The Huli Jing

A grim warrior-sorcerer lineage whose name is spoken with hushed dread across Everdew. Battle-hardened ascetics and master planar wardens, nine-tailed, armoured in lacquered lamellar and midnight silk behind carved wooden spirit-visors.

They hold the Gates — the ancient arches on the island's storm-blasted spine that open onto somewhere else — and they hold them alone.

The Watch

The Netherkin come through the arches. Not constantly, and not predictably, and that is the difficulty: the watch cannot be relaxed and cannot be reinforced, because there is nobody else in Everdew trained to fight what comes out.

They wage that border war with cold precision, curved non-ferrous talons and destructive spirit-flame, and they have never lost an arch. What that has cost is not published, and the population figure above is an estimate made by someone else.

The Renunciation

The Huli Jing abandoned all pastoral and courtly luxury generations ago, and the renunciation is total: no property beyond arms and armour, no lineage names, no attendance at court, no marriages outside the order.

A Tenko who takes the Gates is understood to have left the rest of Tenko life behind, and the Kumiho — who supply a steady trickle of recruits from among their most dangerous young — treat the departure as a bereavement and a promotion at once.

Ways

Revered and feared in equal measure, and entirely without patience for the diplomatic games of the Queen's court. They know that if the watch on the high Gates ever falters the garden realm burns, and they are aware that the court does not really believe this.

Their nearest neighbours across the water are the jacks of the Corpselight Fens, who live closer to the arches than any Faerie in the Kingdom does and have views on them that nobody at court has ever solicited. Twice in four centuries a Huli Jing has crossed the water to ask. Neither report survives.