The Amethyst Order

The Amethyst Order is one of the eight great arcane colleges of the Empire of Man, its wizards devoted to the mastery of Shyish, the purple wind of death. Where common folk shrink from any talk of the grave, the Amethyst magisters embrace it, for they understand death as a natural and necessary force: the turning of the wheel, the ebb that must follow every flow.

Grim and unsettling in their black and purple robes, the Amethyst Wizards are creatures of solemn temperament, given to riddling speech and long silences. Their magic can wither the living, shroud the field in unnatural gloom, and sever the threads that bind a soul to a failing body. Yet for all their morbid arts, they are no friends to the necromancer, for the death-wizards revere true death and abhor the perversion of undeath practised by the Vampire Counts.

Thus the Amethyst Order often finds itself in the front rank against the walking dead, their spells laying restless corpses back into the earth and countering the black sorceries of the necromancers. Recruited from those touched by Shyish (the seventh sons, the ones born under dark stars), the order's magisters walk apart from society, feared and shunned even by the armies they serve. Yet the Empire cannot spare them, for who else can meet death upon its own terms?