The Sifters of the Ashes
The Rakers of the Coals
This group of Doomguard recruits its members from the Regulators fraction and is focused on Entropy on the Inner Planes. Based out of the Crumbling Citadel on the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Ash, the Sifters spend their days searching the plane for useful items. They believe that Elemental Fire is the means by which the multiverse will succumb to Entropy. As Fire burns away reality, Ash is what is left behind as a physical representation of decay and destruction.
However, as Regulators, they believe that only natural fire should be allowed to destroy the multiverse. Those blazes that have been set on purpose (whether it be by arson or collateral damage from spells) only serve to accelerate the pace of Entropy, and thus disturb the natural order of things. By searching through the plains of Ash, they hope to find the remains of items that have not been fully consumed by Fire. Once found, they seek to determine what kind of Fire destroyed it, and then restore the object if it was not consumed by natural means.
Despite the seeming futility of their quest, the Sifters have at least been proven to be correct in that items consumed by Fire do, at least occasionally, end up in Ash. These factioneers manage to recover a steady, but small, stream of gems and precious metals. The other materials found by this group also serve as a source of income – many of them are sold as portal keys or ingredients for magical potions and inks.
Source: Ken Lipka
In the Wake of Destruction
The quasi-elemental plane of Ash, perhaps one of the harshest and at the same time most beautiful planes of existence. This is the plane that symbolises what is left in the wake of destruction, nothing but ashes it is from this plane where we call our home from the Crumbling Citadel.
You see the path of consumption has left behind many things of use to us, from the result of consumption we can see straight into the past of what once was and will never be again. The Ash holds many of the secrets of the multiverse, and so we are here to learn of them.
Perhaps a most interesting specimen of what once was, was this small discovery made a few movements of the cinders past. A cloud of ancient ashes that were caught on a net was determined to be one of something that once lived. It is rare that we find such a specimen, so looking back through out the ages gone past we tried to determine its ancient history.
We learned that it lived here alone long ago, isolated from the rest of its kind. Perhaps it was exiled or maybe here of its own choosing in what was at the time a plane of burning embers. It called this plane its home for years before its isolation got the best of it. So it felt that it needed company, it needed followers to serve it. It travelled some of the planes until it discovered people that would serve it. These people came from the Plane of Negative Energy, souls of a long dead race not content to spend their existence in the plane of all consuming eternal oblivion.
Together it along with its followers laboured for years and toiled to create a place of their own inside very heart of the Empty Winter. What was constructed was that of a great citadel, one that they could call their home. And for aeons they lived, until a powerful force came from a place that lay far away from here as far as these planes of substance goes. Their appearance commanded a strangely powerful presence, as our specimen’s followers could do nothing but watch in all as they were all annihilated by a power that none of them could even hope of matching. It was the sharp chilling bite of cold that all of its followers fell to, and as they destroyed more and more of its followers the embers of the plane began to die out slowly. In the ages to come those dying embers failed to give heat and turned this plane into one of dying heat. It seems that these massive beings of power were here to seek out our specimen indeed, they asked it a question and it answered in silence. Soon what followed was consumption in flames that carried the chilling power of the cold.
It took us a while to learn of that secret and it took all of our best to pull together this story. This has left us with the knowledge of how this plane once was. A sign that entropy even started long before. As for the citadel, in our vision it was never destroyed by the outsiders that came, perhaps even we have seen it and called it our home once.
—Wreik, Sifter of the Doomguard
[Author’s Comments: What this is supposed to suggest is that at one time the quasi-elemental plane of ash was warm, an ancient being travelled here gathered another ancient race from the negative energy plane and built a citadel later to be known as Cavitus. The ancient beings where eventually eliminated by the sleeping ones that are supposedly found on the para-elemental plane of ice, the ancient being might have been a sleeping one too.]
Source: Jason Ng