Legacy of the Tyrant (TWS)

You're Agatha Skiff-Millicent. You are an accredited baker, your main contract being catering for the Fourth-and-Ninth Orphanarium, largest in the region. You rescue as many children as you can manage, which isn't a lot at any given time with your own meagre quarters, but are the proud mother to over a dozen bakers, charcutiers, and other hardworking individuals in the region's food services.

You've no connections to your alleged inheritance - House Cecropia, the Resonant Line. All you know is what you've been told in scattershot, less-than-comprehensive snippets of a whole - an alliance of artisans, bearing lucrative enough goods to fund formidable armies. They called the Spires, a mountainous cloud-forest region replete with plateaus home - banking on neutrality, hard-to-navigate terrain, and the value in scarcity of their esoteric crafts to spare them the Empire's advances.

House Cecropia supposedly commanded a valley, coaxing silk from barely-domesticated stygian beasts and working closely with sister houses to produce instruments, fine bows, and luxurious textiles. While government was conducted with representatives from all Houses, and the Warmaster and the Wordsmith (the military and diplomatic heads of the combined Houses, respectively) positions were rotated via election between Houses, Cecropia's favoured position among a range of Houses earnt it a lot of time in the spotlight of leadership.

The original forest might only survive in the most isolated valleys, but Cecropia's lifeblood - starling-spiders, are still alive. Perhaps not in the capacity envisioned by your ancestors, but alive in the industrial centres of the Tyrant's empire.