Preston Consilium

Created when the Cabal known as the Wild Hunt, emboldened by the accumulation of other mages in the area, broke away from the Consilium by the Bay in the early eighteenth century, the Consilium of Preston has a strong history of significant and often violent activity. Unlike its parent Consilium, very few Cabals of Preston survive past a generation or two, with the Wild Hunt as the primary exception.

History
Initially a purely urban Consilium, the expansion in the late nineteenth century was rapid under the care of a powerful Hierarch whose Shadow Name, Gwyllion, confuses some modern historians, but who has been used as a running joke between Tattersall and Gwyllion.

This expansion brought clashes occasionally with the West Yorkshire Consilium and the Consilium by the Bay, but it is most discussed as one of the series of actions which would eventually lend impetus to the signing of the Burnley Accord and creation of the Burnley Confederation.

In and around the 1950s, the tone of Preston changed, first with the arrival of Equinox, a mage belonging to the Cult of the Doomsday Clock, and shortly afterward with the arrival of Caradoc, whose membership in the Blank Badge was not initially known.

Caradoc founded the Cabal known as the Ministers, in whose ranks were included Soothmaker, a Guardian of the Veil who has the dubious pleasure of being the first in Preston to be infected by the Legion, a left-handed Legacy more often viewed as a psychic infection-slash-parasitic entity.

Soothmaker being quite high up among the Guardians, it was easy for the Ministers to start laying groundwork to loosen the provisions against... often-questioned... Legacies and other customs entering Preston. Word began to get around in certain circles; Roses of Eden, Blank Badges, the Carnival Melancholy and, later, Cwn Annwn and Cloud Infinite would all find homes there.

Meanwhile, Equinox and his own Cabal, a Mysterium cult-extension of the Ergregorus political bent, slowly initiated more and more of their number into the Cult. In the 1980s this would create a serious problem, when a Lictor from the Consilium by the Bay stumbled upon this Cabal, the Watch, and wiped them out, planting the seeds of a longstanding grudge.

WIth the slow decline of the MInisters and especially with the rise of the Wicked Sisters and the Poor Knights, tensions began to truly mount. Under the reign of de Molay, the death of Ford - himself an agent inserted into Preston to monitor Left-Handed behaviour by the Consilium of the Lakes - triggered the events now known as the Argent Agenda.

The mage known as Rowntree pushed for a Convocation to resolve these rising tensions. Following the Convocation Trials, a change of management saw the Cabal of the Court startlingly ascendant, their leader, Mainstay, named a compromise Hierarch. Mainstay met secretly with Rowntree and Hagstone to work toward the Gregson Accord, and so the history of Preston Consilium reached its end as it became part of the Consilium of the Stone Circle.