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The Cursed Blue Rose
The Radiant Fairies could mend anything except the thing that was killing them. Their flame saved lives one at a time while their hunters killed them by the score, and against destruction fire a healer's magic is not a defence. They were losing, and they knew the arithmetic of it.
So some of them let go. They stopped holding the flame to its gentler purpose and let it take the shape their grief and fury were already pushing it toward. Their golden fire went dark. Their wings took on crimson and shadow. The songs that had knitted bone became something closer to a low sound in the throat.
They stopped losing almost immediately.
What they hold now is both halves of fire at once — the flame that gives and the flame that takes, in the same hand. It heals or it consumes depending on which they intend, and it burns hotter the angrier and the more grief-stricken its wielder is, which is not a design anyone would have chosen.
They are hard to kill. A Shadowflame Fairy may return once from death, but only in battle and only in a state she does not fully command — stronger, and much closer to losing herself. Some can drain the fallen to heal the living, and every use of it pulls them further from what they were. There is said to be a last resort beyond all of these, a firestorm that answers rage rather than intent, and the Shadowflame Fairies fear it more than their enemies do.
The trouble was not that they won. It was that they did not stop. Captive enemies were killed. Lands merely suspected of sheltering hunters were burned. Threats were dealt with before they became threats.
The Radiant Fairies, watching their own kin do this, called it a betrayal of the thing that made them. Their healers offered one last remedy — a rite meant to give the strayed a way to hold their darkness in balance. Some took it, and are known as the Twilight Fairies, who walk between.
Most refused, and called the offer weakness. They were exiled, and they have been the Shadowflame Fairies ever since.
There is no Shadowflame homeland and no Shadowflame ruler. They are everywhere and they answer to themselves.
Many sell the only skill they have — mercenaries, corruption-hunters, and bounty-takers whom even demon cultists would rather not have on their trail. Some are looking for a way back, and a few of those have found their way to the Emberguard, whose doctrine of fire's two faces is the nearest thing to their own condition that anyone preaches out loud.
And some have gone all the way down. The worst of them have taken service with the Infernate, on the reasoning that if they can only master Demon Fire itself, nothing will ever hunt them again.
The Radiant Fairies still speak of them as lost sisters. Some of them still hope.