The Sunheart[edit | edit source]
This story is true.
There was once an Arcadian sidhe who refused to rule. She had many names: the Scarlet Scourge, the Red Widow, and The Hunger of Hearts to name a few. She had not always shunned the leadership the Dreaming sought to impose upon all her kin. She was once the ruler of the Duchy of Sweetest Love, but she abdicated the throne when war with a rival took her lover from her. Her abdication was quite the affair, and not just because she had no heir. At the culmination of her speech proclaiming the uselessness of a title without a darling to call you by name, the sidhe reached into her chest and ripped out her own heart before flinging it skyward where it became a crimson sun. And thus, the lawless Duchy of the Red Sunheart was born.
As for the sidhe, she took to prowling the lands’ borders like a starving Hellhound, giving into the void where her heart had been, and raising tooth and nail against those who attempted to invade the Duchy to restore order. She would tear out their hearts and consume them, thus the name Hunger of Hearts. But one day, or night, or evening—there was no true telling since the red sun in the sky was always burning—the Scarlet Scourge killed a boggan who shielded her sidhe liege by baring her chest so that she might lose her heart instead of him. And she remembered the last words of her love: “Lose not thyself in mine absence, sweeting, for thy heart shall always beat in tune with how I spoke ‘I love you’.” Her despair at having failed her love called the Red Sunheart home to her and, as she held the still beating symbol of her own adoration for the one who was gone, she banished herself. And the Duchy of the Red Sunheart simply ceased to be.