Enciphered Maintenance Reports

The custodians were not, at first, a cause for alarm.

From the 14th of Shanthin in the year 681 after the Coming of Estarra, they were found collapsed across the Basin of Life – in the tidal shallows of the Inner Sea, upon the Great Southern Highway near Stewartsville, along the Shallach River, high in the Southern Mountains, and in many of the quieter and less-traveled corners of the world. Elegantly dressed and blank of face beneath shattered masks, they were much like the one first encountered in the Aegis of Vestera a few years prior.

Their bodies dissolved into sheer essence licked by flame before most who passed them thought to look twice. Some walked past. Some looked and walked on regardless. For a time it seemed the custodians would vanish entirely unexamined, their errand – whatever it was – lost.

On the 15th of Shanthin, a piece of paper was retrieved. Aerys Tarsuhl of Hallifax came upon a custodian and was swift enough to find a note tucked within its clothing before the body dissolved. The note was encoded and difficult to read, and she did not yet know what to do with it.

Eventually, as winter progressed, an alive but panicked custodian arrived at the pilgrim camp and collapsed at Pachidrui Etloo’s feet, clutching its own head in despair before going still. Another one, spotted in the chaos, ran off before anyone could follow. By then Pachidrui was already calling for help, and the first to respond was Valinea of Serenwilde, soon joined by Wyrden Haruspex Esei Shee-Slaugh of Glomdoring, Huskii Myeras of Serenwilde, and Qoivhae Vivalde of New Celest.

Pachidrui described the custodian as having looked as though it was fleeing something. Those gathered turned their attention to the body while it remained, and Valinea found a scrap of paper tucked within its clothing. Encoded and damaged, it was illegible at first glance. They were still puzzling over it when the body dissolved. Nevertheless, Valinea had committed enough of it to memory.

The group spread out to search for more, Esei taking point and leading the expedition high and low across the Basin. Eventually they found another custodian in the Toronada Tidal Flats, first discovered by Tonatiuh al-Saaoud of Gaudiguch. Then Valinea came upon another one in the Inner Sea – and this time she was quick enough to retrieve the paper before the body vanished. Though it was riddled with gaps where letters had been obscured, the paper was nonetheless brought back to the Fellowship of the Roots at once.

The Fellowship of the Roots had been piecing together troubling signs for some time. Under the leadership of Nimuire Duskbloom, and with Naesan Sweetfur at the heart of the dreamweaving effort, they had tracked and studied the worsening of the Dreaming, followed manipulated dreams across the Basin, rescued Naesan from the nightmares of the Emerald Enclave, and navigated the rising tensions around the Eater of Flesh and Earth in the Gaaglin Swamp. Now, with custodians turning up dead across the world and carrying coded messages, there was a new urgency to their deliberations.

Naesan encouraged the Fellowship to gather every paper they could find, and so the search intensified across the days that followed. Valinea, Huskii, Esei, Qoivhae, Tikki of Hallifax, Ferelith and Anorak of Glomdoring, Arix Mes’ard and Chundae al-Saaoud of Gaudiguch, and finally Kistan n’Kylbar of Magnagora all joined the effort, fanning out from the Arysian Isles to the Snow Valley, from the Skarch Desert to the roads in the shadow of Avechna’s Peak. They encountered more bodies of the mysterious custodians and upon each they found a paper in the same cipher but the messages themselves varied.

Back at the Fellowship’s outpost in the Grey Moors, Valinea led the effort to decipher the messages with contributions from Huskii, Tikki, Kistan, Esei, and Anorak. The cipher was a rotation – the precise degree of shift worked out through careful attention to word length and repeated patterns. The second word of one message, they determined, was almost certainly “Report”, an anchor that opened the door to the rest of the mystery. Working outward from there, Valinea announced the first real breakthrough: the opening word was “Containment”.

Over the course of several long Roarkian days, the assembled papers and the Fellowship’s collective effort yielded many discoveries. It was determined that the numbers opening each message were likely dates or filing codes – the group could not be certain – though the number 594 drew attention, corresponding as it did to the year associated with the Awakening of Sister Sea.

What was being contained? By whom, and where? And why were these maintenance reports turning up in the hands of dead constructs scattered across the world? Valinea observed that the sequence told a story: containment had held, then required action, then was breached, then had its directives recursively expanded, and then – at some later point – was confirmed stable again. They could not be sure of the chronology due to missing message pieces but that already was worrying enough.

The Fellowship debated for hours on end, with Esei raising the possibility that the custodians were never meant for them at all but that some delivery had been disrupted and the Basin had only happened upon the evidence. Anorak wondered if the papers were the last logs of some aethership vessel. Arix noted that one of the messages sounded as if it concerned the cloier – the one made famous not long before by the Paavik Massacre. Naesan, listening throughout, reminded the Fellowship that something was very wrong in the Dreaming, and that these papers seemed to confirm it even if the specifics remained beyond their grasp.

Though the fellows went without sleep a good long while, it was not just them who started to notice a new heaviness to the hours between dusk and dawn – sleep coming earlier and more insistently than usual, not sparing even those whose strength would ordinarily keep such fatigue at bay. Naesan attributed it at first to the stress of recent events catching up with him but the heaviness would prove harder to dismiss as the days went on.