The Elves of the Gray Order worship the one titan who is not dead. Hykravones, the Gray Prince, withdrew between dimensions before the Ezz flood took his kind, came back to a world Gaea had filled with her own life, and in a single year unmade most of it — nearly every civilization of the Gaeaic Eon, nearly every daemon, killed at the root by killing the people who prayed. Then he stopped, went down into the earth, and has not risen since. To the Order this is not a horror story. It is the last correct thing that happened to the world, and it was left unfinished.
The Order is drawn from the Amverela, which is the strangeness at the center of it. The Amverela are the most prolific and long-lived of the elves, the builders of utopian cities, the people whose unbroken cultural memory has carried them intact through every cataclysm the world has thrown up. They have more to lose from a remade world than almost anyone alive, and a faction of them has spent the age since the Shattering praying for exactly that. Their creed is plain and pitiless: the order Gaea laid over Hykravones's world is a usurpation, the peoples who multiplied under it are rabble, and humans worst of the rabble — and all of it is owed a correction, whatever the cost in lives, including elven ones. They worship the titan, not a god of him. Hykravones is no daemon and never could be; titans do not run on prayer. What the Order gives him is closer to a vigil than a congregation: a watch kept on a sleeper, by people who have decided his waking is the world's only cure.
The long search
For most of an age the Order's work was a search, and the search rested on a single article of faith taken from the histories: that the Gray Prince was not killed and not driven off, but lay down of his own will, whole and patient, somewhere under Alaria in rock no map shows, and would wake again to finish what he began. So the Order looked. Generation after generation of Amverela have walked the deep places hunting the spot where a titan chose to sleep, certain that to find him was to be present at the turning of the world, and certain too that the world would not be ready for it until the rabble had been put down to make room.
What they have never been able to do is find him, and a claim out of the dwarves has lately made the failure mean something the Order cannot agree on. The deep-cavern wardens of Eoga hold that Hykravones did not lie down at all. They say their ancestors chained him, cutting a sentence into titan-bone in the titans' own command-tongue — the one speech that compels, and the only material that holds its charge without weathering — and that the binding still holds him under the Cascades of Ygg, where every warden alive descends from the work-gangs that carved it. If that is true, the Order has spent eons looking for the wrong thing. A titan who chose to sleep would wake on his own schedule. A titan held down by a dwarvish sentence in titan-bone will never wake at all unless someone goes and breaks it.
Wake him, or wait for him
The dwarvish claim has split the Order in two, and the split is the live thing about it.
The orthodox wing holds the old faith and calls the binding a lie. No mortal chains a titan; the wardens flatter themselves with a story, and the truth is the one the histories tell, that the Gray Prince rests by his own choice and rises by it. Their task is unchanged. Find him, keep the vigil, and prepare the world against the day he chooses — which means continuing the long, patient work of pulling down the peoples who would stand in his way. To go digging at the Cascades of Ygg to break a binding they do not believe exists is to mistake the whole nature of what they worship.
The other wing has come to believe the dwarves, and the belief turns a waiting cult into an active one with a target. If Hykravones is bound, then the Waking is not something to be awaited but something to be done: find the Cascades, kill the wardens who keep the sentence, and cut the titan-bone that says he does not wake. This wing has stopped looking for a sleeper and started looking for a prison and the gangs that guard it. And it is here that the Order's own creed turns under it, because the older elves among them remember what the Shattering actually did. It nearly ended the elves too. Their own founding patrons, Aelwennar and Eluvarin Aelweir, lived through it only by going dormant in the Long-Song and the First Grove, by the narrowest road any survivor found. The Gray Prince did not unmake humans. He unmade everything that had replaced the titans, and the elves are part of what replaced them. So even among those ready to break the binding, a few have stopped to ask the question the faith has never answered: whether the freed titan would thank the elves who woke him, or simply finish the work the elves interrupted. No one in the Order can answer it, and the wing that wants to dig is not waiting for an answer.