The Black Friars

For the first few centuries of the modern era, everybody expected the French Inquisition. Dystopian Catholic France would have it no other way. They scoured Farrellitism into paranoid French undergrounds or Occidental exile; to this day, children are terrorized into good behavior by the simple threat "Gardes ta langue": watch your tongue. When the Nestorian Epistles led to the construction of Saint-Thomas d'Indé in Paris, the Inquisitors fought it tooth and nail, driving several Syro-Indian metrans back to the Malabar Coast before the rest were built and burning one or two Heretical Heroes [who?]. During the Guise Golden Age, any thinker or writer of note expected a visit from inquisitors at some point during their career; the first visit by the Inquisition was a commemorated coming of age, like losing your virginity.

After the War of the French Succession, the Burgundian disengagement from the Catholic Church led to the decline of the Inquisition as an arm of the French state. But given how powerful it had been for those first 200 years, is it any surprise that the fear of the Inquistion has lasted to the present day?

In Andalusada, that fear has a name, a face and a mythos: the Black Friars.

Details of the Black Friars

Black Friars traditionally dress in what looks (to the uninitiated eye) like the black cloak of the Gonzalans. It isn't; the Gonzalan habit traditionally includes much more white than the Black Friars wear. Black Friars will usually introduce themselves as "Black Friars," but never as Gonzalans; if pressed, they'll state that they're from "the Priory," without specifying what or where that may be. (In one account of the Black Friars, they visited a Gonzalan tertiary, who spent a great deal of time around the local priory and knew most of the Gonzalans involved. Over the course of the conversation, the subject of their attention constantly called their claims to be "from the priory," leaving them extremely angry.)

The Black Friars will also claim an interest in talking to you. Don't expect them to be very good at it. As a rule, the more of them show up, the less fluent any of them seem to be in modern languages. (Many accounts witness them completing each other's sentences, as one or another butchers grammar, mangles syntax, or simply fails to say anything intelligible.) Oddly, they seem quite fluent in ancient languages - Latin in particular; Black Friars seem much more comfortable talking in macaronic Latin. (When their subjects try talking entirely in Latin, however, Black Friars have been known to speak macaronic Latin interlaced with something older.) Oddly, overheard conversation with a Black Friar is always unintelligible; some encounters report a Rue Morgue-style experience, where multiple people listening in identify them as speaking wildly different languages.

• Black Friars have a terrifyingly intense stare. By all accounts, they are terrifying to make eye contact with; some of their subjects wake up screaming from nightmares of those terrible deep eyes. If they blink, nobody seems to remember it either.
• Black Friars sometimes (but not always) are cold. Subjects recall doorknobs and metal objects touched by the Black Friars as being numbing to the touch; others report them having visible exhalations even in midsummer, or frosting glasses they hold in their dead-white hands.

Encounters with the Black Friars traditionally end with the first thing the subject remembers in detail: a litany of words, some in Latin, some in pseudo-Latin and some in tongues unknown, which the Black Friars pressure the subject into repeating. This apparently suppresses most memories of the actual visitation... at least until the subject is prompted to remember the litany, which leads to them remembering the Friars, which leads to remembering the encounter beforehand.

The history of the Black Friars

The Black Friars don't actually exist, of course.

Fear of the Inquisition is well-earned and goes back a long ways, but the Black Friars as a trope are only about 75 years old. They were codified in a Gothic-style novel [details?] written in 1838, several years after the crushing of the Sodalite Revolt in Provence during the Burning Thirties. At the time, French Catholicism was going through a big shakeup, as a number of orders (specifically heavily-Sodalite houses, felt hopelessly compromised by the House of Guise) were being suppressed and the House of Burgundy was distancing itself from the French Inquisition.

• The Black Friars were, in this novel, part of a (fictional) Guisard house.
• It's interesting to note that the novelist [who?] didn't portray the Black Friars quite so supernaturally as later retellings describe.

Disregard Moorish claims of being threatened by "Inquisitors" a century prior. The Black Friars don't exist. After all, if they did, somebody would've offered conclusive proof.