As the human empires became increasingly fragmented due to prolonged, devastating war with the other races in the Novus Æterno universe, the central human governments found it progressively more difficult to hold sway over their colonies at the edges of the frontier. With these remote regions of the human sphere threatening to descend into total anarchy, a core group of Zealots took it upon themselves to uphold the Law in the absence of civil authorities.
A Zealot dedicated to maintaining and enforcing the Law pursues his or her calling with an unflappable devotion sometimes bordering on obsession. The least spiritual of all Zealots in a conventional sense, many come to worship the code of the Law itself, and subsequently develop elaborate personal rituals concerning the preservation of its integrity. They have little interest in the pursuit of metaphysical enlightenment, and instead choose to concern themselves with worldly affairs involving crime, corruption and vice.
Perhaps because they are the least traditionally religious of all Zealots, those who’ve sworn to uphold the Law do not typically posses the same intensely xenophobic attitudes as their brothers and sisters. Rather, they focus on the actions and behaviour of other humans, and view the greatest evils in the universe to be those that humans inflict upon one another. Piracy is rampant in the Novus Æterno universe, and in the eyes of a Zealot devoted to the Law, human pirates who prey on their own kind are the worst breed of bottom-feeding parasite imaginable. Although the Zealots who’ve dedicated themselves to the Law are generally dispassionate and impartial as they mete out justice, they reserve a special brand of swift and merciless retribution for those individuals they find to be guilty of such crimes.
