Sorcerer

When the shining ones came down upon the mountain, they brought gifts. To the smiths they gave the secret of the blade. To the women they gave the making of charms. And to a few, the cleverest and the hungriest, they gave the arts: the reading of the stars, the cutting of roots, the brewing of venoms, the binding of spirits, and the words that make a plague walk.

Those few became the first Sorcerers, and their students fill the towers of the gilded city today. They wear rich robes embroidered with stars and carry rods carved in the shape of a serpent's head. Their knowledge is real. Their power is real. When a Sorcerer throws down a rod, it becomes a serpent. When a Sorcerer breathes on a crowd, a sickly mist rises from the ground and men begin to choke.

But the Sorcerers know a secret they do not like to speak aloud. There are signs they cannot copy. They can make the lesser wonders: the serpent, the swarm, the sickness. They have never called fire down from heaven, and every Sorcerer who has tried has stood in silence under an empty sky. Their arts come from below, and from below is where they stay. And every working leaves its mark: a darkening of the veins, a faint chain scar on the wrist that flares whenever the art is called, a debt that someone, somewhere, is keeping count of.

You are a plague on the battlefield. Where the Prophet strikes one enemy with a single crushing sign, you poison a whole pack and let the venom work. Every enemy suffering one of your lingering curses makes all your arts stronger, so the more foes you spread your sickness over, the deadlier you become. Choking air weakens every enemy in the fight, a foul mist rises around you, plague bursts over the encounter, and at the height of your power your rods fall to the ground as serpents and seize five enemies at once.

The Sorcerer turns a crowd into a graveyard. It also turns every head in that crowd toward the Sorcerer.

You want to watch a whole pack of enemies wither at once. You love lingering curses, spreading plagues, and the grim satisfaction of a battlefield going quiet around you. But know what the arts are, and who taught them. The fallen who gave this knowledge to men have never given anything away. They only lend, and they always collect. Yet no debt owed by a man is beyond paying, and more than one Sorcerer has broken the serpent rod across a knee and walked out of the tower toward the hills.