The Shadow court was founded in the early days of Engima city, after fleeing the elven persecution in Fal’addas around 500 years ago, where their works were hunted and banned as being unnatural. It helped shape how they operated making secrecy of utmost importance, and working in layers of lies, many cloaks to hide parts of the truth.

The first of the powerful organizations in the circle of thorns, it is lied that Eleth speaks directly to the Shadow court leadership, Eleth's Aspectii or prophets would never do something so mundane as tell you what to do. Eleth is about the unknown, surprises, half-truths, and misdirection, those that are devoted to the god are supposed to embody these concepts. There is an old saying, a predictable initiate is never one for long, either soon dead or reformed.

Conflict with the tome keepers cannot be understated, the two groups loath each other and yet balance each other out. While the tome keepers focus on confusing and even wiping knowledge as a preventative measure, the court prefers to destroy original texts too but keeps them as an echo in Shadon, so only they will fully understand or translate it. The Tome Keepers see this as a threat naturally and a possible weakness, while the Shadow Court sees it as a necessity.

You can think of their organization as layers of deception, that require ciphers to unlock parts and then piece together the truth, both about how they operate but also what they are concealing. It is a mystery to challenge them, and one they will keep rearranging to frustrate your search.

As an example, the informants that deal with them know them incorrectly and usually have several misconceptions. Perhaps by an alternative name, thinks they are aligned with different organizations, thinks they are a smaller part of larger unrelated organizations. They never know who they are working for, and usually have three layers of deception in the way of finding out, at a minimum they would be working for a friend, of a friend, of a friend. Quiet often for example an informant would be given a task that was completely worthless to the shadow court, just to throw them off track, and of course, they will be killed without a second thought if they ever were a problem.

Despite its tendency toward betrayal, the shadow court is reasonably stable as an organization. It pays what it says it will to those who it employs, a necessity of keeping a stable network of informants, mercenaries, and agents. This much predictability at least is tolerated as a sacrifice for keeping the network functioning. A great many slaves are also purchased, and perhaps of all the organizations in Engima, it goes through most of them at an alarming rate.

Shadon is their primary method of communication, where no sentence is what it seems, and most of their dealings or any contracts are written in Shadon. Though contracts is an interesting choice of words for an organization that is dedicated to the art of lying or masking the truth beneath layers of deception.

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