Are there still any openings available? This seems really well thought-out and interesting. I love how the magic schools are all connected by a concrete theme beyond 'this is the illusion magic', 'this is the healing magic', and so on.

Just from reading that first post, my initial idea for a character (just brainstorming) would be a courier of some sort. Maybe a human, maybe a goblin, definitely with some tangential knowledge of Old Soot (a valuable tool for anyone walking the long roads). He/she wouldn't have been a courier for long, if only because most couriers don't do the work for more than a few years before quitting in terror and hiding from the darkness in the bottom of the deepest bottle they can find, retiring into a life of lazy, well-earned comfort, or vanishing somewhere in the wooded darkness between point A and point B.

As I said, that's just the first idea that came to mind. If it wouldn't fit in the setting, I'll think of something else.