The fire bender raiders that killed Hunk’s family are called the ‘Ashen Ones’. They are wild bandits, bearing nothing but breeches, fearsome Ram Horses, and the loot that they take from their victims, to devour or sell. They are all fire benders, for when a babe is born among them, before anything else, like dropping it into its Ashen mother’s arms, it’s thrown into a roaring fire. Most get eaten by the flames, but the strong benders, the most useful ones, make frail attempts to fight back. And those, the Ashen Ones save.
In an age of machine and metal, these ones turn their back on all that, reach back into primal, brutal roots, and channel them into a wave of destruction so fine, so great, that in some parts, their names can only be hushed. When their settlements, made out of bone and charcoal, run out of food and funds, they send a raid. A raid to some other village, or some other nomadic people, and they take everything they can. Food, pots, pets, coin, carpets, bags, jewellery, anything small enough that they can drag away on their beasts, and things that are not human.
For all that is human, they slaughter, they burn to charred flesh and stinking cinders, save for one child. A child with two parents, old enough to remember, but young enough to fear them like an animal. A child that will continue tales of how powerful they are, how unstoppable, to spread their word, all to quake the boots of the pot bellied city industrialists who’ve retreated away from their natures.
The Ashen Ones detest modernity, detest morality, and adore depravity to the point where, in many ways, they are human no longer.