Free Council/temp

Philosophy
Can you feel it? Magic exists now, like a stunted tree twisted under the weight of the Abyss. Nations call fire from the sky when it's time for war; voices drift on invisible waves from New York to Jakarta. The world is full of sigils and runes; men and woman will die for a flag or work themselves ragged for a brand. This is an age of power and opportunity, and if they look at it the right way, the Awakened can see Supernal shadows overlaying it all. But it's an age of horror too, because power doesn't have an ethos. The tools of power are there for the taking, but the management is bad.

The Free Council means to change that. This age, this time of glorious chaos, needs to be translated into Awakened wisdom. In a new kind of alchemy, the Council will change the trappings of the Sleepers' Quiescence into its undoing.

Atlantis is a worthy dream, but to the Free Council, other mages make the mistake of casting their lot with the past, ensuring that they'll always be less than their ancestors. The order sees the Awakened City as a spiritual ideal but doesn't believe that its old rites are the best way to renew Awakened power. It holds that virtually any method can be used to invoke the Supernal Realms as long as it captures some genuine meaning. Humanity found the essential spark of Awakening in prehistory and never forgot. Even this Fallen World contains countless treasures for the Awakened seeker.

Arcane power is not wisdom. The Free Council discovered this when it started to question the Atlantean orthodoxy. For all their power, even great masters were blind to the new truths of the quickening age. It was time to drop the old hierarchies and seek the truth through democracy and consensus. Levels of initiation and secrets barred from the so-called unworthy are all the worse because humanity was never meant to abase itself for the sake of occult training. Magic exists now, and it's moving forward as swiftly as a thought. Cling to tradition, and you'll get left behind.

Character concepts
Awakened society has always had its share of rebels and strange geniuses, mages who could never accept the easy answers of Atlantean tradition. The Silver Ladder cast them out, the Adamantine Arrow refused to protect them, and the Mysterium expunged their words from history. But the Awakened have always been sensitive to the spirit of an age, and there have been times when the trickle of malcontent grew to a flood. These eras coincided with some of the greatest achievements in human history, but also its wars and disasters. Do mages cause such events or take their lessons to heart? So many layers of conspiracy exist between mages and Sleeping humanity that it's nigh impossible to tell who bears the burden of history, but during these pivotal periods, arcane knowledge increases. In the early 19th century, cabals across Europe expounded a startling theory: that these events led to genuinely new occult praxes, not mere shadows of Atlantis. Men and women were not as weak as the Exarchs supposed, and strained against their prison across the generations.

The new movement gave itself hundreds of different names based on everything from Sleeper inspirations to esoteric humor. Conflict was inevitable; it spanned the globe through the charms of the Boxer Rebellion, the guns of the American West and the bombs of London anarchists. Mysterium historians call it the Nameless War, for at the time, the other orders refused to even give the revolutionaries a common name. After all, names grant their recipient symbolic power; the heirs of Atlantis, for all their internal strife, wanted to see history bury these apostates.

The war left the rebels bloody but unbowed, and even increased their membership. Young members of the traditional orders defected, charmed by the opportunities offered by rebel factions. Even so, the Nameless rebels couldn't prove their worth to the ancient orders until they took a stand for something, instead of against tradition. This requirement was fulfilled by the Great Refusal.

Today
The Seers of the Throne knew that the rebels presented a great opportunity. Nameless mages embraced the Sleeping world's technologies and fashions. They could be used to wipe out all memory of Atlantis. Together, the Seers and the Nameless could create a world where humanity could not even conceive of the occult, closing the final few flaws in the Exarchs' prison. The Seers of the Throne sent emissaries to Nameless cabals, offering them wealth and power in exchange for an alliance that would wed technological and cultural magic to an agenda of control. The Nameless order declined. They declined with guns, bombs, and mind-crushing Arts. On New Year's Eve in 1899, the Great Refusal of alliance concluded with the official formation of the Free Council, who had finally discovered a common enemy. The spirit of the modern world would be liberty, not technocracy, and it was time to explore it.