Game Master only. The secret at the heart of the campaign.
Two hundred years ago a bullywug student named Murgaxor Grenshel, expelled from Witherbloom for blood magic, crept beneath the Biblioplex and began to drain the snarl. Magic across Arcavios guttered. No adult believed the one student who noticed: Marrow Ashgrove, a scholarship boy from the bayou who kept bees, wrote terrible poems and loved his little sister Elsbet and his best friend Valentin.
Marrow and Valentin went down into the Depths. Valentin took a bite meant for Marrow and rose a vampire. To starve Murgaxor, Marrow bound the snarl into his own mind. For nine days he held every scrap of magic in the world and heard every spell cast on Arcavios. On the ninth day the campus began to rearrange itself around his dreams.
The Founders and the Oracle of the day were afraid. They cut the snarl out of him by writing him into the Unwritten Book, and because the snarl had touched every mind on campus that year, they erased the whole year: 312 students lost it, families forgot their children, and names were struck from every wall. Elsbet forgot her brother and sang a lullaby with his classmates' names in it for the rest of her life without knowing why. The class became the Class of the Fifth Arch, and the Fifth Arch was taken down.
Valentin: undead minds cannot be rewritten. He has obeyed the Founders' order to keep silent for 200 years.
Lady Thistlewane: fey; kept one memory in a lantern.
Murgaxor: fled before the erasure.
The Oracle: every Oracle is told. Jadzi was told, and so was Extus.
The Founders: they have spent 200 years not deciding what to do.
The binding was set to hold for two hundred years. It fails at noon on election day of Year 4. That is the date the Book writes on the first night. The names it writes are a witness list: the people who will be standing in the Hall of Oracles when it fails. Not chosen ones. Present ones. Their choices decide what that means.
Extus Narr: open the Book, restore the year, and take the snarl so no council can ever erase anyone again. Right about the crime, wrong about the cure.
Murgaxor: drink the snarl through the Blood Avatar, using Tibby Marsh's blood, and betray Extus at the last moment.
The Founders: another seal, another 200 years, another lie.
Marrow: to be finished, not freed, and for Tibby to be safe.