There are as many schools of wizardry as there are stars in the sky. Conjurers who study the art of calling forth beings and objects, the elemental professors who master the dynamic powers of elementals, and of course the necromancer. Necromancers are often shunned or feared due to the taboo nature of their work and how they might use it. While death is a terrifying thing, it is natural. If something lives it must die, and the cycle will continue as nutrients pass on to the next organism. Even if they are just and moral in their practices, necromancers introducing themselves as the arcane scholars of death is an easy way to generate suspicion or land themselves in a spot of trouble. Which is especially ironic, considering how much worse the wizards of life are.

The Geschwulsters, also known as Flesh-Twisters or Vitaemancers, are a classic study of how anything can be twisted towards evil, regardless of how pure or virtuous it may begin. They supposedly originated from an obscure magical school in the foothills of a far-off mountain range, where the class of a mere fifty students stumbled across something terrible in their efforts to oppose the power of death. Something unceasing, that thrummed with an unstoppable heartbeat. Something that the students took into themselves, to study what secrets lay in the halls of ceaseless life. It is presumably the introduction of this alien essence into their body that poisoned their minds, although they may have been driven to madness long before their breakthrough. You’d have to ask one of the fifty, if you could get close enough without having words drowned out by bloody vomiting.

Geschwulsters have unlocked the secrets of the body, and the true power of disease. Whereas necromancers may conjure forth blights and plagues that spread rapidly from person to person, vitaemancers use more narrow ailments that do not spread between victims. The tradeoff is that where other illnesses may be blocked by a healthy lifestyle, medicine and common sense, their diseases are nigh unstoppable, growing forth from within their target as opposed to an external source. With a single gesture and an arcane word, tumors erupt forth to grow out of control, tearing apart organs and draining vitality. Or perhaps the Geschwulster shall command another’s body to such an extent that it begins turning its defenses against itself, the immune system bursting blood vessels and drowning out vital functions with a red tide.

Regardless of methods, these avatars of cancer and bodily sabotage are a horrendous force to be reckoned with. One can only hope that one’s body is strong enough to live through the ordeal, or that the Geschwulsters eventually die out. The former is the more applicable, as just like the stubborn cells within them the foul wizards just refuse to die, no matter the carnage they may wreak around them.