The Sweetkeepers
The Sweetkeepers are a charming yet surprisingly essential guild in the Lilted Vale, dedicated to the cultivation, crafting, and magical infusion of confections, honeys, preserves, and candied herbs. In a land where flowers sing and nectar sometimes hums with latent spells, the Sweetkeepers blend culinary mastery with gentle enchantment, providing the Vale’s villages and visiting travelers with treats that delight the senses — and often carry subtle protective or mood-lifting charms.
They are known for their intricate market stalls draped in ivy and lanterns, where jars of swirling pastel nectar seem almost alive, and for their annual Festival of Sugared Blossoms, which draws folk from across Mythralune.
Structure
- The Gilded Thistle — The warm, often rotund master of the Sweetkeepers, elected by a circle of respected confectioners. Oversees all regional operations, blesses new recipes, and leads seasonal festivals.
- Hivewards & Blossomwrights — Mid-tier artisans who manage groves of sugar-blooms, oversee hives of magically attuned bees, and experiment with new sweetcraft spells.
- Preservers & Sugarhands — The skilled candy makers, syrup boilers, and nectar infusers who perform the daily art of transforming raw Vale sweetness into delicate wares.
- Saplings (same affectionate term as in other Vale guilds) — Apprentices who learn to gather dew, charm bees, prune sugar-lilies, and chant the low hums that prevent syrups from crystallizing too soon.
Culture
- Core Beliefs: Life’s sweetness is meant to be savored and shared. They see their work as nurturing joy and community connection, using nature’s bounty responsibly to foster harmony and ease sorrows.
- Customs: Many wear garlands woven with tiny sugared flowers or carry little pots of blossom honey to share on impulse. Each morning begins with a ritual tasting of a single new sweet to “start the day in delight.”
- View on outsiders: Generally welcoming, eager to offer samples and stories. However, they are fiercely protective of their bees and secret sweetening runes — thefts are met with both sharp words and quietly invoked hexes that cause thieves’ tongues to taste only bitterness for days..55+
Public Agenda
- Officially: To provide the Vale’s people with nourishment, celebration, and moments of wonder through sweetcraft. They also play a quiet role in ensuring morale, easing disputes with mood-lightening treats.
- Unofficially: To carefully control how much of the Vale’s most potent enchanted nectars and honeys leave the region, safeguarding against overharvest and misuse by greedy foreign merchants.
Assets
- The Honeyvaults: Cool cavern stores where enchanted honeys rest in crystal jars, aging and absorbing slow pulses of ley magic. Some are kept for decades before being deemed ready.
- Orchards & Sugar Groves: Carefully tended plots of flowering trees, giant berry bushes, and creeping nectar vines that yield fruits with faint, calming enchantments.
- Bee Kinships: Colonies of sapient or semi-sapient bees, bred over centuries to respond to sung commands and hum in ritual harmonies that stabilize magic-rich flowers.
- Confectioner’s Archives: Vast recipe books bound in dried blossom vellum, some of which literally whisper suggestions to skilled readers.
History
| Year (VE) | Event |
|---|---|
| 1 VE | The Sweet Keepers are founded by a coalition of independent confectioners, beekeepers, and flowerbinders to prevent ecological collapse from overharvesting by outsiders. |
| 5 VE | Invention of Dreamlace Honey, a calming, magical nectar that gently eases troubled minds into restful dreams. Widely adopted in orphanages and healing glades across the Vale. |
| 8 VE | Creation of candied petal charms that emit low-level protective wards. These are gifted to farmers after a rise in fey trickery and seasonal mischief. |
| 14 VE | In secret collaboration with the Gardeners of Order, the Keepers craft decoy syrup blooms to redirect unstable pollinators during a dangerous bloom surge near Honeyknell Hollow. |
Foreign Relations
- The Lilted Vale’s communities: Deeply beloved — almost every family keeps a small pot of Sweetkeeper jam or honey for special occasions or gentle ailments.
- Gardeners of Order: Trusted partners, often coordinating harvests and pollination schedules to avoid stressing sensitive groves.
- Virellian Merchant Houses: Eager to import Vale honeys and confections, but bound by strict Sweetkeeper quotas. Smuggling does happen, and when caught, the offending merchants often discover their tongues refuse to taste sweetness for months.
Trade & Transport
- Flower Caravans: Decorated carts pulled by docile mossback deer, with enchanted canopy shades that keep delicate jars cool and stable.
- Wisp Trails: For very special deliveries, the Sweetkeepers employ minor spirit contracts to carry sealed parcels along faint ley lines, bypassing physical hazards.
- Market Festivals: Much trade happens through traveling market wagons that host impromptu feasts, with tastings accompanied by minstrels playing gentle floral pipes.
Education
- Flavor Harmonies: Apprentices spend years learning how magic-infused nectars, fruit acids, and crystalized sugars interact not just on the tongue, but with emotional auras.
- Bee Singing: All initiates learn lullabies and hum-patterns to calm enchanted bees, who otherwise might swarm unpredictably in the Vale’s ley-charged air.
- Practical Alchemy: Training includes minor hex-breaking, syrup stabilization spells, and creation of subtle charms woven into sugar strands.
Infrastructure
- The Sweetkeeper Hall: A sprawling lodge with sugar ivy climbing its walls and windows crafted from panes of enchanted sugar glass that never melt or fade.
- Aged Nectar Cellars: Cool, softly glowing caves beneath the Hall where jars are set upon ley-infused shelves of living wood that slowly rotate to evenly distribute magical resonance.
- Festival Fields: Wide meadows set aside for seasonal gatherings, often planted with rotating waves of sunburst blossoms and lantern fungi that bloom on cue with song.
Founding Date
1 VE
Type
Corporation, Food Industry
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