I've run three sagas so far and we have had a fight every session or two. Most have been things that the magi could deal with easily but deaths have happened often enough that the players know that any fight can kill.
We lost mage to a stray arrow, one died at the "hands" of a ghostly magi. Another was killed by the minions of a sihir (Don't announce your plans to attack and then sit down and eat dinner). One was eaten by an infernal dragon (They let the friendly neighborhood infernal aura sit and fester for waaay too long).
But the best was one killed by a wandering priest because of a domestic dispute. The magus was a massive lecher. Nothing female within a day's travel was safe from his attentions. This included the faerie queen in the nearby woods whose tourney was our major source of vis. One day one of our teamsters rescued a pious nun who was fleeing from the infernalist bishop who bespied her amazing beauty. The magus decided he must have her and started a two year long quest to get her in bed, which ended in him getting her drunk at Christmas.
Three months later she revealed that she was pregnant and the magus was to do the honourable thing. He laughed in her face and she stormed off to talk to the covenant's only maga and her best friend. The maga promptly challenged the magus to certamen and walked over him in the resulting duel. The wandering priest who occasionally visited the covenant was present at the time and large wedding was swiftly organized and a measure of peace settled upon the covenant for a few years. During this time a daughter was born the the not quite happy couple.
One day one of the faerie queen's raven heralds arrived to congratulate the magus on the birth of his son. This was a large surprise to the magus's wife who had now become the covenant's autocrat. This triggered an ecstatic vision in the covenant's prophetess. While the prophetess was convulsing and speaking in the voice of prophecy the wife stormed off into the covenant's mystic tower. While the magi we conferring about the prophecy the wife began throw the magus's laboratory out the tower's sixth floor window.
By the time he reached his lab she cost him the better part of his lab's specialty in mentem. He trapped her first in a web and then in a circular war against mundane humans. She spent the next year in imprisoned in the anteroom to his lab, just inside his sanctum door.
One spring day the wandering priest arrived again. He promptly stormed into the magus's sanctum, freed the wife, admonished the magus to be a good husand and stop his philandering. The priest left the next day. The magus decided that he did not like the priest's interference in his marital affairs and set up an ambush on the trail away from the covenant.
The priest wiped away the cinders from the pilum of fire off his robe and then transformed into real form, that of Seferiel angel of the Hermetic magi. The angel then allow the magus to repent his sins and then executed him before he had a chance to sin again.
Seferiel had been coming to the covenant for ten years by this point. He had been dropping hints every time he visited (not obvious ones yet... He was there for the big infernalist plot I was building).
