No track selected
The Cursed Blue Rose
The Shadow Coven is the order through which Alysira, the Cinder Witch, exercises her will beyond her own reach. Its seat is Skaitos, a city she took rather than founded, in the savanna and rocky mountain country of the south-east. Alone among the twelve settlements of that region, Skaitos does not hold the Ruby as divine: it keeps the Infernal Creed, and its allegiance is sworn to the Coven rather than to any neighbouring throne.
On every ledger the Coven stands within the bloc of the Creed, and the Infernate counts it among its own. Whether the Coven agrees is less clear. Its mistress is older than the Infernate, older than the faith it serves, and keeps her own counsel about both.
The Glacial Dominion, far to the north, has long whispered that the Coven has placed its people inside the Dominion's own administration. Nothing has ever been proven. That, those who fear the Coven point out, is precisely what one would expect.
The Coven's operatives are not soldiers and do not present as such. They go where a legion cannot: into courts, into households, into the confidence of people who would never open a gate to the Infernate. What they trade in is the same thing their mistress trades in — impossible gifts, extended freely, on terms written in someone else's spirit and collected at a date of her choosing.