✅ No plot spoilers — this is about how the Conclave works, not what happens to it. Read on.
The Conclave is the Midland Empire's mage order — the only institution in the human world authorised to train, certify, and govern practitioners of Mind Magic. It is based in Arcani, the mountain city where the Four Theoreticians founded the discipline seven hundred years ago, and has remained there through the fall of the Magocracy and five centuries of Imperial rule.
Its relationship with the throne is defined by three principles, inscribed in the Codex of Arcani at the Empire's founding:
Fidelity. Mages owe absolute loyalty to the Emperor or Empress. They may object to a command politely. They may not disobey it.
Autonomy. The Conclave governs itself, judges its own members, and answers to no Imperial authority except the throne itself. Barons, ministers, generals, and allied kings have no authority over a mage. The mages are aware of this and make sure everyone else is aware of it too.
Monopoly. Mind Magic is the Conclave's exclusive domain. No other practitioner may legally use it, develop it, or teach it. The Conclave has the right — and the obligation — to hunt down any unauthorised magical practice within Imperial territory.
These three principles exist in deliberate tension with each other. The Emperor gets absolute loyalty and accepts that the institution giving it answers to no one else. The mages get autonomy and monopoly and accept that they cannot disobey the single person at the top of the entire structure. The arrangement has held for five hundred years.
The Conclave is brilliant, pedantic, and comprehensively insufferable. Its members regard magical ability as the highest expression of human potential, consider the unpowered — the profanes, in their own vocabulary — as lesser by nature, and have never found it necessary to be subtle about either position. They will lecture a duke if the duke is wrong. They will ignore a baron's orders on principle. They will conduct a lengthy methodological dispute in the middle of a battlefield if they feel the methodology is important enough.
This attitude is not merely tolerated — under Empress Maren, it has been formally codified. The right of mages to be rude to anyone below the rank of Emperor is effectively recognised by Imperial protocol, a concession Maren made deliberately. The mages responded with the gratitude of people who have been given official permission to do what they were already doing, and their loyalty to her is, accordingly, genuine and fierce. She gave them what they wanted most: the formal acknowledgement that they are better than everyone else, excluding only her.
Their attitude toward non-humans is different in character. Highfolk enchantments and Deepfolk mechanical technology command genuine technical respect from Conclave scholars. Acquiring an otherfolk artefact for study is the private ambition of a significant fraction of Arcani's membership. The contempt reserved for unmagical humans does not extend to races whose magical or technical achievements the mages find worth studying.
The Conclave is a meritocratic structure in theory, and something considerably more complicated in practice. Rising through its ranks requires both magical ability and political skill in roughly equal measure, and the two do not always appear in the same person.
Before formal entry into the Conclave, those identified as magically gifted are assessed. Those who choose to pursue training — or are required to — begin as Apprentices, selected by individual Masters who take responsibility for their instruction.
Apprentices wear grey robes. They have no formal rank, no voice in Conclave affairs, and very little protection from the opinions of their superiors. The standard of treatment ranges from rigorous to brutal depending on the Master. Five years of study are required before an Apprentice may sit the examination for Mastership. Most who enter as Apprentices do not pass it.
Masters are the Conclave's rank and file — approximately five thousand across the full extent of the Empire, performing the practical work that justifies the Conclave's privileges: weather management, large-scale construction, ship propulsion, battle magic, and the countless smaller applications that make Imperial infrastructure function. They wear plain robes in a colour indicating their specialisation.
Masters have no formal voice in Conclave governance. They may attend sessions of the higher bodies but cannot speak. In practice, Masters influence Conclave politics significantly — through their votes in Grandmaster elections, through factional organisation, and through the accumulated weight of informal relationships. A prominent and well-connected Master like Gaspar wields real influence in Arcani without holding a senior title.
Masters select magically gifted individuals as their Apprentices, making the choice of who enters the Conclave a distributed decision rather than a centralised one.
Masters elect one hundred Grandmasters from among themselves. Grandmasters wear embroidered robes over their specialisation colours. They hold formal voice in Conclave governance, attending all sessions of the senior body and voting on the selection of Archmages.
Grandmasters form the Conclave's effective political class — the level at which factional interests are negotiated, alliances formed, and the real decisions about institutional direction made before they reach the formal vote. An Archmage who ignores Grandmaster opinion does not remain an Archmage for long.
The Conclave's four Archmages are elected by the Grandmaster body. They wear gold robes. There are always exactly four — the number of the original Theoreticians, maintained as deliberate tradition.
Archmages hold supreme authority within the Conclave on all matters of mage law, policy, and discipline. They govern by consultation: decisions are reached through open discussion with the assembled Grandmasters before the Archmages vote formally. Masters are present at these sessions but do not speak. The Archmages' decision, once taken, is final within the Conclave's domain.
On taking office, every Archmage swears a personal oath of loyalty to the Imperial throne — the same oath first sworn at the Conclave's founding, renewed in every generation without alteration.
Critically, Archmages cannot select their own successors. When a seat falls vacant, the Grandmasters elect a replacement from among themselves. This structural constraint — attributed directly to Galenus — was designed to prevent the Conclave from consolidating into a hereditary oligarchy of the kind the Magocracy had been. It has produced, instead, a perpetual low-grade political campaign at the Grandmaster level, as candidates position themselves and alliances form and dissolve around the question of who the next vacancy will produce.
The Codex of Arcani establishes a principle that the Empire's civil courts have never successfully challenged: only a mage can judge a mage. When a Conclave member commits an offence — whether against Imperial law or Conclave law — the case belongs to the Conclave. Imperial authorities report, provide evidence, and are then thanked and dismissed.
This principle extends, with deliberate irony, to illegal practitioners. When an unlicensed magic user is discovered, it is the Conclave that investigates, judges, and sentences. The civil authorities have no standing. The softest available verdict is forced apprenticeship. The harsher verdicts are described in the Codex in terms the Conclave has never found it necessary to publish in detail.
The Codex of Arcani is the body of laws written by Galenus at the Conclave's founding, governing magical practice throughout the Empire. It establishes the three pillars, the judicial autonomy provision, the registration requirement for magical ability, and the classification of forbidden arts.
The Codex was designed to subjugate the surviving mages after the fall of the Magocracy. It achieved that. In exchange, it granted privileges so extensive — judicial autonomy, operational independence, tax exemptions, the right to be rude to barons — that the mages concluded the arrangement was worth accepting. Five centuries later, neither party has found a reason to revise it fundamentally.
Despite the Monopoly principle, unlicensed practitioners appear in every generation. Some are benign — individuals attempting to develop alternative approaches outside Conclave orthodoxy. They are found eventually. Others practise arts the Codex explicitly prohibits: Necromancy, Blood Magic, and Witchcraft. The Conclave treats these cases with considerably less restraint than it applies to mere unlicensed study.
The most significant legal anomaly in the Codex's application is the Wind-Callers of the Rulen — see The Wild Baron Lands for context. The Conclave accepted, under political pressure, a legal argument reclassifying their shamanistic practice as religion rather than magic. The Conclave's official position on this argument is that it is technically defensible. Their private position has never been formally recorded, which is itself informative.
The Conclave and the Imperial Creed have coexisted for five hundred years in a state of mutual contempt managed into functional necessity by shared dependence on Imperial favour. Neither can destroy the other. Both have spent five centuries trying, through political influence and the accumulation of Imperial goodwill, to make the other less comfortable.
The Creed holds that magic corrupts the soul. The Conclave holds that faith is for the weak-minded. The Emperor or Empress holds the balance between them, which is precisely how Galenus designed it.
Mages try, as a rule, not to speak to clergy directly. They find faith beneath serious engagement and its practitioners insufficiently educated to be worth arguing with. Clergy find mages arrogant and spiritually dangerous. Both are, in their own estimation, correct.
The Conclave's seat is Arcani — the mountain city founded by the Four Theoreticians seven hundred years ago, where Mind Magic was systematised and the Magocracy was born. It survived the Magocracy's fall because Galenus chose to preserve it rather than raze it, and has been the Conclave's permanent home ever since. The city is built into and around a mountain in what is now the Maritana province, a few days' travel from the capital. It is not welcoming to visitors who are not mages, and the mages do not consider this a problem.
This article is about an Organization — Human Mage Order
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| Key Characters | Gaspar |
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