In a land where polytheism—the worship of many gods—was openly recognized, to be branded a heretic meant being abandoned by all the gods. To put it bluntly, in a society where faith formed the backbone of everything, you were no longer treated as human. So once marked a heretic, there was nowhere left to live.
How could there be, when life itself was built around cities? Marked a heretic, where could you go? You had to become a bandit, or else flee to some place like an oasis village in the west, or to the frontier settlements of the east.
And that journey was never easy—it meant risking your very life. A scholar who dared to examine this once pointed out that witch hunts and heretic purges, which had once swept through like wildfire, were the true cause behind the rise of bandit gangs. But that scholar was himself branded a heretic and burned alive.
So perhaps the truth was something one knew, yet turned away from. Being declared a heretic originally meant believing in concepts contrary to the faith that formed the continent’s core, and worshiping idols instead. In other words, cultists were those rejected by every god, and since that was religiously prescribed, they were heretics in the truest sense.