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The Cursed Blue Rose
The minotaurs are Beasts in the old sense — sapient natives of Kworgale who were here before the Elehath came, and who survived the Crusades that were mounted to remove them. Survival broke them into pieces. There are plains tribes around Hipalos who trade protection for pasture; there are wild ones in the far north who kept nothing; there are lone wanderers who hire out as mercenaries and smiths and answer to no horn at all.
And there are the Sons of the Black Horn, who took a fortress.
Doosmund is a black fortress-city in the snowy mountains of the deep west, and the minotaurs did not build it. The Elekoi raised it during the First Beast Crusade, as a base from which to hunt them. The minotaurs took it afterwards and never gave it back.
What came with the walls mattered more than the walls. The crusaders left behind advanced Elekoi relic-weaponry, and the Sons of the Black Horn have spent the centuries since salvaging and reforging it. The hunters' own castle and the hunters' own armoury now belong to the hunted, which is a joke the minotaurs are said to enjoy considerably.
The sacred fires inside it have not been allowed to go out.
The strangest thing about Doosmund is that its religion is not led by minotaurs. The Ember Speakers are an order of Elekoi nature-shaman-priestesses, and they lead the faith of a city of Beasts.
They are heretics by the reckoning of every other Elekoi state — they revere the living present world and reject the old star-legacy entirely, and they oppose their own kind on principle. What they worship is the Great Spirit of Fire: the Mother-flame, a primal force of nature and no Elder of anyone's pantheon. Their rites are fire-rites and their rites take blood.
The current Ember Speaker is a pale woman with long raven-black hair and eyes that glow gold — the gold being the mark of a true fire-shaman, and not something that can be faked. She goes barefoot and dressed light, as the fire-aligned do, in warrior-priestess regalia. Hers is the most closely guarded life in Doosmund, and the guard on it is heavier than her office alone would explain.
Doosmund lives on war it is paid for. Its mercenary companies are the chief export, and the open secret of the western trade is that respectable Elekoi states hire Beasts to fight their wars and do not put it in writing. Beyond that there is a black market in relic-arms, a toll on the western passes, and master-work steel that fetches what the smiths ask for it.
None of it is spent on expansion. Every coin goes back into arms, intelligence and the guard around the priestess, and the Sons of the Black Horn have kept it up for generations without moving.
What they are waiting for, they have not said. The mountain people of the west will tell you the peaks themselves are not to be crossed against Doosmund's wishes, and they say it in the tone of people repeating something they were told rather than something they worked out.