Sickle

The Sickle is the mage guild of the Realms, monopolising the use of magic and protecting its users (killing magic users who does not want to join their ranks).

During the Prosperous Times, the Sickle managed to gain a lot of public support and partly wipe away some of its tarnished reputation by pledging help to the city without demands for compensation. They helped to move the river Wildrun into an impressive moat, move tonnes of soil to enable important buildings to be founded on bedrock and to irrigate the local fields as well as setting up a system of magic enhancement to improve the crops themselves, making the already massive city almost self-sufficient.

The great fire of XXXX was found to have been started by an 11-year old daughter of a noble family, who had undetected magic powers which randomly manifested and burned not just the girl, but the whole estate and most of the family. The fire spread to an oil storage for street lamps and almost took on catastrophic consequences from there on.

The Sickle, which was central in putting out the fire, managed to raise awareness of the dangers of uncontrolled magic as well as creating a strong sense of urgency to report magic use in non-Wizards. When they pledged to cast a powerful detection spell, it was even welcomed.

The Sickle also gave the King a hundred fire-free street lamps to avoid further fires and pledged to continue to deliver lamps to entirely replace the oil lamps (much to the outcry of oil salesmen and lamp lighters). The catch was that the city would have to pay for magic power at a cost similar to that of the oil lamps, a deal the King gratefully accepted.

Some lamp lighters got to keep their jobs, only now they refill the lamps with magical batteries rather than oil.

Despite many a good deed, The Sickle has never completely gained public support even in the city, and some merchant initiatives are to avoid MEP - magically enhanced produce.

What people, even most Wizards, don't know is that it's the lamps which detect magic. A tiny fraction of the power paid for by the city is secretly used to power the built-in enchantment that takes note of place, location of the sun, school of spell, strength and (as much as possible) magic signature. If it detects magic, this information is then sent to The Eye, which is another enchanted item in the top of The Spire, which creates a small glass pebble imbued with a detailed illusion of the said magic.

What follows is that magic students sort the pebbles for time and as part of their training attempts to detect what spell is used, which is written down on paper. The information is double-checked by another student in another room, and the same twice more. If there are spells which are too complex for the students, or looks like they have tried to conceal its purpose, it's handed to a Professor.