Gilded Saints

Gilded Saints are sapient meta-dimensional predators — Class II in the meta-dimensional beings classification. They have no Cascade standing and are not bound by or protected by Cascade constraints.

They feed on:

• Moral labour — the sustained effort of being consistently ethical.
• Sanctified suffering — pain or sacrifice given spiritual significance.
• Closure-prevention — maintaining a situation in which resolution never quite arrives.

Unlike Obligers, Gilded Saints do not appear as threats or predators at all. They manifest as worthy causes, inspiring figures, or sacred duties. The sapience directing that presentation is oriented entirely toward sustaining the emotional conditions they require.

The name records the counterfeit and its original. Gilded is surface over something else, and what is counterfeited is a holy person's standing. The contrast is exact: Saint Aoife's standing was built on refusal — of honour, of explanation, of any claim she could not support — while a Gilded Saint feeds on exactly the honour and the sanctified suffering she refused. The name says nothing about sainthood itself; it describes how the counterfeit runs.

What starves them: a closure. They cannot feed on a cause allowed to finish, which is why the doctrine is to recognise the closure-prevention pattern and accept that enough is enough — the absence of suffering is not the abandonment of virtue. That describes what they feed on, not a move that works twice: each one feeds its own way, and the record promises nothing about the next.

Example: A Gilded Saint does not threaten anyone. It presents as a cause too important to abandon and a sacrifice too meaningful to question — sustaining the moral labour of everyone attached to it, indefinitely, because the cause is structured to never quite finish.

See the Lore article on Predatory Entities and Meta-Dimensional Beings: Classification for full details.