The Collegiate Arcane is the great school of sorcery that serves Sigmar's civilisation, an order of wizards, scholars, and battlemages that studies the wild magic of the realms and bends it to the defence of humankind. In a cosmos where raw arcane power leaks from the very ground, the untrained mage is a danger to himself and all around him; the Collegiate exists to impose discipline on that power, teaching its initiates to wield the lores of the Mortal Realms without being consumed by them.
The order draws its authority and much of its lore from the sky-realm of Azyr, where its greatest libraries and academies stand safe above the chaos below. From there its magisters travel out to the free cities, establishing colleges and towers wherever the Cities of Sigmar take root. Each institution guards its own traditions, and rivalries between the various schools of magic can be as fierce as any grudge between guilds, yet all answer ultimately to the shared duty of safeguarding civilisation from arcane ruin.
Within the Collegiate, rank is earned through mastery and demonstrated restraint. Apprentices endure years of rigorous, often perilous study before they are permitted to loose their power in earnest, and a wizard's standing rises with the subtlety of his control as much as the scale of his might. The order licenses its battlemages to march with the city armies, where a single magister may turn the tide of a battle, calling down lightning, raising walls of flame, or shielding an entire regiment from harm.
Yet the Collegiate never forgets that its craft is a borrowed fire. The same winds it channels can twist a careless practitioner into something monstrous, and the temptation of forbidden knowledge is ever present. So the order polices its own with grim vigilance, for a wizard who strays is not merely a scholar gone wrong but a doorway through which the enemies of Sigmar might pour.
The registry continues
