Within
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The Court
The Obscured Court is an ancient, hidden governing body that oversees the use and containment of forbidden magic, arcane forces drawn from the Threads, intangible tethers that connect the mortal world to the husks of long-dead gods. These Threads are not merely sources of power, but living remnants of entities that once sought to unmake reality itself. The Court exists not to protect humanity from these forces, but to maintain a fragile, brutal balance. It does not answer to nations or faiths. It answers only to the Threads.
Formed by the thirteen original bloodlines, known as the Lineages, who first survived contact with these divine cadavers, the Court is made of those born to bear the weight of impossible magic. Each Lineage guards a single Thread, and each Thread grants its family a unique, devastating school of magic: decay, ash, blood, shadow, bone, silence, and more. These magics are powerful, but not without price. The Threads demand payment, and the Court ensures the cost is paid in flesh, soul, or sanity.
In theory, the Obscured Court exists to enforce rules that prevent catastrophe: no Thread may be severed, no magic made public, and no god may rise again. In practice, it is a cold, cruel institution. More concerned with preserving its grip on power than saving lives. Apostates who abandon their Lineage or misuse their Thread are hunted. Traitors are unmade. And those who threaten to cross Threads, to combine forbidden magics, risk awakening something far worse than death.
The Court does not meet in public. Its members do not wear crowns. But they are everywhere: behind closed doors, beneath ancestral estates, woven into the nightmares of children born too magical for their own good. It is said the Court does not rule the world, but it rules the ruin beneath it. -
The Blackroot Lineage
“From soil soaked in secrets, we bloom.”
The Blackroot Lineage is one of the most feared and secretive magical bloodlines still in existence. Shrouded in whispered legend and sustained by generations of ritual, the Blackroots were born of ancient pacts made in desperation and sealed in blood. They were not gifted their magic. They bled for it. They bound themselves to power older than time, and darker than death, and that power has clung to their bloodline ever since. Their magic is black magic in its purest, most unrepentant form. It is raw, untamed, and dangerously alive. This older, wilder strain of power predates most modern magical disciplines and openly defies the rules that govern other practices. Blackroot magic doesn’t ask permission. It takes. It twists. It remakes. Their spells are visceral and instinctive, born from the marrow of instinct and the bite of emotion. It is magic that lives in the gut and festers in the soul.
This lineage does not draw from a single element or celestial alignment, but rather from the corrupted weave of the natural world: blood-soaked soil, bone orchards, poisoned roots that sing at midnight, and the smoldering memories carried in ash and dust. Where others fear rot and ruin, Blackroots find nourishment. Their magic feeds on death, betrayal, grief, and rage. Theirs is a sacred violence, honed into art.
No spell is without sacrifice. No enchantment is ever clean. Their rituals demand something real—blood, breath, pain, memory. To cast is to cut. To weave is to wound. Magic, for a Blackroot, is not an act of will. It is a transaction. A toll. And they always pay it willingly. Within the Blackroot family, power is earned, never inherited. Even children are tested, pushed to the brink through cruel rites and unflinching trials. Those who prove weak are discarded—or worse, offered up in the workings of their stronger kin. Loyalty is sacred. Failure is a sin. The family tree is filled with missing branches, and not a single member dares to ask why.
Their ancestral home, Blackroot Hollow, is spoken of like a myth: a place where time folds in on itself, where the wind carries voices that do not belong to the living, and the trees grow from soil fed by secrets. The estate is hidden deep in forgotten woods, warded by spells that blur the mind and cloud the eyes. Graves grow wild in the orchard. The walls bleed during eclipses. Spirits linger in the halls. The Hollow remembers every scream. In the magical underground, Blackroots are whispered about like ghosts, their name uttered in cautious tones behind closed doors. They are both respected and avoided in equal measure, known for their cold precision and brutal retaliation. A Blackroot does not forgive. A Blackroot does not forget. They carry grudges like curses and vengeance like a sacrament.
To cross a Blackroot is to mark your soul, not just in this life.......but in the ones that follow.