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The Cursed Blue Rose
Every kingdom keeps soldiers. Risbern keeps something else as well.
The Radiant Vanguard is sworn against the supernatural and the catastrophic — the threats that a line of spearmen simply cannot be pointed at. It takes the missions that are dangerous, and it takes the ones that are morally impossible, and it does not always come home able to say which was which.
Its emblem is a sunburst run through with a sword: light brought deliberately into the places light does not reach. Its plate is gilded and cut with faintly glowing runes of radiance, and the runes are not decoration — dark magic does not bite through them the way it bites through steel.
Radiant Wardens carry a minor investiture of radiance in the body itself, which makes them resistant to demonic corruption and lets them weaken dark workings simply by standing in them. They are the order's line.
Sunforge Knights are the heavy: fully armoured, carrying enchanted arms that discharge holy force on impact. Against a corrupted thing, one blow that lands is usually the whole engagement.
Lightbringers are its mages — a small number of specialists in focused radiance who raise barriers, close wounds, and unpick curses that were not designed to be unpicked.
Shadow Trackers are the ones nobody sees. They hunt the cursed and the demon-touched across enormous distances, quietly, and they are usually already in the room before the order officially arrives.
The Vanguard does not answer to Risbern's generals. It answers directly to Clerumbras, the kingdom's crown prince, whose own connection to radiance is a matter of blood rather than of appointment.
That arrangement has served Risbern well for a long time, on the assumption that the crown's judgement is sound and the crown's confidence is its own.
What the Vanguard has been sent to do at this moment is not something the order discusses, and those outside it who have worked out roughly what it must be do not agree on whether it is justice or the worst mistake Risbern has ever made.
The prince is said to be conflicted. He pursues it anyway. Duty and radiance both push the same direction, and it has not yet occurred to him to ask who else might be pushing.