Hand Trials

Hand Trials
The Great Arena of Vharnhold, photographed covertly in 2041
Location	State arenas of the Ulmarkan Empire
Date	2039 – present
Target	Followers of the Cult of Landon
Type	Religious persecution, forced combat, public execution
Deaths	9,000+ (Concord estimate, 2047)
Perpetrators	Ring Guard, Ulmarkan state

The Hand Trials are a series of public arena combats in the Ulmarkan Empire in which imprisoned followers of the Cult of Landon are forced to fight trained wrestlers in the lethal grave circle form of Ulmarkan oil wrestling. Begun in 2039, a year after the movement was banned, they have continued to the present, and the Cohesive Global Concord estimated in 2047 that more than 9,000 people had died in them.^[1]

The Ulmarkan state calls the trials voluntary tests of faith. Human rights organisations and the Concord describe them as religious persecution and public execution, and they are among the principal reasons for the sanctions against the empire.^[1]

The Cult of Landon reached Ulmarka in the early 2030s and grew quickly among the families of soldiers killed in the Protectorate Wars. Its central teaching, the vow of the Open Hand, was declared incompatible with the Way of the Circle and with the state cult of Colby by imperial decree in 2038: in Ulmarkan law an open hand is "a hand that will not grip", and therefore a refusal of the duty to fight.^[2] The movement was banned and its houses closed. The discovery of the Ostholm experiments by the Ring Guard in April 2039, in which a breakaway Landonite faction had carried out human experimentation, was cited in the decree that began the trials that year.

Arrested Landonites are offered the chance to renounce Landon publicly. Those who refuse are entered into the trials, held in the Great Arena of Vharnhold and in provincial arenas on holidays and broadcast live. Each prisoner faces a wrestler of the Ring Guard in the grave circle. Under the rules of the trials, a prisoner who closes their hands in a grip is deemed to have renounced their faith and is spared; most do not.^[1]

The refusal of many prisoners to grip their opponents, entering the circle with their hands open and dying without resisting, became the defining image of the trials. Footage smuggled out of the empire in 2041 caused international outrage. Within the Cult of Landon the dead are venerated as martyrs, and the open-handed salute has become a symbol of opposition to the empire worldwide.^[3]

The empire responded by banning the gesture. Since 2042 an open palm raised in public is a criminal offence in Ulmarka.

The Cohesive Global Concord imposed sanctions in 2044, after which the empire withdrew from the organisation. Following the 2049 Sylvaris Transit Corridor Bombing, Ulmarkan state media accused Landonites of involvement and the number of trials doubled; the bombing has been attributed by investigators to The Brass Concord, and no link to the movement has been found.^[4] Landon has made no public statement about the trials, a silence the movement's members describe as grief and its critics as complicity.

• Cult of Landon
• Ulmarkan Empire
• Ulmarkan oil wrestling
• Open Hand
• Ostholm experiments
• Brass Concord
• Ulmarkan Famine
• Grand Circle