[This is an old event post, refer to Updates #7 for why these are out of
order]

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.

Penned by My hand on the 3rd of Juliary, in the year 747 CE.

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