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The Cursed Blue Rose
The Sunfang are the only people in the world who became something else and lost nothing in the exchange.
They were human: hunters and keepers of Sunspire Forest, on the far landmass of Thirvandor, dwelling in the woods long before the Infernal Creed had a name. Their whole culture was bound to the Ruby's flame — not as worshippers at a distance but as the people who lived where the fire actually was.
When the Creed came for the Ruby Heart with the demons of Azcaloth at its back, the Ruby of the Wilds spent her own existence to stop them. What was left of her did not disperse. It went into the people who had kept her forest, and it changed their bodies.
It changed nothing else. They kept the name Sunfang. They kept their language, their customs, their families and their charge. To this day the Tribe regards the transformation not as a curse or a blessing but as an inheritance: the last thing their patron had left, handed to the only people who would use it properly.
They are stronger, they heal faster, and they live a great deal longer than they used to. The bond to the forest that was already the centre of their culture became a physical fact — Sunfang do not get lost in Sunspire, and Sunspire does not turn them at its border the way it turns everyone else.
They are werewolves in the plain sense of the word and in no other sense that outsiders expect. Nothing about them answers to the moon. Whatever made them came out of creation-fire, and so the Tribe gathers by daylight: its rites, its judgements, its huntings and its namings all happen under the sun, and a Sunfang asked why will look at the questioner as though the answer were embarrassingly obvious.
The Tribe is small, and it is not a nation. It has no city and does not want one. It keeps the forest's paths, its wards and its dead, and it treats the Amber Tree at the centre as the one thing in the world it would spend all of itself to defend — which, at the Battle of Sunspire, it very nearly did.
They are not isolationists by conviction so much as by long experience. Almost everyone who has ever come looking for them came looking for what they guard. In the age of the Blue Rose, for the first time in their recorded history, someone arrived who was not after the Heart, and the Tribe made an alliance for the first time in its life.
It has not forgotten that either.
One child of the Ruby of the Wilds was born among them and did not stay: Torvan, who lived through his mother's sacrifice, watched the Tribe change, and left with those the change had not touched.
The Sunfang do not curse his name. They call him the Lost Son of the Ruby, tell his story to children, and are noticeably careful to say that going is not the same as abandoning. Whether they are being generous or whether they know something is a question outsiders have never got a straight answer to.