The scion of the noble Crosse house of Karthene, Cymbeline Crosse was a Torchbearer of the Council of Commonlight and the descendant of Arch-Magistrate Cecily Crosse. Unlike many of her line who tried to soften or distance the memory of their ancestor, Cymbeline was shaped by the petrified people she grew up among and the Edict of Stillness that kept them there. She devoted her life to historical jurisprudence: identifying the petrified victims of the Stonebinding Scepter, preserving their names, and tracing contradictory archival trails that pre-dated Cecily’s rise.
In time, she became one of the foremost scholars on the legal and political histories surrounding Epochal Artifact. Cymbeline believed that Stonebinder’s origin was not divine sanction, but a political transaction or theft whose details had been deliberately erased. Her appointment as Karthene’s representative to the Council of Commonlight was widely seen as a symbolic reconciliation of Karthene’s past with the League’s present; Cymbeline herself treated it instead as a jurisdiction from which she could force clarity into old lies.
The house of Myrdinn, the greatest and oldest family in Commona, quietly despised this. Cymbeline's continuing research began to implicate early Common League founders in the networks that trafficked forbidden artifacts, and her scholarship on provenance threatened the narrative that the great houses rose purely on legitimacy and merit. This created a bitter rivalry with Iomyna Myrdinn that spanned both the public floor of the Council and the shadow politics beneath it. Iomyna’s vision was of a stable future, guided by the most capable Commoners; Cymbeline’s was that no stability meant anything if it rested on inherited silence.