The Continent · A Company of the Cast-Off
The Band of Exiles
“The ones nobody else would keep — keeping each other.”
The Band of Exiles · A Court of Frost and Starlight
The ones nobody else would keep — keeping each other.
A misfit company on the Continent: a cursed queen, an exiled emissary, and a resurrected human commander, gathered against the deathless thing in the lake. Not a court. Not a kingdom. A fire with people around it.
At a glance
The shape of the band.
The company · Cast-off and kept
Made of who was left over.
After the war with Hybern, three figures with nowhere quite to belong fall into orbit around one another on the Continent. Vassa — a mortal queen cursed by Koschei to live as a firebird by day, a woman only by night, tethered to his lake. Jurian — the ancient human commander resurrected from the eye Amarantha kept of him, alive again in a body that should be long dead. And Lucien Vanserra, Tamlin's former emissary, a son with no court that wants him and a mate he will not press. None of them quite fits anywhere. So they fit together.
The cause · Against the deathless
A war that didn't end when the war ended.
Their work is the slower, stranger fight the great courts of Prythian largely turn from: the human realm's survival, the scheming of the mortal queens, and above all the threat of Koschei — the deathless sorcerer who holds Vassa's curse. Lucien moves between this band and the Night Court as a thread of intelligence and trust, one of the few faces welcome on both sides of the sea.
The feeling · Found family
Defiance with a hearth in the middle.
What makes them a band rather than a list of names is the warmth. They tease, they bristle, they cover for one another. Lucien — who has spent his life being the least-wanted son in a court of cruelty — finds, among the exiles, something close to ease. It is not a grand alliance with banners and oaths. It is the particular gold of people who have all been thrown away learning that they can choose, instead, to be each other's.
What holds them
The ties of the cast-off.
Each other
None of them has a court that wants them — so the band becomes the belonging.
The mortal cause
They fight for the human realm and its queens when the great Fae courts look away.
Defiance
Bound less by duty than by the shared refusal to be discarded quietly.
The band itself
Who you'll find around the fire.
Continue
Lucien Vanserra →The least-wanted son who found, among the exiles, the first thing close to home.
Vassa → Jurian → Koschei →