Umbramancy

Known most often under the nebulous title of 'shadow magics', umbramancy is a sect of casting whose practitioners manipulate the flow of mana to create and alter physical material rather than to strictly influence or manipulate it. Earning its name and association with shadow due to the ethereal and black smoke-like appearance held by objects created or influenced by umbramancy, its intrinsic association with undeath affords it a disreputable and often-times sequestered if not outright banned status among many institutions of mystical knowledge the world over. Despite not interfering with others' souls directly in the vein of necromancy, the other sect associated with undeath, it is a form of magic closely associated with spectral undead for its ability to allow the soul to exist without a fully tangible physical form.
In a natural state, the ethereal soul and the physical body exist in an unbroken connection with one another; the body may interact only with the physical realm, while the soul may only interact with the ethereal. It is umbramancy and umbramancy alone which can bridge this gap. At its very foundation, one studying umbramancy must learn how to temporarily turn the tangible intangible and vice-versa — and thus becomes the baseline upon which all further knowledge of the study expands upon. Across the world, this is viewed as taboo at best and inherently heretical at worst by a large number of cultures and religions, leaving much of it ironically relegated to the shadows of any given society.
Fair or otherwise, then, the sect is most often considered the realm of necromancers, witches, and trained killers who fancy dabbling in the occult.
As one might expect of a form of magic so closely related to specters, umbramancy plays often with the laws of physical and spatial reality, its users able to levitate and slow their falls, covering short distances instantly in puffs of black smoke by willing their physical forms through open space, or returning bound objects to their hand from great distances with a simple thought. In battle, an umbramancer might create a cloud of smog to obscure their position or launch inky black tendrils towards their opponents to bludgeon them with unexpected mass; one who favors a less obvious approach might manifest arrows or knives formed of solid shadow in their hands which vanish into the air after they've hit their mark.

by Martina Fačková (Wizards of the Coast)