Assassination does not begin or end with a blade.
It leaves widows staring at doors that will not open. It empties ledgers. It unravels alliances built over decades. Grief spreads outward in rings, touching lives the assassin never sees. For some, that reality repels. For others, it clarifies purpose.
The Assassin Guild formed in Thalevir not to glorify killing, but to discipline it.
Before its rise, hired deaths were reckless. Amateurs botched work and fled. Clients were cheated. Collateral bloodshed multiplied retaliation. Chaos followed incompetence. The Guild imposed standards. It trained its members in patience, surveillance, anatomy, poisons, and exit routes. Apprentices learned to study a target’s routines before drawing steel. They learned restraint before lethality.
The Guild did not function as a collective army. Each assassin operated independently, negotiating contracts according to skill, risk, and reputation. A quiet marketplace of death existed behind closed doors, where price reflected precision. What the Guild provided was structure and consequence. Failed contracts triggered internal penalties. Recklessness endangered everyone.
Only three rules governed them.
- Do not take another assassin’s contract.
- Do not abandon a contract once accepted.
- Do not kill outside of contract, except in self-defense.
The rules were simple because complexity invited loopholes. Reputation sustained business. Predictability sustained survival.
The Guild did not claim moral purity. It did not pretend that its work was noble. It argued only this: if killing would happen regardless, it was better done cleanly, deliberately, and without spectacle.
In a world already shaped by power struggles and quiet betrayals, the Assassin Guild ensured that death, when purchased, arrived with discipline.