The Royal Hunters of the Silvercrest Court

There are many organizations that offer training for aspiring trackers, but few are as respected as the Royal Hunters of the Silvercrest court in the Alderworth Kingdom. The Royal Hunters are more than simple trackers, though; they are the silent blades of the Silvercrest dynasty, a fraternal organization of predators who roam the frontier landscapes between nature and society. Their base, the Hall of the Hunt, hidden in the lands belonging to the Silvercrest outside of Veldonia, is a vast lodge surrounded by training grounds. It is here that beginners are taught that hunting is not a vocation but a sacred compact between human and nature, a requirement of complete command over both.

To become a member of their number, a candidate has to survive first through the Blood Trail, a month-long test where they are left in the wilderness of Ravenscroft with a knife and a lone arrow. Whoever comes back (and most do not) bears the Huntmaster’s brand: a burned stag’s skull on the shoulder. Then, training in earnest starts. Apprentices commit to memory the Book of Tracks, a bound booklet of descriptions of every creature from wolf to wyrm. They learn to move as silent as a ghost, to become a part of landscape so seamlessly that even deer avoid stepping on them, and to set traps using whatever tools and materials they have at hand. By the end of the third year, they are tasked to hunt not beasts, but runaways: heretics, deserters, enemies of the Crown who think that the forest would protect them. It never does. The most notorious graduate of the order, Veyla “The Ghost Stag”, earned her moniker during the Purge of Westhumbria. When a group of nobles revolted against the Silvercrests, she lay in wait among them for eleven months, taking out the plotters individually. No one ever saw her; only a flicker of motion in the shadows before an arrow lodged in their throat. By the end, rebels hanged their own leaders, hoping to pacify the ghost terrorizing them to death. The present Huntmaster, Orrick Duskbane, supposedly keeps a record of each victim killed by his hunters, each name inscribed in iron-gall ink mixed with blood from his first kill.

Although working for the Crown, the Hunters are beholden to only their own codes. They refuse to kill children or pregnant women –less for moral reasons, and more as a consequence of superstition, with tales about a curse from a Wild King, a deep-wood spirit, cast upon those who spill innocent blood. Their loyalty isn’t purchased but earned; when a former Silvercrest king went mad and commissioned a hunt on an entire village, his command disappeared into the wilds for a decade, reappearing after his death only. They now tread along the knife’s edge of being both royal enforcers and folkloric monsters. Peasants make honey and barley offerings to avert their attention at shrines deep in the woods, while nobles tread cautiously, aware that even castle walls would not dissuade a Hunter who has scented his quarry.