Athame

An athame in the world of Reign of the Seven Spellblades is a short sword carried by most mages as a combination sidearm and magic focus.

Description
An athame is normally a short sword between thirteen and twenty-two inches in length meant to be wielded in one hand. Beyond this they vary wildly in form from one mage to the next: they may be either curved or straight, and be either single- or double-edged. Most have cruciform hilts, though some feature handguards.

A trained mage can both duel with their athame, a practice known as sword arts, and cast spells with it in place of their white wand.

Nanao Hibiya, who trained as a samurai in her homeland of Yamatsu, was considered unusual for preferring a katana over twenty-five inches long. Two-handed swords were rare enough in the Union that there were no standard dueling rules to account for them.

Few mages were capable of wielding two athames at once. The only one in living memory who could manage this effectively was the late Chloe Halford.

History and controversy
Athames are deeply intertwined with the invention of sword arts. In the year 1132, the High Sorcerer Wilf Badderwell was killed in a fair duel by a nonmagical swordsman. Prior to this, carrying a sword was considered dishonorable; however, the death of Badderwell forced mages to rethink this position.

In the 1530s, Professor Frances Gilchrist still despised the use of athames, arguing that even though they made mages safer from nonmagicals, they also led to an increase in mage-on-mage violence. She believed that mages should favor magical solutions for close-in defense, such as the use of familiars.