Long ago, in a time remembered only by the oldest of gods and the most faded memories of the eldest of the Dragon Kings, Creation was wilder and more unruly than in any time since. Even the terrors of the Contagion cannot match the sheer savagery of that time, when the world still shuddered in the throes of its own birth: mountains grew and fell, water and ice carved their tracks across the land, and the gods and behemoths that served the primordials did battle with those mightiest of the Fair Folk who raged against this interloping speck of reality in their midst.

Without humanity to hold back the shores of the Wyld with the weight of their belief and memory, the Dragon Kings who dwelt in each of the four directions turned to their vegetative technology as a ward against the encroachment of relentless potentiality. Eventually, they developed a magical plant, its name now forgotten even by savants and referred to by only as the Tree of Broken Swords.

There are four variant of the tree, one for each of the four elemental poles. ,The southern tree is large and broad, with huge roots, a colossally thick trunk and an incongruously thin canopy of leaves above; its northern counterpart is almost the opposite, thin and tall and wrapped in a dense, spiky mass of thin needles. The eastern tree is a curious combination of willow and vine, with long, flexible branches that extend out to crawl, ivy-like through the branches of other trees; finally, the western tree is most akin to the waving palms, a curved trunk that stoops out over the water, its long leaves dangling down to just above the waves. But one trait is shared in common by all variants; for any living Tree of Broken Swords is strewn around the base of its trunk with the broken, rusted remnants of steel and iron objects.

This is because the trees, in order to live and function, must draw iron up through their roots, incorporating it into their timber. So long as the tree is alive, the Wyld cannot come within the area through which its roots or branches extend; neither can the Fair Folk stand the presence of the plant.

There are few Trees known now to remain in Creation; the private gardens of privileged gods and Exalts contain a few, while a small number exist wild over natural veins of iron ore; the Dragon Kings had no other use for iron, and in their time there existed whole forests of the magical tree, but humanity requires the metal too much for its own purposes, and nor would they be so inclined to consider it a wise investment when it takes many of their lifetimes for one seed to grow and spread into a forest large enough to protect even a small settlement. But now the Scarlet Empress is gone, and the unknown engines of the Imperial Manse lie silent, Creation may need all the defense against the Fae that it can muster.