The Shadows

The magic the empire tried to bury — and the people who would not let it die.

Long before the empire, the wizards — all of them, undivided — rose against the old gods and banished them from the world. There was no “Shadow” among them then: a wizard was a wizard, and the distinction that now damns half their number did not yet exist.

That line was drawn much later, and the wizards did not draw it. When the Palatine Knights were forged and the empire rose on their backs, it was the empire and its Knights that split wizardry in two. The traditions useful to the Knights — fire, lightning, protection — were kept close as the honored Tower Wizards. Everything the Knights had no use for was cast into the shadow. That rejected wizardry, taken together, is Shadow Magic, and those who work it are the Shadows.

To be a Shadow is not the same as to be outlawed. Shadow Magic runs from the merely mistrusted to the strictly forbidden:

  • Nature — the oldest craft of all, mastery over beasts and growing things. Its wizards ruled this region before the Knights were ever found, and they rebelled against their making; they were crushed, and the empire took none of their art into its golems. But nature magic was never banned — only mistrusted. A nature wizard practices in the open, watched.
  • Illusion — the bending of sight and certainty, a quiet art that needs no army to be dangerous. This one is outlawed as heresy.
  • Necromancy — the raising and binding of the dead, the most feared of the heresies, and the one no city will tolerate within its walls. Outlawed, and worked only in the dark.

The Shadows are not a single faction. Some want only to practice in peace. Others wage a patient, secret war over relics the empire would rather stayed buried — for the old powers were banished, not destroyed. There are those, in the deep places and the high councils both, who would see them stir again. What walks back into the world if they succeed is a question the Tower Wizards do not like to be asked.

Dragons of the Eastern Mountains

The one beast that can answer a Palatine Knight.

Creatures large enough to fight an armored knight on equal terms are rare. The greatest of them are the dragons of the eastern mountains — immense, armored in scale thicker than a castle wall, and crowned with fire. A grown dragon can take a battering that would shatter a golem, strike three times in the span a knight strikes once, and burn a line of soldiers to ash before they close. When one descends, it is the knights — and only the knights — who can ride out to meet it.

For the most part they keep to the high passes. But their numbers swell, and in hard years, or when something stirs them, they push down out of the heights into settled land, and a knight rides to the “rescue.” Rarer still, and far worse, is when one of the great old wyrms wakes with purpose — a Dragon Awakening that empties whole towns and turns a campaign into a hunt.

And there are darker rumors from across the mountains, well beyond the empire: of wizards who can take dragon shape, who keep true dragons for war, and who have spun a false history of themselves as dragon-gods. Whether an exiled prince of theirs will one day bring that war west, no one in the empire can say. They only watch the eastern peaks, and hope the year is a quiet one.

Bears and the Dire Packs

Not malicious. Just large, hungry, and in the way.

Below the monsters of legend are the beasts — the bears, boars, and wolves that maraud the deep country at the ragged edges of cultivation. One of them is a hunt. A pack of them, driven down by hunger or hard weather, is a battle, and exactly the sort of work a frontier company is hired to handle when a village’s own militia cannot.

Bears are the worst of the common kinds: heavy, thick-hided, and strong enough to stagger a knight. Boars are faster and come in greater numbers, goring and scattering a loose formation. Wolves rarely fight a company head-on, but they harry stragglers and the wounded.

The real danger is the dire specimens — the great old bears and boars that grow far beyond their kin and lead the packs that follow them. A dire bear can soak punishment that would put down three ordinary ones; a careless company that lets a dire-led pack close on it can be broken outright. They are not cruel, and they want nothing but range and a full belly. That makes them no less deadly when a hungry pack decides your column is in its way.

For a company, beasts are also profit: a kill yields pelts, tusks, and trophies that sell well enough in any town that has lately lost livestock — or people — to the wild.

The Captains of the Roads

Where imperial order runs thin, the roads belong to the bold.

The empire’s authority is thinnest on the frontier, and into that gap step the bandits — deserters, broken men, dispossessed peasants, and captains with ambitions far above their station. They prey on caravans, isolated steadings, and travelers foolish enough to ride the back roads alone. With no standing law but a passing company of swords, they are the most common work a warband takes, and the bread and butter of a young company’s purse.

Most are a nuisance: a dozen hungry men with stolen spears and a defensible camp. But the frontier breeds worse. A clever, ruthless captain who wins a few fights draws more men, takes a strongpoint, and stops running — until what began as a gang of brigands has become a small army holding its own stronghold and answering to no lord at all. Left long enough, such a captain can grow into a warlord, and the clearing of one bandit camp becomes a campaign to bring down a power that threatens even the great cities of the border.

They take their names from the same stock as everyone else on the march — a Frankish or Talins given name, an ugly epithet earned along the way. The Black. The Faithless. Iron-Glove. Cold-Blade. By the time a captain has earned one, they are usually worth the bounty.

The Retinue

The footmen who follow the lance.

For every towering knight there are a dozen ordinary soldiers — the retinue. Footmen with spear and shield, archers and crossbowmen, light horse: the common men and women who march behind the golem-knights and do the unglamorous work of war. A unit of retinue is reckoned not as a single warrior but as a body of up to ten figures, and its losses are counted in figures fallen rather than wounds taken. They do not suffer the crippling critical wounds a knight can — they simply hold, or they break.

Against a Palatine Knight, retinue are nearly powerless; a single armored golem can wade through a company of them. So they are seldom the deciding force on a battlefield. Instead they are the empire’s constables and skirmishers — they hold the towns, walk the roads, escort the caravans, scout ahead of the knights, and harass an enemy the knights have not yet reached.

But retinue are not static. Soldiers who survive enough hard fighting, and who are re-armed and re-armored as their company prospers, grow into something more than footmen — heavier, deadlier, and proud of the name they have earned. A warband’s true wealth is not just its knights, but the seasoned spears who have lived long enough to become veterans.

The Tower Wizards

The empire has no priests. It has wizards.

Where other ages would place a priesthood, the Palatine Empire places its Tower Wizards. They counsel kings and peasants alike, read omens in smoke and stone, keep the calendar and the histories, and hold the knowledge of how the world actually works. Above all, it is their craft that shapes and consecrates the golems of the Palatine Knights — making them, in a real sense, the foundation the whole empire stands on.

Three traditions are honored above all — the ones the Knights cannot do without:

  • Fire — flame and divination; the tradition most concerned with seeking knowledge and deciding what of it should be shared.
  • Lightning — the chained, leaping strike; favored where speed and aggression decide the day.
  • Protection — wards, shields, and mending; the magic that keeps a line standing.

A fourth craft, Nature — the oldest of all, mastery over beasts and growing things — is no longer counted among them. Its wizards opposed the making of the Knights and were broken for it, and the empire took none of their art into its golems; nature magic was cast out among the Shadows. It was never outlawed, mind — that fate fell to the forbidden Shadow arts of illusion and necromancy — but a nature wizard works under the empire’s distrust all the same.

A wizard’s might is real, but on the empire’s battlefields they are rarely alone: their power is spent consecrating and supporting the knights. It is only in the lands the empire never conquered that wizards still wage war directly, in their own name — shielded by elite guards rather than merged into stone.

The Spine and the High Pass

One road, one pass, and a war on either side of it.

The contested frontier is split by a range of mountains the locals simply call the Spine — a long, hard ridge that runs across the march between Talins and Severni Mars. It is not the tallest range in the world, but it is in the way of everything, and there is only one pass through it.

That pass is held by the fortress city of Halgard, and whoever holds Halgard holds the throat of the whole region. The empire’s one great highway threads through it, running from the northern port of Talinsthorpe, up through the pass at Halgard, and down to the southern coast at Eastmark. Off that spine, lesser roads wander west through the interior and south toward the warmer country around Verath.

The land changes as you cross it. The north is colder, its coast grey and wind-scoured; the south is warmer and softer, its old Talins settlements drowsing in the heat. To the west lies open ocean. Everywhere between are the things that make a company’s living: forests thick enough to hide a warband, fens and rough hill country, ruined steadings, and roads that were safe last season and are not safe now.

It is a small slice of what two kingdoms both claim — and both claim it loudly.

Talinsthorpe

The great northern port — and the seat of the Order of Saatti.

Talinsthorpe is the largest city of the northern frontier: a grey, salt-stained port on the cold northern coast, where the empire’s one great highway begins its run south toward the pass at Halgard. It is wealthy, crowded, and watchful — a working harbor city that has changed hands by conquest and remembers it.

The city is ruled by a Voznian dynasty that won Talins by the sword and has never fully digested its conquest; the old Talins blood beneath them has long memories and longer grievances. Holding it all together — and holding the roads that feed it — is the Order of Saatti, whose discipline keeps the peace in the great cities of the empire. Talinsthorpe is their seat on this frontier.

It is also home to a Saatti Order House: one of the places where knights are armed, re-equipped, and brought for the finer gear and enchantments their golems can carry. For a company working the north, Talinsthorpe is where you resupply, where you hear the rumors first, and where the work — honest or otherwise — tends to find you.

When the wars of the border turn hot, Talinsthorpe is a prize. More than one campaign on this frontier has ended at its gates.

The Order of Saatti

Honor. The spear and the lance. The colour blue.

Saatti was a legionnaire — a soldier of foreign birth who led an army of foreign recruits in the empire’s early expansion. His name is remembered for the defense of Talins. Having taken the city, Saatti learned that a far larger enemy army was marching to retake it. Rather than subject the people of Talins to a siege, he led his army out to meet the enemy in the open field. His army was decimated. But when the victorious enemy turned to march into the undefended city, the people of Talins shut the gates in their faces and barred them out — and when reinforcements arrived, the enemy was caught in the open and destroyed.

That is the Order’s idea of honor: not the appearance of it, but the price of it.

Today the Order of Saatti keeps the rank-and-file order of the empire’s great cities and leads its common armies — and on the frontier, it backs the lords of Talinsthorpe, the Voznian dynasty that won Talins by conquest and has never fully digested it. Saatti’s knights fight with spear and shield: well-armored, disciplined, patient, and slow to forgive. Where their rivals raid, they consolidate. Their proxies hold the roads.

The head of the Order, where one is acknowledged, bears the title Knight of Honor.

The Stone Bond

What it is to live inside the armor.

A Palatine Knight does not wear their armor. They become it.

The bond begins with a touch and a word. Laying a hand on the golem of enchanted stone and speaking a personal command phrase — known only to the bonded knight — the warrior merges into it. Their body is subsumed into the stone for the length of the battle. They see through its eyes, hear through its ears, breathe through its mouth, and move as it moves. They do not raise the golem’s arm; they raise their arm. While merged they feel larger than life, almost beyond harm, and they look down — literally — on everyone around them.

The bond cannot be improvised. It must be consecrated by a living Tower Wizard, which is why a knight and their Order’s wizards are never far apart. No wizard, no bonding. No bonding, no knight.

Most armors are old, named, and passed down within a family for generations. A golem can be captured on the field, but the deep magic to rebind it to a new owner is costly and known to very few — so a defeated knight is more often ransomed or exchanged than destroyed, and a captor may even offer the knight an honorable place in their own army, armor and all.

The merging is permanent, but being in the armor is not — it is donned for battle and shed afterward, like any other harness. They say there are knights who refuse to come out. No one likes to think about what becomes of them.