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↓ Read on
Payment is carried by Stripe. We never see, hold, or store your card details.
The cathedral takes tithes and calls it grace. I take payment and call it payment. You may judge for yourself which of us is the more honest institution.
Purchases and memberships run through Ko-fi, processed by Stripe — certified at PCI-DSS Level 1, which is the highest certification the payments world offers and rather more scrutiny than any house has ever submitted to.
Your card details travel directly to Stripe over an encrypted line. They do not pass through this site. I never receive them. I see what is needed to put the thing in your hands: what you took, and where it goes.
Many relics are offered pay what you will above a stated floor. The floor covers the materials and the hours in the thing. Anything above it keeps the lamp lit.
Paying above the floor is a gift, not a purchase of anything further. It buys no priority, no favour, and no better relic. The houses will sell you standing. I will not. Generosity here is noted with gratitude and precisely no advantage, which I appreciate is a poor sales pitch and an excellent principle.
Prices are in US dollars. A card issued elsewhere may attract your bank's own conversion rate or a foreign transaction fee. That charge is theirs, not ours, and we never see a penny of it.
Any sales tax due is worked out at checkout by the platform. Prices exclude tax unless stated.
In full, at the moment of taking. A sale completes when payment clears and confirmation issues.
We may decline or refund any order before it ships — a listing error, a piece already gone, an order that smells wrong. You will be told, not ignored.
Prices are set by hand, and hands err. Where a piece is listed at an obviously wrong figure, we may cancel and refund rather than fulfil it. A misprint is not a contract. The cathedral has been running that particular argument in reverse for three centuries and I decline to join them.
Refunds due under the Returns Policy return to the original payment method. Not another card, not another account, not another person. After we issue it, the pace belongs to Stripe and your bank — usually 5 to 10 working days, and entirely beyond my reach.
If something is wrong, write to me first. I answer. I would rather fix it than fight you.
A chargeback raised without a word costs an independent maker the fees on top of the sum, and helps precisely nobody. Chargebacks raised in bad faith will be contested with delivery evidence and correspondence, because — and I cannot stress this enough — I keep records. It is the one threat I can make entirely straight-faced.
The site is served over HTTPS. Payment pages are hosted and secured by Stripe and Ko-fi under their own standards.
We run no card system of our own, which means there is no card data here to steal. A vault with nothing in it has never once been robbed successfully.
We will never write to you asking for card details, and never ask you to pay outside the platform. If something claiming to be the Reliquary asks for either, it is not us. Send it to thegildedarchivist@proton.me and I will add it to the record.
Failed, doubled, or simply strange — the contact form or thegildedarchivist@proton.me, with your order details. It gets sorted directly.