There are those who will assure you that Hades is sunless. That warmth and light and the rest of the sun's qualities are quite unknown to the underworld; that even if there is sight, then that sight is blurred, obfuscated by the realm of darkness, accepted only as much as it needs must be.
Those who assure you of this have not been there. Now, in the Year of Grace 1580 - or as near as can be told, after the cataclysm at Lepanto - there are settlements on the Styx inhabited by more than ghosts. In the pious fortress of God's Ravelin, or the impromptu forum of Rome Oldest and Newest, the techniques of Hadean astronomy are developing. There is day, and there is night. The sun's rays produced the metal gold in the Earth, and continue to filter down into the Underworld. Even those who do not opine that Hades is truly in the earth admit that it is paraterrestrial - so that the sun reaches even them.
Not that this is sunlight as men know it. So we see the bleak light of Wanhope as the vaults of Hades brighten, the livid clarity of Febriterce, the aching monotony of Rackhour and the sulking slow dwindling of Bittergloam. These are strange states to dwell in - and those who know the surface world still find themselves caught out by the passage of 'days' in the underworld. One or two clocks, in point of fact, did survive the trip down from the Gulf of Patras; given the state of sixteenth century clockwork, no-one is really sure that Wanhope to Wanhope really is twenty-four hours, or even that Febriterce even falls at the same time every day.
Still, there are some effects of the light that equal those on the surface. During Bittergloam, there appear in certain places great gatherings of things like birds. They are dark and small, but bearing about their heads a sort of intangible sorcerous veil. Flying one way, they are distant but clear points in the distance - flying another, they are deceptive little specks that one must focus on carefully, like frogspawn. Flocks wing together in the near-dusk, forming assorted patterns in groups ten thousand or more strong: now a great disc, now a twisting serpent, an unwinding helix, a sinuous crescent, a wolf's head. Then after perhaps an hour, they disperse.
Given the lack of predictable natural life in Hades, these are not merely birds going about the unclear but ordinary business of avian life. Theories have been proposed by residents of the Underworld. By some it is thought that these are souls of the thoughtless, of those who obeyed in error - who now follow nothing in particular, save that they follow. By others, they are traces of birds as they dwell on the surface, set as a half-measure in the half-realm below.
An interesting notion holds that these are the souls of humans in purgatory, showing themselves to living Christians and Virtuous Pagans below, indicating that the proper process of human redemption and the afterlife is going on, somewhere. As souls in Purgatory are going through a form of penitence, the birds naturally wear supernatural hoods and there is a soft noise of myriad whispered prayers.
A variation on this holds that these are not souls in Purgatory (who are really far too busy going through Purgatory) but souls of those on Earth - who sin, or think on sin, and so are brought near to the realms of gloom and flame. They swarm and group and gather as vice and hope war in them, as one sin or another grips them. A spectral trail follows them, trace of their spiritual journey - and, even when briefly set as a bird, the seat of their spirit-handling intellect is the head.
Whatever their origin, it is these last two theories that give rise to the name of the Murmuring Fraternity.
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