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.
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