House Beautero

House Beautero rule Blossom Reach, a town in the Thundering Flats. Their banner is a damask pattern in the color of a damask rose, with a sigil of a circle made of lapsing blue waves. The Beautero Houe is unique amongst Houses of the Iron Empire, as they are old as House Glore itself, tracing their lineage back to a tribe during the Blood Age. Through a long, twisting history, the Beautero tribe survived to the modern day, albeit much diminished from what they once were. Now, they only hold one town, but it is the central port of the West, what the Radiant Lance and Duskport are for the East is what Blossom Reach fulfills on the other side of the Iron Empire. The seas much more violent and hard to traverse away from the coast, but the western coast is used for safer shipping of goods and travel that has allowed some of the most distant towns in the Thundering Flats to flourish, such as Blossom Reach, Rumblehood, Banes, and Redburn.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Lord Gaul Beautero, Lord of Blossom Reach. Gaul is heirless, his two sons slain by Lost, and his wife lost to disease. He refuses to marry, and allows the procession to pass through his sister's children, the offspring of the Wartide and Seaspark. Gaul is an old man, barely clinging to life.

• Lady Beatrix Beautero, Lady of Blossom Reach. Wife to Lord Gaul. Deceased. Mother of Anthoine and Talebot Beautero.
• Anthoine Beautero, deceased son of Gaul and Beatrix. Prior heir to the House.
• Talebot Beautero, deceased son of Gaul and Beatrix. Prior heir to the House.

Lady Loriath Beautero, younger sister to Gaul. She is the mother of Caldus and Santori Beautero, and Loriath took both the Wartide and Seaspark as lovers. Lady Loriath is likewise very old, and considered senile by most.

• Sir Caldus Beautero, heir to Blossom Reach and son of Sir Portar, the Wartide's Bastard, the ex-husband to Loriath Beautero and bastard son of the Wartide. Caldus was taken in by the Beautero House for being a bastard.
• Meisent Beautero, wife to Sir Caldus Beautero. Lady Meisent is a noble from Redburn, of House Kilrich.
• Lady Santori Beautero, half-sister to Caldus and daughter of Sir Corren, the Seaspark's Bastard, the other ex-husband to Loriath Beautero and bastard son of the Seaspark. Santori was also taken in by the Beautero House for being a bastard.
• Ir Farald Tarbor, husband to Lady Santori Beautero.
• Sir Caldus has not yet had a child, but many rumor that the newborn babe of Lady Santori is not Ir Farald's, but is Caldus'. The two have been inseperable since birth, the opposite of their fathers and their fathers before them. Ur Naria Beautero/Tarbor, daughter of Ir Farald and Lady Santori (rumored that the real father is Sir Caldus).

Reach Witness Aethelfin. A second cousin of the Beautero House. Sir Leopald Beautero. Brother of Reach Witness Aethelfin. Married to Seliah Stawnesh/Beautero. Together they have three children: Lunete, Deni, and Raoul Beautero.

Culture

Due to Beautero's origin as a unique Blood Tribe, they are vastly culturally different to the other Houses of the Iron Empire, who stem from the Sacrim tribe. The customs of the Sacrim tribe have continued and spread across the entire Empire, but many old Beautero customs have held strong in the Blossom Reach. One such example is that the Beautero celebrate bastards. They do not discriminate against children born of an unmarried couple, and hold them equal to those born of an otherwise 'holy' matrimony. Many past Beautero nobles have been bastards, who would have been ostracized elsewhere in the Empire. This is the reason that the children of the Wartide and Seaspark's bastards were welcomed into the Beautero House as full nobility.
What Beautero is best known for is wine. They created wine, the name originating from the Beauteran (a very similar dialect for Old Sacrim) word for a grapevine, simplified over the ages from Vinum, ending with Wine. In Blossom Reach, dark grapes of red, dark red, and black. They use these rich fruits to create a variety of wines that have been perfected over the centuries that is seen as the elegant drink-of-choice for nobles, out of the reach of the commonfolk.
Blossom Wines – from Blossom Reach, House Beautero's largest export. This is an umbrella term that can be categorized by two main types of wine made in Blossom Reach.

• Blossom Red – a dark red wine. Blossom Red is a full red, containing the highest amount of alcohol and considered to have the richest flavor. House Beautero occasionally makes medium or lighter red wine, but they believe that Blossom Red is the best way to drink wine. The lighter the red, the lower alcohol content and less rich of a taste.
• Mulled Damask – a light red wine the color of Beautero’s damask banner, based off the color of the Reach and the Damask Roses that blossom all throughout Beautero's land. Mulled Damask is more pink in color, and is heated with fruit and spices. The denizens of Blossom Reach tend towards Blossom Red for themselves, while Mulled Damask remains a huge export for the rest of the Empire who favor its sweeter taste.

Beautero dominates the wine market, but House Stawnesh of Deva have entered the race, trying to create something new to contend with Blossom Wines. They created the Deva White. They utilized different grapes found in Deva, white/green grapes. The vast majority still hold Blossom wines as superior, but it has forced Beautero to innovate and create new and even better wines recently. House Beautero is also closely allied with House Kilrich of Redburn. Beautero ships base wine up to Redburn along the western coast, which the winemakers of Redburn use to create Brandy after aging the base wine in wooden casks during the journey. This brandy is usually had as an after-dinner digestif. This is known as Redburn Brandy. 
Also allied with the Beautero House are The Witnesses, who see the Reach as a holy site. Many unique rituals and sacrifices of note are done on or near the Reach.  Almost all trade to and from Blossom Reach is done by sea, to avoid the bandit Aslani in the mountains.

History

The Blood Tribes

The Beautero tribe is one of the few tribes that has survived to the modern day, with their history and name intact. This faction occupied half of the Thundering Flats during The Blood Age, and constantly warred with the Aslani tribe. Beautero lived along the Western coast, and the Aslani were of the East. Both fought in the sprawling plains of the flats, and between the hills and mountains that dotted it. At this time, the Flats were not beset by constant storms and were just slightly more stormy than other areas. Burnstorms only occured once every 100 years as well, so the Flats were a much more hospitable place. Beautero were slightly darker-skinned than those of the north, but were still white-skinned. They were one of the first to start using gold as ornamentation, as ancient tapestries in the Blossom Reach show.
Beautero possessed some bronze weapons through trades with the Taldonians, pieces of golden armor such as conical helms, and druidic magic. Druids within Beautero culture were religious leaders, as the Beautero tribe held religion and leadership as one in the same. Druids, like their tribesmen, were pagans, who held and organized divinations, sacrifices, and communions. The Beautero tribe worshipped the land and nature itself, believing that everything was intertwined. That there were no Gods other than what they could see. The druids were their connection to nature itself, and they had to appease the land by spilling blood. Over the centuries, as the Storm Age progressed, the bloody aspects of druidism faded and were replaced with more humane affects. But during the Blood Age, the Beautero tribe spilled the blood of their enemies not just in defense, but in ritual. They would coat themselves in blood, drink from bowels, scream into the wilderness, trying to draw themselves closer to nature. But that was not all the Druids could do. If history is to believed, the druids could call upon elemental powers of pure nature. Historians believe this was a rudimentary, but safer, version of Soulomancy similar to what the Soleri tribesmen use. They could not create large effects, but it became clear that the druids of Beautero could divine prophecies, and foresee horrible events to come. Similar to how Priscilla Glore foresees the future in her work Soulweavers of the Oracle's Prophecy.
Unfortunately, the Druids were powerless against the overwhelming political might of the Iron Empire. When pilgrims from Iron appeared from the north, they saw the thunderous fighting between the Beautero and Aslani and decided to aid the Beautero. To them, the Aslani were dark-skinned and wild, while the Beautero were similar to the Sacrim tribe they originated from. The Ironers aided Beautero in military might, fighting the Aslani, in return for land. Slowly and surely, the Ironers gave their swords to Beautero and used miscommunication through translation to take more and more land from the Beautero tribe. Beneath their very noses, they started to settle in the Thundering Flats in land that Beautero thought still belonged to them. Over time, slowly, the Beautero tribe would shrink. Pushed back to the western corner of the Empire, by the time of The Ivory Age, Beautero would be given the title of a noble House through integrations with House Glore, and would rule over Blossom Reach, the last remaining land from their time during the Blood Age.
Aslani - This tribe is the antithesis of Beautero. Expert riders, the Aslani are known for the Aslani breed of horse as well. This horse is well-adapted to steep mountains and sheer cliffs from their time during the Blood Age. The Aslani tribesmen lived in mountains and hills that, during the Blood Age, were much taller and sharper in the past. Now, these same mountains have been battered and beaten down by constant supernatural storms to become rolling hills or flatlands of the Thundering Flats. During the Blood Age, the many mountains were the Aslani's best ally. They used their natural terrain to their advantage during the constant battles of this Age, riding their shorter, rotund horses adept at scaling stones. The Aslani themselves were, like their horses, shorter than the average of the time, some stocky, and some lithe and limber. They had an olive complexion, much darker than most of the other tribes, and thick, curly black hair. The men of the Aslani kept their beards long, and the women their hair long. The Aslani are now known to be one of the first peoples to utilize the creation of jewelry. They would adorn their bodies with piercings, and common among them were nose and ear piercings on men and women alike. They would also wear the smithed items of those they killed, particularly the Beautero tribe, as a sign of prowess, but this changed over the years to resemble larger pieces of jewelry made from the smelted bronze.

Blossom Reach

The original home of the Beautero tribe, and now their only land. Blossom Reach is actually a massive swath of land sheltered from the worst of the infamous storms of the Thundering Flats. This is because of the ring of mountains that seperate the land from the rest of the Flats, the Aslani mountains. It is within these stunted mountains that the surviving Aslani tribe remain. The land on the western side of the Aslani mountains is rich with grapevines, the unique circumstances those fragile plants need to grow met within the sheltered Reach. This allowed the Beautero's to create the first variations of wine within the Iron Kingdom. In the Old Iron Kingdom, they had a type of fermented ale made from what little they had, but the creation of wine would take the Empire by storm. It occurred between the Southern Exodus and subsequent abandonment of the South, and the re-settling of the Flats years later in the year of 344AW. 
House Beautero did not miss this opportunity. Over the years during Lucianus' rule as the Failed King, Beautero focused on perfecting their craft, and it now shows. They are known as masters of wine. That the best, and only consumable, wine comes from Blossom Reach is what it is mostly known for in the modern day of the Empire. But this was not always the case. Blossom Reach was once a war-like stronghold with no room for vineyards. The tribespeople utilized the 'fingers' of holy rock that reach out of the water in a cluster off the coast of Blossom Reach as military advantages, retreating to their tops when raided and raining fire down on their enemies from above. These finger-like pillars the color of the damask rose appear so supernatural in nature, that the people of Blossom Reach look at them with apprehension. They are rumored to be the fossilized fingers of an ancient giant, or the remnant bones of a creature of rock.
The clusters of obelisks look like a gargantuan hand reaching skyward from the depths of the ocean, with the fingers breaking the surface, so the denizens named it the Reach. The entire area took the name: the Reach, until the Blood Age subsided and the people found a tenuous peace. The grapevines of the Reach blossomed, and the land became known as Blossom Reach. Now the Reach is a place of holy worship, the religion of The Iron Creed taking over past beliefs around what the Reach was, and that the Reach is a place close to Ethos, close to the Gods and the Burn, for why else would it reach towards Heaven? The Reach directs our attention towards the Burn, where our future is, and serves as a sign of God of where to aim.

The Vines Run Red

Sir Gaul Beautero, Lord of Blossom Reach

Type

Political, Family

Leader

Gaul Beautero

Leader Title

Lord

Parent Organization

Iron Empire

Location

Blossom Reach