Every character trains under one of the four Paths — Might, Guile, Arcana or Faith. Your Class is the trade you learn inside it: a portable name that a captain at Rezg, a Vhalder notary and a shrine chaplain can all read, even while each insists the other two teach it wrong. Which Classes are open to you depends on your Path and your Race, and several can be reached down more than one Path.
Every Class keeps its own door list. The Races named on each card — and the gates marked women only or men only — are what character creation currently offers. No bodily, religious or legal cause for them has been established.
Weapon and harness, drilled until they work without you. The plan fails at the second gate, the formation is gone, and the Warrior is the reason the line is still standing — and the one who carries the dead home afterward.
Commit early, break whatever is holding you — roots, snares, a closed ring of shields — and settle the bill with your own body later. The Culdar drove-companies took the old chancery slander, printed it on their hire contracts, and raised the rate.
Full harness, a shield arm, and prepared workings carried into the press instead of cast from behind it. No single order stands behind the title: a mark scored at dawn simply has to survive being dropped, bled on and stepped through.
Not a dispeller — a diagnostician who works inside the reach of a hostile working. Name the source, the reference, the path and the bearer while standing near enough that being wrong kills you, and ordinary hands get the few breaths they need to score the seal.
Liturgy carried at sword’s length and aimed at whatever the enemy has anchored. A warstone is a counter-anchor planted in public; burning one is the founding argument of the Brand’s houses. Other shrines and free companies carry the same close work and inherit none of the doctrine.
Where a lord would send a hound into the thicket, a Wildspear goes in with the spear: pursuit, the cull, and fighting on ground no road crosses. The Red Hunt teaches the famous form and swears its hunters off the Heartwood’s promised return. Most learn elsewhere and swear nothing.
A Farportal takes a traveller and what that traveller carries. It does not take grain, herds, carts or a siege train — so the roads are still walked, and somebody still has to know which ford is a ford in a wet month.
The subject of the working is another person — their attention, their fear, a loyalty they took for their own. No college will certify a craft that cannot say afterwards what it spent, so the sworn houses keep rolls a hostile court can read while it condemns them. Soldiers call it hookwork.
Entry, concealment and timing, finished before the room knows there is anything to resist. Courts keep their worst word for the specialists who take the attendant, the register or the road home first, so that one ordinary death becomes final.
A hook in a man is somebody’s work, and somebody is still holding the other end. The Bloodshade finds the hold, follows it back to the living hand that keeps it, and says what can be cut without killing the man it is in.
Access, taking, and being elsewhere by the time it is noticed. Four centuries of measures, seals and registers that no longer agree left doors standing open on paper — a warehouse weighing against an uncalibrated markstone can be robbed before anyone touches the lock.
Hold a bearing, read a light, count what you saw, and report only that. The walking was never the hard part: a Scout comes back alone and unwitnessed, and then has to be believed by an employer who was not there.
Ordered performance doing practical work. A Vhalder hall keeps its charters in a man who can be cross-examined, because two written copies cannot both be trusted; in a fight the same craft holds a company inside one cadence, or takes the enemy’s timing away.
The distinction is bookkeeping, not power. Drawn heat rimes the vessel and splits damp masonry, and the cold has gone somewhere — a quarry, a servants’ dormitory, a downstream field. A Wizard is the one who can say which, and charge for saying it.
Nothing is made. Heat, pressure, charge and motion already exist; the working moves them, and they arrive somewhere. An Elementalist’s fire was somebody’s fuel, and the hoarfrost marks the room that will not be warm tonight.
Dead matter keeps some of its structure, and structure can be made to answer. Nothing in the craft returns a dispersed person, and animation restores nobody — which leaves the Necromancer arguing custody of what is left, case by case, before whoever is in the room.
A Stormcaller makes no weather. The squall pulled onto a siege line is one that a hundred miles of coast will now not get, and the sky lent to a close group — up to thirty seconds of it — ends in a landing that the people standing underneath have to clear.
Edrin of Kharb held an anchor garden nine days after the register failed and would not let a lord’s binding jump the queue. His Wardens still work that way at a Heartwood, and still certify a return the same three ways: a spent countermark, a living body, a named witness. Wake priests keep watch instead, Old Faith houses thank the Green Mother, and each will tell you at length that the others are doing it wrong.
A healing is paid for out of the patient. Worked too early or too often it leaves fever, scarring and a body slower to close next time — so the order is dose and triage first, rite afterward, called close enough to the line to be heard over it.
Grafts, root-rot, weather, sick herds — and at Falon, the living shock-frame that one pace of the Hill-Ship tears at while Golemwrights mind the stone legs. Boughwardens hold that every Heartwood belongs to the Green Mother; guild and wandering Druids use the same craft and refuse the claim.
Sent to settle one question: did something answer here, and who profited by it? The work is examination — the receiver, the residue, the beneficiary — and it ends in a warrant, because opened in the body a holy wound and an unholy wound are the same wound, and only the paper differs.
Reads a failing anchor, a poisoned herd or a wound that has turned — and can push any of them further along. The Harvest Court, which arrives after a siege with contracts, calls rot the payment on a standing crop coming due; Brukhan’s benches examine the same results without teaching a word of it.
Your Class is a one-way door. Pick the trade that fits how you want to be remembered — the wall, the knife, the borrowed storm, or the hand that keeps everyone else standing.
