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The Cursed Blue Rose
They were elves of the Glacial Dominion, and their sin was ambition. Convinced that the secret of true immortality lay in preservation and fortitude, they asked the Frost Queen for the one thing she would not give: access to the preserved heart of her dead sister. She refused. They waited until she was occupied fighting the demons of Azcaloth, took it anyway, and fled south to raise a fortress where nobody would interrupt the working.
The working failed. What it produced was not eternal life but something standing outside of life altogether — bodies frozen past death, hearts stopped and still moving. And it produced a hunger. To hold their shape they must drink the warmth of the living, and those attuned to fire above all. A Covenant vampire who does not feed does not die; it forgets itself, and walks the ice thereafter as a mindless husk.
Glacya marched on their fortress to end them. She found them not defiant but remorseful, and they offered her the only restitution they had: an oath to hold the way into Azcaloth for as long as they endured, so that neither the Creed's cultists nor the fire-maddened Ashen Colossi could ever reach the Pyreheart Nexus and let its unbound fire into the world.
She let them live on that condition. They built the Blood Gate to keep it — a fortress-gate standing as the last barrier between the world and the wellspring of all fire — and they have kept it for centuries since, feeding on those who come to breach it.
They are immortal against fire, steel and sickness; shattered, they reform out of the frost; and their strength grows with what they drink, until the ice magic they wield passes beyond anything a living mage could hold.
There is exactly one force in the world that can end them permanently, and it is Demon Fire — the very flame they swore to contain. Every century they hold the gate is a century spent guarding the only thing that can kill them.
Glacya has never forgiven them. To her they remain a desecration of ice magic and a standing insult to her sister's memory, tolerated for their usefulness and nothing more. The Infernate regards them as the obstacle between it and the Nexus.
So they hold their gate with no ally who trusts them and no enemy who pities them, and the question of what they are — cursed monsters, or exiled heroes — is one they have long since stopped putting to anyone but themselves.