The Lorekeepers

Charge and Origin

The Lorekeepers formed when the first founders of Naath chose the clearing where the ley flows meet. Wardens knew the trails and the threats, merchants knew the weights and the coin, but someone had to read the ground that breathes beneath it all. The first Lorekeepers were recorders of weather, stars, and small signs at shrines. Over time they became judges in matters of magic, witnesses for rites, and stewards of sealed history. Their charge is simple and strict: preserve the memory of the land; keep the rhythm of the ley; stop any working that would endanger the city’s people, water, or trees.

They do not rule the city, yet the city relies on their word. When the Council needs to know if a bridge may cross a rootbed without strain, it asks them. When the Wardens mark a new hazard line and need proof it will hold through the season, they ask them. When the Merchant Guild questions the safety of an imported charm, the Cloister tests it and writes the rule. The Lake-Wardens carry their warnings onto Selenmere and accept their bans without protest. The Seekers bring them fresh maps, odd stones, and reports from the wild and take back measured guidance in return.

The Leyshade Cloister and Its Work

The Lorekeepers live and labor in the Leyshade Cloister, set in a quiet basin of old trees and deeper stone in the city’s southwestern quarter. Its rounded halls are grown rather than built, low to the earth and marked with shifting glyphs that follow the hour. Runnels carry slow water into rootpools where apprentices study and copy. Racks hold bark-slates scored with path signs, star-calendars, and notes on shrines. Vault doors are layered with barkstone, rootglass, and seal resins. A small ring of observatories faces clearings where the canopy opens enough to track the night sky.

Daily practice is steady. At dawn, weather logs and leypole readings are entered. Midday brings the hearing of permits for magical wares and workings—healing fountains, ward-lanterns, purifications, seed rites, and the like. At dusk the Cloister takes petitions: a farmer asking leave to shift a garden wall near a shallow flow; a craftmaster seeking to test a new dye that brightens under rune light; a Seeker captain requesting sealed charts for a run toward the Wyrmshade.

The archive is more than books. Memory-echoes are pressed into resin tablets that hold voices, sounds, and short visions from field sites—bone-rings in the Wyrmshade, web-hung ledges above the Varnhollow chasms, frost-cracked cairns below the Hulderhorns, and quiet ripples on Selenmere that bend sound in still weather. Each echo is tagged with dates, witnesses, sky notes, and any recorded scent or taste—sap bitterness, iron bite, lake salt—to ground the vision in real sense rather than fancy.

Ritual Law and the Web of Duty

The Cloister writes ritual law in plain speech. No unlicensed spellwork over Selenmere. No force-drawing rites within a stone’s throw of a shrine. No binding cast across a rootbridge. No sale of relics pulled from deep water unless tested for memory-wake. When a case breaks these rules, the Lorekeepers sit with the Council in the Fountain Pavilion to decide censure, fines, or exile. Their preference is repair and warning, but they will vote for exile if a worker proves stubborn and dangerous.
They do not act alone. With the Wardens, they survey paths each season, set new shrines when the flows shift, and retire old stones when a line goes quiet. With the Lake-Wardens, they maintain storm boards, fog signs, and quiet zones where even oar rings are banned. With the Merchant Guild, they stamp permits for rare goods—cold-iron, rootglass, sealed inks, deep-lake fish—and hold escrow for disputed magic. With the Seekers, they share field notes and lend calibrated rods that measure tug and tremor in the ley.

When strangers arrive through the Eldertree Gateways with unfamiliar arts, the Cloister hears them. A safe art is shown, recorded, and taught with care. A risky art is set aside until tested under witness. A foul art—one that scars bark, chills rootwater, or twists breath—is refused at once and the Council is called to stand. These habits are old because memory is long. The Cloister holds records of careless workings that broke a feeder stream, soured a resin bed, and set a grove singing on a night when no wind moved. Those pages have no poetry; they have dates and lists of names.

Apprenticeship, Fieldcraft, and Signs of Change

A Lorekeeper’s path begins with letters, counting, and the map of the city. Then comes star work, plant lore, and the reading of stones and roots. The third year adds law and hearing practice, so a young keeper can judge without anger and write without fog. Only then are they sent to field posts: a month with Rootwatch, a month with the Lake-Wardens, a run with the Seekers, and a quiet winter beside the Fountain steams to tend small healings and note how ritual changes the air.

Tools are simple. Chalks that will not wash from moss, rods that sing at fixed tones when flows press hard, split-root compasses, and resin inks that hold memory-echo. They carry lantern-stones that pulse at measured intervals so field teams can find one another without shouting. They learn to taste water, count breaths between distant thunder, and time bird calls at dawn. These details seem small. They are the ground of good judgment when larger signs appear.

When the Cloister declares a Watch, it posts signs at the Gateways, the Trunk Market, and Ezra’s Tavern. Green watch means note and report. Amber watch means restrict harvests, shorten trips, and keep children near home. Red watch calls the Seekers to ready and the Wardens to set lines. Red is rare. It is used when the Wyrmshade grows louder, when the Varnhollow webs creep down-slope, when Redfang totems shift near trade passes, or when the Hulderhorn winds bring ice in a month that should be rain.

In all of this, the Lorekeepers try to see as the land sees—season by season, sign by sign. They do not chase wonder. They keep the city steady. When rites are held in the Boughring, they stand at the edges with plain staffs and open eyes. When names are read for the lost, they answer with the people and record the day. When the fountain steam lifts at winter’s height, they note how far it rises and by how much it falls. None of this is grand. It is the work that lets the city change without breaking its shape.