House Vanthew, the Blackglass Court

For most of its life, House Vanthew was a minor border dynasty known for funeral rights and bitter endurance. Their rise began when Seraphine Vanthew converted grief into power, creating a house that offered shelter to the unwanted and leverage over the desperate. Over the next century, the family became indispensable to the kingdom by controlling burial contracts, inheritance arbitration, and the discreet transport of sensitive goods through coffin caravans and mourning processions. Their wealth grew, but so did the rot beneath the marble. The family survived a devastating fire known as the Candlefall, when the original ancestral wing burned and fifteen relatives supposedly died in one night. In the ashes, the house emerged more secretive, more paranoid, and more interconnected with the dead than with the living. The defining watershed moment came during the Night of a Thousand Seals, when House Vanthew produced evidence that saved the crown from a treasonous coalition, but only after selectively destroying documents that would have incriminated their own branch. Since then, they have been treated as loyal, unsettling, and indispensable. They have kept that reputation by ensuring that every major political scandal in the kingdom eventually passes through their hands, their vaults, or their cemetery gates.