ROUGH DRAFT!

The order (which is larger than its knighthood, composed of laity and led by clerics) interpret the story of the Aquiline Heart rather differently than their ersatz opposites. Where the followers of Annaesiah confuse the legend's lesson with a call to compassion and healing, Sin'ghaele's faithful understand the truth of the power of passion and lifetaking, that the dark allure of the forbidden is not meant as temptation but as guidance. So say their mad priests, at least, and such men and women are not lightly defied. The heart of the Stormseeker Eagle is meant to be devoured by the strong, not shared out to benefit the weak.

They serve as prostitutes, minders for the broken (though never menders - those welcomed into their strange asylum-churches emerge as priests and holy warriors or not at all), and triage executioners, taking up the grisly duty of dispatching the wounded who cannot be saved to their final rest. They are most often found as camp followers of armies, though they flock to catastrophes just as readily. They take a tithe of blood and the freedom to perform certain rites - including the collection and reanimination of certain cadavers - but otherwise offer their services freely as religious oblation.

The knighthood are exempt from these services, though many still perform them as a sign of devotion and humility. Their purpose is simpler, purer: where the greater order reaps a harvest of secrets and opportunities from the sown tragedies of the world, the knights seek new and fertile lands and the strange, mad crops that might grow there. They are tradesmen in blood, explorers of the dark corners of the earth - wherever celestials fear to tread, the order's harbingers are ferried by black wings.

Their Dark Messengers take a curious shape: great black eagles with ragged holes in their breasts, through which it is apparent that their hearts have been torn out. They act as companions and viziers to the knights of the order, feeding on their enemies with a vampiric lust for blood and on the harbingers themselves in the form of harrowing - though often insightful - nightmares. They are things of the Shadow World, it is whispered, and their hearts still dwell there, in some monstrous aerie, a grand throbbing cacophony grown fat on all the knowledge their attended knights collect, one day to be devoured - by who and to what end varies with each whisperer.