The Seekers' Guild

"Conjuration is a dangerous art, one which has claimed well more than its fair share of casualties. Let it be known that under the Circle of Nine it is an outlawed practice: to willfully bring the Other into our world is to forsake the protection of mortal law. There is no gain to be had from it; any boon that comes through such treachery is no boon at all."
—Former King of Solisvar Yaotl Ahuilan, speaking on behalf of the Circle of Nine in 42 YC.

Dormant but not dead, the Seekers' Guild are a syndicate of mages dedicated to pursuing forbidden knowledge. Primarily, the mages that make up the guild are summoners, those who use their power to pull creatures from the Otherworld into the world of mortals in order to trap, interrogate, and experiment upon them. The practice of summoning the Other is forbidden under the Circle of Nine, and has been nearly since the Co9's inception. But that has not stopped the Seekers' Guild, though they have operated under layers of deep secrecy for hundreds of years in order to evade the law.

The true name of the organization is known by few outside of its ranks; most who know of it know it as the Dark Guild, and the number of those who know it at all has dwindled drastically over the past century. Though the Dark Guild undoubtedly still has quite a few mages within its ranks, the current actual size of the guild is quite difficult to estimate, for the guild's activities have become even quieter than usual since around 600 YC—though it may be the case that the guild has simply gotten better at covering its tracks. The most active Seekers' Guilds are believed to be in the Federation of Vay, Norsivar, and Oristhane.

The Seekers' Guild is a grassroots and unstructured organization entirely focused on uniting those with interest, knowledge, and skills in summoning. Within a community, a certain Seeker, as the guildsmen refer to themselves, may rise to a position of authority, but that position derives solely from the attitudes of other Seekers; there is no formal hierarchy. There are longstanding hierarchies within a few branches of the Dark Guild, but those are exclusive to those local regions and not reflective of the Guild at large.

"Knowledge has no morality."

Founding Date

190 YW

Type

Guild, Mages

Alternative Names

The Seekers, the Dark Guild