They ride out when the sun goes down, and they bring everyone home by dawn.
The Guardians of the Sunstone are a chivalric defensive order of the Kingdom of Aermond, sworn to keep the realm connected and its people safe through the night. Their membership is drawn from adventurers of every discipline: warriors, mages, scouts, healers, and specialists of all kinds, united by a common oath rather than a shared martial tradition. Every member holds the title of Guardian regardless of background or skill set. Together they form one of the most respected institutions in Aermond, quietly essential to a kingdom whose plains become impassable at dusk.
Mandate
The need that gave rise to the Guardians is unique to Aermond’s geography and history. When darkness falls across the haunted plains, the fallen of ancient wars stir and refight their endless battles across the open ground, blocking the roads and making travel between settlements perilous to the point of impossibility. Ordinary travel ceases at dusk. Commerce, correspondence, and emergency supply all grind to a halt unless something crosses the plain above it.
The Guardians are that something. Mounted on enchanted carpets and winged mounts consistent with Aermond's tradition of winged cavalry, they take to the air each night and maintain the connections the kingdom cannot afford to lose. Their most recognized duties include escorting the medicinal shipments of Aermond’s Twilight Herbary from their source to the settlements that depend on them, carrying the crown’s correspondence across distances that daylight alone could not bridge in time, and retrieving stranded travelers before dawn closes the window for safe return. The ordinary people of Aermond rarely witness this work directly; it happens in the dark, above the plain, and is over before sunrise. The order’s presence is felt more in what does not go wrong than in any visible act of heroism.
The oath every Guardian swears at induction captures their purpose in three lines:
Carry the light. Bring everyone home. Be brave for those who cannot.
The Sunstone
The order takes its name from sunstone, a golden stone quarried from Jolneau Rise and best known as the material from which the Sunstone Palace was built. Sunstone holds captured daylight within its structure, and in sufficient concentration it produces a warm glow that is, in the words sometimes heard in Aermond, able to “pierce the twilight.” The crucial property that makes sunstone central to the Guardians’ work is its effect on the risen dead: the fallen of old wars that haunt the plain at night cannot perceive anything wrapped in the light of true sunstone. A Guardian carrying a lit shard can move through even the densest concentration of the restless dead without drawing their attention.
Each Guardian carries one or more shards as standard equipment. Upon completing the induction oath, a new member receives their own sunstone shard, a practice that functions as both a practical necessity and a rite of passage. The stones are neither ornamental nor symbolic in isolation; they are working tools, maintained and carried throughout active service. Exactly how the Guardians’ supply of sunstone shards is sourced, cut, and prepared is managed through channels connected to the crown, though the details of that supply chain are not widely discussed.
Organization
The internal structure of the Guardians is intentionally flat. All members share the rank of Guardian, and the order’s deliberate openness to adventurers of any discipline means it encompasses a wider range of abilities than a conventional military unit. Field patrols are led by Sergeants, experienced Guardians trusted to make operational decisions in the air over hostile ground. No single commander’s name is publicly associated with the order’s leadership, and the Guardians conduct their affairs with a discretion that extends to their own hierarchy.
The order is small relative to the scale of the threat it manages. That smallness is understood within Aermond not as a weakness but as a reflection of what the work requires: the plains cannot be pacified, only navigated, and the Guardians are chosen for their ability to navigate it with speed, judgment, and the particular courage that comes from doing dangerous work without an audience.
Relationship to the Crown
The Guardians serve the Aermond Royal Family directly and operate under the authority of King Alaric. The order’s charter is royal rather than ecclesiastical or civic, which places the Guardians firmly within the crown’s chain of command while keeping them distinct from the kingdom’s standing military forces. Their work is, in effect, an extension of the crown’s obligation to connect and protect the realm, performed by a specialized body capable of operating under conditions no conventional force could sustain.
The Sunstone Palace itself, built from the same quarried stone the Guardians carry in their pockets, stands as an implicit symbol of the relationship: the same material that keeps the royal seat warm and luminous also keeps the kingdom’s roads open after dark. The Guardians are rarely named in official proclamations and do not seek public ceremony. Their reputation in Aermond is nonetheless substantial, built not through display but through decades of reliable, thankless work conducted in the hours when everyone else has gone inside.