The Silent

The Silent is a nomadic order of necromancers who view death as a sacred, solvable riddle, and are driven by a singular, obsessive pilgrimage: the search for the Kerazi. The exact nature of the Kerazi is a subject of feverish debate among scholars, as The Silent do not explain themselves to outsiders. Some grim texts suggest the Kerazi is the First Corpse: the physical remains of the first being to ever die, which supposedly holds the secret to unmaking death entirely. Others whisper that the Kerazi is not a thing, but a word, a specific incantation that, when spoken, can command the very concept of mortality. The Silent scour ancient battlefields, plague pits, and royal crypts, measuring, tasting, and listening to the decay, hunting for a trace of this holy grail.

Despite their frightening appearance, they are not aggressive. When they make camp outside a settlement, they erect a perimeter of bone-wards and wait. This is a signal to the desperate and the ambitious. Aspiring necromancers, often rejected by formal academies or hunted as witches, can approach the caravan to seek tutelage. The Silent offer comprehensive training in the manipulation of life and death, teaching techniques far older and more refined than the brute-force reanimation used by common hedge-wizards.

However, the price for this knowledge is steep. As the Silent have no use for gold, they demand payment in vitality. To pay for a lesson, a student must allow a Silent master to drain a portion of their natural lifespan; a week for a cantrip, a year for a ritual, a decade for a masterwork spell. Those who complete their training leave with immense power, but they are often grey-haired and withered before their time, their own lives shortened to fuel the very magic they now command. When the lessons are done, the Silent pack their wagons and move on, leaving behind a new generation of master necromancers and continuing their eternal, quiet search for the Kerazi.