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The Cursed Blue Rose
On the far landmass of Thirvandor, past an ocean that most captains will not cross, stands a forest that decides for itself who may enter it.
Sunspire is warded by living magic. Its borders do not merely resist outsiders — they turn them, patiently and without violence, until the traveller finds themselves walking back out of country they thought they were walking into. Those the forest permits describe it as the most beautiful place in the world. Those it does not are simply never quite able to say why they gave up.
At the heart of the forest stands the Amber Tree, and inside the Amber Tree is the Ruby Heart of the Wilds.
The Heart is what remains of an Elehath: the crystallised essence of the Ruby of the Wilds, left behind when she gave herself up. Everything Sunspire is — its beauty, its wards, its refusal — grows out of that single act. It is a sanctuary because it is a grave.
The Sunfang were human once. They lived in the forest long before the Infernal Creed existed, as hunters and as its keepers, and their whole culture was bound to the Ruby's flame.
When the Creed came for the Ruby Heart with the demons of Azcaloth behind it, the Ruby of the Wilds spent herself to stop them — and her essence went into her followers rather than into the air. It changed their bodies. It did not change anything else. They kept their name, their tongue, their customs and their charge, and they have held the forest as werewolves ever since.
They do not gather by moonlight. Whatever made them came out of creation-fire, and the Sunfang keep their rites under the sun.
A child was born in Sunspire around 50 DS: Torvan, son of the Warden of Stillstars and the Ruby of the Wilds, raised as a holy child among his mother's faithful and tutored by elves out of the Glacial Dominion.
He lived through his mother's sacrifice and through the changing of the Tribe, and then he did what nobody expected of him: he left. He went out with the elves and the others the transformation had not touched, and he did not come back. In Sunfang tradition he is the Lost Son of the Ruby, and the tradition is careful to note that leaving is not the same as betraying.
Where he went, and what he has been doing there in the centuries since, is not something the Tribe claims to know. Other people claim to. Their accounts do not agree with each other and none of them are pleasant.
In the age of the Blue Rose the Creed came back, and this time it came in force: Rysalia, High Commander of the Creed's armies, with the Ashen Serpent bonded to her, meaning to take the Ruby Heart out of the Amber Tree and put its power to work.
The Sunfang rose as they always had. For the first time in their history they did not rise alone. Merynia, the Blue Rose, and Ray, the Heart of Resistance, made alliance with the Tribe and stood in the trees with them.
The battle was ugly and close. Rysalia filled the forest with smoke and serpent-fire so that nobody could see what they were fighting; the Ashen Serpent put out tendrils of black flame; the Sunfang fought like the animals their enemies had always called them. Merynia's fractured Radiance cut lanes through the smoke. Ray's Demon Fire burned against shadowflame that nothing else would touch.
The Creed was thrown back. The Amber Tree still stands.
Someone observed the whole engagement and intervened in none of it.
What concerned him was not whether the Creed took the Heart. It was something else entirely, kept a very long way from Sunspire, which he believed he might one day need the Ashen Serpent's strength to control.
The Tribe does not know this. Very few people do.