The Halikarnians have a less traditional faith and more a rigorous intellectual discipline dedicated to the worship of Truth itself. Their practice is built upon the revelation of Hailea, who showed the world that all physical reality—the crumbling castles, the shifting seas, the dying heroes—is merely an imperfect shadow of a higher, perfect realm: the Hylaean Theoric World.
For a Halikarnian, the true act of reverence is the precise study and realization of these Perfect Forms. The power of a circle drawn with flawless compass, the elegance of a theorem proved without flaw, the beauty of a song written with mathematically pure harmony—these acts do not merely describe truth; they invoke the Form from the Hylaean World and make it manifest, briefly, in the physical realm. The goal of the Order is to align the chaotic world of the senses with the immutable order of the Forms.
The Gods as Imperfect Images
The Halikarnians stand apart from others precisely in how they view the gods. To them, Zeus, Odin, The Morrígan, and all others are not ultimate creators, but rather potent, magnificent reflections of the Hylaean Forms.
A God's Power is a Force of Nature, not an Origin: The raw, terrifying strength of Thor's hammer or the calculated strategy of Athena are not considered divine inventions, but rather particularly potent, almost perfect, localized Manifestations of the Form of Power, the Form of Order, or the Form of Strife. The gods are the ultimate examples of potential realized, but even they are subject to the universal, eternal laws of the Forms that they embody.
Worship Through Understanding
Halikarnians do not supplicate the gods; they study them. They believe that by fully understanding the geometry of Mount Olympus or the mathematical probabilities of a battle predicted by a Norn, they can glean the pure, abstract Form that gave rise to the god's power. By achieving this abstract understanding, a practitioner can wield a sliver of that Form's power without relying on the temperamental god who merely casts its shadow.
In Modern Times
In the world today, most Halidarnians realize that the tension between the perfect Forms and the messy reality is too great to be solved with a single world. It is now believed that a vast, layered Multiverse composed of myriad worlds or worldtracks (cosmological realities). These worldtracks are arranged in a hierarchical order: the closest worlds are the most hylaean (most perfectly aligned with the Forms), while the furthest are the least. The world of mortals, full of chaos and error, is simply one of the less purely hylaean worlds. The Great Systematizers’ like Fra Erasmus, Master Tolcharde and Dr. Dee's life work involve meticulously charting these worldtracks using esoteric mathematics, arguing that true universal wisdom lies in understanding the relationships between the Form (the ultimate ideal) and its infinite variations across the Polycosm.