@part(lefthand, root = "/mit/abstract/Characters/sheet.format")
@subsection [The Left Hand]

Witchcraft has its uses.  The Sweetwater clan learned this early in
its existence, and has passed the power and the secrets of witchcraft
down through the generations of the family, forming the network of
covens loosely labelled the Left Hand of the Clans.  Secrecy is
important to the Left Hand -- if your existence were ever discovered,
your own people would cast you out of the Clans.

This is extremely frustrating, since most of your people are loyal to
the Clans.  At the very least, you have finally managed to arrange it
so you can use your craft to aid in the war effort -- through the
efforts of Iris, your representative to the Clasp, witchcraft has been
legalized under Clasp control and for Clasp purposes.  It isn't
perfect, but it's better than nothing, and at least it's a foot in the
door.  The Left Hand has remained in hiding, though, as the solution
only seems temporary.  Hopefully, soon magic will be legalized for
good, and you can stop living in fear of being discovered and exiled.

Iris has been the Left Hand's CovenQueen for seven years, having been
given the post by her sister Seamist when Seamist made her way over to
the Realm to start a new coven there.  The Black Hand, as Seamist
called her organization, was designed to infiltrate the Realm and spy
on its activities, and when the Realm's desecration of the Shrine of
Mishael served as the trigger to war between the two groups, the Black
Hand turned to sabotage and assassination to aid the Clan's war
effort.  

The last message between the two covens occured a little less than
five years ago, when Seamist mentioned she and her Hand were going to
assassinate the Realm's Justiciar.  They succeeded in this, although
he was promptly replaced, but the Black Hand hasn't been heard from
since.  

Shortly after Seamist went out, Iris sent out two other witches, Ivory
and Jade, on a similar infiltration mission.  They, too, have
disappeared, after sending back a message that they found their
apprentices and were beginning to consolidate their forces -- and that
one of their initiates was the son of Mint Sweetwater, who was the
first of your sisters to be captured by the Iron Gauntlet and declared
OutClan in decades.  This was astounding - Mint (who hated her name,
if memory serves, and preferred to go by Dreamer, your common family
name...) and her father Mandrake were the ones indirectly responsible
for the Clans and the Realm meeting when they were exiled into the
Realm thirty-five years ago!

It would be ironic if "Dreamer's" son had become a warlock, working
for the Clans.  It was, after all, her exile that brought the
Clanlands to the attention of the Realm traitor, Lord Soeth, who then
triggered the first Realm-Clan war by slaughtering his own troops.
And Soeth was in his own way responsible for the Left Hand sending out
the Claw in the first place.

When the traitorous soldier entered the Clanlands, he met one of your
younger sisters, Raven.  They and a young thief ended up in a battle
for their lives against the Iron Gauntlet, in the course of which
Raven's healing witchcraft was discovered, and Soeth took advantage of
this information to meet the Left Hand.

You were suspicious of this outsider, but you didn't expect him to
betray you as fully or as effectively as he did.  Not only did he
steal one of your most precious and powerful treasures, a page of the
supposedly lost and destroyed Tome of Chthon, he also drained a
talisman of transport in teleporting away from your island.  When he
returned to the Clanlands, he was leading an army.

Raven left the Clans in search of him, and never returned, and when
the war was over and his treachery discovered the Clans closed their
borders.  But the Left Hand's memory is longer than that of the Clasp,
and when it was decided to open those borders again, it was the memory
of Soeth's betrayal that led to the formation of the two daughter
covens.

Regardless of the irony, after hearing about Mint Dreamer's son's
recruitment you heard nothing more from the Claw.  And by that time,
the war had begun and you were incapable of devoting many of your
energies to discover them.  Worse yet, you were unable to affect the
Realm with your own magics from within the Clans; the same effect that
protects your brethren from Realm magic makes it extremely difficult
to cast spells @i(from) the Clans.  Since then, you have been reduced
to functioning as seers and diviners -- even so, you are the best at
the job.

A week ago, for example, Iris discovered that a Realm mage was
planning an attack of some kind on the Clans, unauthorized by his
government.  With this advance warning, Cord Sweetwater, along with a
number of his Army colleagues, defeated and chased him away before he
could destroy whatever hope the two nations might have had for
achieving peace.

Recently you have suffered a major blow.  A ritual was scheduled to
summon a low-ranking deva to use to spy on the Wizard's Conclave, in
an attempt to decipher the reasons for the mad attack.  It was a
desperate move, certainly, but it seemed necessary.  Unfortunately,
something went wrong -- nearly half a dozen of your best people were
destroyed in an explosion of magical energy, along with several other
workers and innocent bystanders at Castle Clearstone at the time.  The
general assumption is that this was a Realm attack, but that doesn't
ring quite right; the Realm should still be unable to cast its magic
into the Clans.  Perhaps something went wrong with the ritual...
in any case, one survivor of the explosion, Spade Greystone, is
currently on the Castle.  Maybe he can shed some light on it.

Of course, between losing a major portion of your active witches and
having another group of them stuck on the surface when the teleport
platforms broke, there are currently very few of the Left Hand here on
the Castle to deal with whatever problems might arise.  In fact,
there's really just two of you -- Iris and Krys.  Cord is here, as
well; although he isn't a witch he is affiliated with the Left Hand
and is loyal to it.  Between you, you're going to have to get at the
root of a number of questions:  what was the meaning of the Conclave's
attack against the Clanlands?  What was the nature of the spell the
wizard you chased off was trying to cast?  Is the Clasp in danger of
another magical attack on the Castle?  What happened during the
informational ritual to cause the explosion?  What was the eventual
fate of the Black Hand and the Claw?  

It seems that before those questions can realistically be answered,
you'll need to find some help.  You also need to decide whether or not
to support the war against the Realm -- if you could somehow assure
that witchcraft would remain legalized after the war was over, ending
it would be ideal for your purposes, allowing you to return to your
own affairs.  Here, in the midst of political deliberations on all
sides, you should be able to find some way to assure that.