The Arcane Coalition
"When evil magick rears it's head, the Coalition will see it dead." -Mantra of the Arcane Coalition
The Arcane Coalition is Everwealth’s hand around the throat of sorcery, equal parts shield and shackle. An order born of mass hysteria. When the world cracked during The Fall and The Great Schism it created burned what little faith in magick we had left to ashes; The realm demanded a chain strong enough to bind the very breath of magick in all it's forms. From that demand came them, and soon after their License to Practice Magick, a parchment and oath bound in fear, inked, sealed, and revoked at will by them alone at the full support of The Monarchy. The Coalition’s reach begins and ends at Fort Sunless., a citadel carved into the bones of a distant, isolated realm with no name that the Coalition alone knows the way to; A liminal place where no dawn ever rises or falls, a secret place where they are the only oversight. From its wards flow edicts and warrants, each more binding than the last, each ensuring that what once burned the sky will never rise again. They call it governance, most call it possession. The Coalition’s hand touches every spark of spellcraft, from street-corner potionmongers to royal court conjurers, and none escape its gaze. To the powerful, their inspections are humiliation dressed as law. To the desperate, they are deliverance when nightmares manifest. Their agents ride without banners and arrive without warning, judging miracles and crimes alike with the same quiet, surgical efficiency. Cities breathe easier when their cloaks appear… but never without holding that breath too long. They preach purity, yet traffic in poison. Hexsteel, Mire-Iron, metals forbidden, even lethal to touch, stripping one's strength from their very souls; Yet they line their prisons and forge their chains. They call them blasphemies but wield them with impunity. When asked how they endure, the answers always change. The most fearful whisper of a ritual that peels away the soul’s softest parts, leaving cold, empty vessels, nothing left within for the metals to sunder. Whether that is miracle or mutilation depends on who you ask. And still, they come when no one else will. When a town’s wells bleed light, when the dead start whispering through open mouths, when a mage’s grief turns a field to glass, Coalition riders are the first and last to arrive. They bring the cure, though it often kills, and bury what cannot be saved. For all their cruelty, many believe the Coalition’s horror is a necessary one; That every public execution prevents another Schism, another Fall. Within their ranks walk zealots and cynics alike, men and women who would die to preserve a world that fears them. Yet something beneath Fort Sunless whispers louder each year. The stones hum like a throat remembering how to speak, and the walls themselves seem to listen. Some say there is a heart down there, still beating, carved from the ruin of the world before. Others insist it is not a heart at all, but a mouth, one that feeds upon obedience and sings in law. Whatever truth festers below, it is patient, and it is hungry. And when the magenta banners move across the horizon, you can never quite tell whether they are coming to save the realm, or to feed another pyre with the flesh of the innocent.
Career
Qualifications
Entry into the Coalition requires either a proven aptitude for magick or exceptional physical and mental resilience. Candidates are often scouted young, particularly orphans, delinquents, or the magickally inclined, then processed through secretive trials or recruited through Guild affiliation. Those who show raw potential are brought to Fort Sunless. Formal education is discouraged unless it's through Coalition-approved channels like The Scholar's Guild or sanctioned magick guilds under their thumb. Candidates with active licenses are often fast-tracked through lower trials, particularly those with Tier III or IV certifications. However, former license-bearers found to have violated doctrine are recruited as test subjects or pit-cadets, rarely surviving their first assignment. While the Coalition publicly proclaims itself meritocratic, insiders whisper that those brought to Fort Sunless are remade rather than trained. The strongest return with their wills pared down to discipline alone; the weakest vanish into the fort’s cells, or else into its rumored slave-stock, their identities scrubbed. Advancement, then, is not only obedience and utility, it is survival of transformation.
Career Progression
All recruits begin as Initiates, stripped of titles and names until they survive four years of brutal instruction. If they endure, they become Task Mages, enforcers of magick law. From there, a select few rise to positions of oversight or become specialist Arcane Inquisitors. The highest rank, High Magus, is granted to only the most ruthless and loyal, commanders like Cameron O’Leary who enforce doctrine without question. Advancement is earned not through genius alone but through obedience, utility, and survival. Many high-ranking Coalition operatives retain their licenses, but under internal protocols that exceed Tier V restrictions. These certifications include unique clauses such as Instant Invocation Waiver, Post-Mortem Nullification Clearance, and Preemptive Subversion Execution, clauses that effectively turn their bearers into magickal judge, jury, and executioner. The Coalition’s hierarchy is deceptively simple, its ladder short but steep, designed to pare away weakness until only the most unflinching remain. Each rank narrows the soul a little further, trimming away compassion and doubt until only loyalty to the Fort remains.
- Initiate - Stripped of name, heritage, and license, Initiates are raw stock pressed through four years of starvation, silence, and exposure to cursed materials. They are taught to hold Hexsteel without weeping, to drink Mire-Iron tinctures until vomiting blood becomes routine. Few survive; those who do are already broken into the shape of a Task Mage.
- Task Mage - The Coalition’s rank-and-file enforcers. They patrol streets, inspect licenses, and carry out arrests. Their duties include shackling suspects in Hexsteel, silencing spellbooks, and dragging unlicensed alchemists from their homes. They are the face of the Coalition to commonfolk, hated, feared, and necessary.
- Arcane Inquisitor - Specialists trained in interrogation, containment, and extermination. Arcane Inquisitors hunt rogue casters and dismantle cults with surgical cruelty, armed with tools forbidden to all others. Their investigations are not trials but sentences, their presence a promise that someone, somewhere, has already been marked for disappearance.
- High Magus - The pinnacle of Coalition command, cloaked in magenta and authority absolute. High Magi are architects of doctrine and law, writing amendments to the License to Practice Magick and orchestrating “incidents” that justify new restrictions. They command both soldiers and shadows, wielding a bureaucrat’s quill as lethally as a blade. Many are whispered to no longer be entirely human, reshaped by Fort Sunless into vessels of something older and less merciful.
Payment & Reimbursement
Coalition agents receive steady wages, food stipends, and priority housing, often funded through taxes levied on licensed mages and Guilds. Higher-ranking officers earn privileges such as enchanted weaponry, off-duty immunity, and land grants. Informants and external collaborators are paid in coin, favors, or amnesty.
Other Benefits
While the Coalition’s reputation is bleak, internal benefits are substantial. Access to forbidden magickal knowledge, immunity from common prosecution, enhanced training, and black-budget artifacts. Veterans often retire to quiet posts or serve as judges, bounty contractors, or underground consultants for nobles who require discreet power.
Perception
Purpose
To regulate, monitor, and suppress unsanctioned magick; to license only state-approved arcane activity; to investigate, imprison, or execute violators; and to ensure that the knowledge of The Fall and The Great Schism is never repeated through unchecked power. The Coalition is not only the enforcing arm of arcane law, it is the sole architect of it. License to Practice Magick, the most feared legislative instrument in modern Everwealth, is a Coalition creation, written, enforced, and revised solely by its uppermost Magi. Every clause, inspection mandate, and sanctioned spell book originates within Fort Sunless, granting the Coalition legal dominion not just over magickal events, but over the very souls permitted to cast.
Social Status
Coalition members enjoy a twisted prestige. In high society, their authority grants them deference, but also unease. Among commoners, they are feared rather than revered. In magickal communities, they are loathed. In hidden covens and circles, they are killed on sight. Rumors persist that high-ranking Coalition mages are no longer entirely human, having undergone arcane “insulation” rituals allowing them to survive long-term exposure to materials like Hexsteel. While unconfirmed, their immunity to its effects continues to drive public suspicion. Licensed mages, especially low-tier ones, are often mocked for their subservience to the Coalition, called “leashed flames” or “paper-sorcerers.” Coalition members, by contrast, are feared not only for what they enforce, but for what they’re allowed to ignore.
Demographics
Roughly 2% of Everwealth's population belongs to the Coalition, but their influence extends like a shadow. The organization is intentionally small, elite, mobile, and overwhelming.
History
Formed shortly after the Great Schism, the Coalition arose when rogue mages and volatile magickal relics threatened the fragile new kingdom. Armed with divine sanction and royal funding, they were given power over all arcane affairs. Over centuries, they became less a watchdog and more a ravenous hound. Documents uncovered in the deeper vaults of Fort Sunless hint at early experimentation with Mire-Iron-laced shackles and memory scramblers, preceding their regulation by nearly two decades. This suggests the Coalition not only foresaw public resistance, but intended to retain exclusive mastery over forbidden materials from the start. License to Practice Magick, ratified in 211 CA, was born in these chambers. After a series of catastrophic arcane disasters during Everwealth’s post-Schism reconstruction, the Coalition was given sweeping powers by King Lucius Valmore. The License became both their sword and their scripture. Every amendment since, most notably the Silent Conduit Clause, has further blurred the line between protection and oppression, extending the Coalition’s reach into every guild, home, and street where magick might whisper.
Operations
Tools
Coalition members are armed with anti-magick shackles, enchanted anti-magick blades, magick detectors like Chime Lantern or a Tri-Needle Navigator, both of which are essential equipment to them, hoarded like coin in a vault. Uniforms vary by rank but often include black leathers reinforced with enchanted silver steels and magenta-cloaked helms. Fort Sunless is rumored to store tools so potent they are warded from the minds of even its own members. Task Mages carry miniature replicas of License seals, enchanted to flash upon detection of subversive spellwork. These devices burn hotter the higher the unauthorized tier detected.
Materials
Witch Wax (used to maintain arcane surveillance rituals), Mire-Iron (preferred for psychological attrition in containment zones), Blackglass Dust (employed in memory-cleaving salves), and other restricted materials feature heavily in the Task Mage's toolkit. Despite regulating these materials as “too dangerous” for civilian use, the Coalition stockpiles and deploys them freely, especially Hexsteel which they claim is lethal to handle. Internal records, however, indicate sustained long-term use without known symptoms, suggesting Coalition-exclusive immunity or alchemical intervention kept secret from the public.
Workplace
While fieldwork occurs across Everwealth, their true workplace is Fort Sunless, a fortress beyond daylight, hidden in an arcane pocket. It reeks of sweat, blood, ozone, and desperation. Dungeons rumble with restrained energy, training halls echo with the screams of the broken, and no door opens without magickal surveillance. Operations are outwardly clean, framed in parchment and seal, but beneath the ink lurk cruelties more dire than their laws confess. Prisoners shackled in Hexsteel rarely survive longer than days, yet the Coalition maintains such restraints for years, whispering that prolonged agony extracts truths unspoken by lesser torments. Apprentices in Fort Sunless are pressed to oversee such methods, ensuring complicity before they rise. Critics argue this is less enforcement than indoctrination, proof that the Coalition’s “incidents” are curated, each silencing less a victory and more a performance.
Provided Services
- Magickal licensing and enforcement.
- Interrogation of magickal suspects.
- Relic seizure and containment.
- Arcane crime investigation.
- “Discreet” magickal assassinations.
- Controlling magickal outbreaks and rogue phenomena.
- Selective alchemical regulation enforcement (focused on compounds identified under the Alchemical Concord, with leniency toward licensed black-budget operators)
Dangers & Hazards
Though publicly dedicated to protecting the realm from reckless magick, the Arcane Coalition is no stranger to dangerous practices themselves... Most notably, they regularly restrain prisoners using shackles forged from Hexsteel, an alloy derived from Blackglass Dust and Mire-Iron, despite it being banned for civilian use due to its volatile anti-magick properties and deeply harmful effects, including seizures, blood maladies, and fugue states. The Coalition cites necessity, claiming Hexsteel neutralizes spellcasting, but critics argue its use is both hypocritical and inhumane, especially since no reports of their own suffering exist, while deaths from even brief civilian contact are well-documented. In addition, raw Mire-Iron is often embedded into prison walls, execution platforms, and interrogation rooms throughout Fort Sunless. While less overtly destructive than Hexsteel, its innate affinity for curses and mental decay makes it ideal for psychological erosion. Whispers persist that long-term exposure to such materials breaks prisoners not just in body but in soul, accelerating confession or madness. These methods, and the Coalition’s increasing reliance on them, only became prominent after their occupation of Fort Sunless. Prior to this relocation, the organization’s practices were more measured, its influence less total. Now, with rising reports of manufactured incidents and secretive training deaths, some question whether the Coalition is still governed by its original mission, or if something far older and darker, buried within the fort, is quietly reshaping its doctrine. Curiously, while exposed civilians experience fatal side effects from materials like Hexsteel, vomiting blood, memory loss, or complete magickal severance, Coalition operatives display no such afflictions. It is now speculated that hidden rituals, alchemical treatments, or even biologically engineered resilience have been developed at Fort Sunless to allow exclusive use of these materials without harm. License enforcement has grown more brutal over time. Fugitive casters found outside registration are subjected to Silent Sanction, a doctrine found nowhere in public scrolls but whispered about by underground apothecaries and charmwrights. Under this clause, violators are erased from record, no trial, no burial, no memory. Their names are replaced in all official ledgers by a burn-marked sigil: a spiral swallowing itself.
Alternative Names
'The Cloaked Judges', 'Mage Hounds', 'The Magickeaters', 'The Real Cult'.
Type
Arcane
Demand
Their demand is ever-rising. As new magickal threats appear, or are manufactured, the Coalition's mandate expands. From rogue mages to potion smugglers, few threats fall outside their purview.
Legality
The Coalition itself is the law on magick. They write the rules, interpret them, and break them when necessary. Though technically answerable to the Crown, their word carries final authority on all magickal matters. Accusations against them just as over-half of the mages, that we know of, which they target are, buried, or mysteriously silenced. The License to Practice Magick is the Coalition’s crowning achievement, and its most divisive creation. Its clauses are rigid, its punishment swift. Coalition Tithers patrol cities with mirrored scrolls bound in silent vellum, capable of scanning nearby license-holders for violations. Those caught casting even above-tier spells in self-defense are silenced. The Coalition claims the License prevents “a second Fall.” Most see it as institutionalized subjugation, a tether from soul to state. Even alchemical practices now fall under its expanded clauses, with brews above Potency Class II requiring formal tier documentation, ingredient logs, and sanctioned cauldron registration.
Used By
Comments