A Censor is tall and narrow, wrapped from head to foot in bands of dark cloth or black paper, so that it looks like a closed scroll standing on end. Where a face would be is a broad band of solid black, like a line struck through a page. Its long hands are stained with black ink to the wrist. It moves silently and very smoothly, as if sliding, and where it passes the writing on nearby shelves seems to darken and blur. It does not speak. It smells of lamp-black and wax.

They move through the Eternal Record, among its shelves and above all at the doors of its sealed sections.

A Censor seals. It goes to whatever knowledge is judged too dangerous, closes it with a black seal, and moves on. Who judges is not known; the Censors do not explain. They do not stop visitors from reading what is open, only from reaching what is sealed.

Its seal closes knowledge so that it cannot be read, and attempting to reach a sealed section can end in being erased from existence.

They keep the most dangerous knowledge out of mortal hands. Their danger is to any traveller who tries to open what they have closed.

Some scholars on Caeldon say that the gaps in their oldest records, the missing pages and struck-out lines, are the work of the Censors; most gaps in records have plainer causes.

Treasure-seekers who go into the Record after lost spells and the locations of buried hoards tell of companions who reached for a sealed book and were simply no longer there, and whose names their friends could not remember on the way home.