discovery that sunlight could be captured, decanted, and held — the liquid-sunlight technique that became the theological architecture of the entire clan, and that an early Aureum named Aurea swore her people to.
Worshipped by: The Aureum, who keep his orthodoxy and the mirror-glass infrastructure that makes daylight available a mile below the surface. The Nydor, who pray to the same name with the inversion the Aureum consider an apostasy and the Nydor consider a clarification. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
He is the captured sun. Aurea's oath bound the clan to channel daylight, never to hoard it; the Aureum mirror-and-glass network distributes light down shafts and through chambers that no surface visitor would think possible, and the cult is the infrastructure. A priest is a glass-tender. A vow is a maintenance schedule. Each mirror in the chain is named, and a mirror that goes unnamed will not hold the patron's light long enough to reach the next reflector. The liquid sunlight — the actual decanted substance that the Aureum draw off the prime mirrors — is treated as sworn-oath made physical. A vial broken is a vow broken. A vial poured for an unworthy reason is a heresy.
He is not Sorveth. Sorveth was the open-sky greeted-sun of the Golden Age, the deity to whom workers spoke at sunrise, at noon, and at dusk; his ubiquity meant his collapse when the volcanic winter darkened the sky was total, and no successor cult could be built from his ashes. Aurigeum is the answer the Aureum found when they decided the sun should not be trusted to stay where you can see it. They captured it. They put it in glass. They distributed it on schedule, and the schedule itself became the prayer. Where Sorveth's worshippers stood under an open sky and named the hour, the Aureum stand in a tunnel and tend the mirror that points at a vault, and the light comes through whether the sky above is overcast or not. The patron is not the sun. The patron is the vessel the sun has been sworn into.
The Nydor heresy is the same theology turned inside out. The Nydor took Aurigeum with them when they broke off from the Aureum, and they kept the captured-sun framework — but they read the captured part as the point, not the obligation. If light can be held, the Nydor reasoned, it can be withheld. If it can be withheld, it can be sold. If it can be sold, it can be used to break a person, the way any monopoly can. The Nydor's slave camps run on artificial dark; the patron is invoked at the keyhole of every cell that has had its mirror disconnected. The Aureum call this the dead-sun, the captured-sun made captor. They call it heresy. The Nydor call it the same daemon at last admitting what he was always for. Both halves of the cult still pray to the name. The Aureum priesthood has not produced a defense against this fact and increasingly does not try.
A young Aureum chosen to tend the prime mirror takes the same oath Aurea took. The oath does not mention the Nydor by name. The instructors mention them by name, every time, and what the chosen will do if a Nydor scout is found inside the network. The patron does not adjudicate. He arrived ready to be both, and the cult is still arguing about it.