No two springs keep the same Guardians, because no two makers made them alike. The constructs a Lingerers community sets are usually figures of the spring’s own surroundings: a warden of fitted stone the height of a man, its moss never grown tall; a figure of grey wood from a tree that has not dropped a leaf in centuries; a shape of the heavy, softly glowing water held upright and unmoving. Those a Resonant set are stranger and older, tall figures of pale silver and translucent white, finished like the trees of the spring, perfect and rigid as glass.

All share the spring’s condition. Nothing on them weathers, chips, or grows. They stand in the golden twilight without casting a changing shadow, and they make no sound but the trickle of the spring behind them; to touch one is like touching the spring’s flowers, cool and unyielding. The spirits among them are seen as a stillness in the air, a place where dust hangs and does not fall.

Guardians stand within the zone, on the paths to the pool and at its rim. Because inside the zone nothing ages and nothing rots, a Guardian set there long ago is as it was the day it was set. A spring may have one Guardian or a ring of them. The zone counts other kinds among its Guardians as well: Spring-Wards, barriers of held time that bar unauthorized entry; Spring-Chroniclers, spirits that record those who drink; and the Warning-Statues, visitors the spring’s power turned into statues as a warning. This entry describes the made Guardians, the constructs and spirits that move.

A Guardian has one purpose and keeps it without weariness: no one tampers with the water, no one destroys the spring. A traveller who walks to the pool and drinks is let be; the spring’s blessing and curse are the drinker’s own affair. One who comes with a bucket to carry the water off in quantity, a spade to divert it, or stones to cover it is stopped. Constructs made by the Lingerers behave as their makers would, wary and patient; those of Resonants are colder, as if the spring mattered and the people at it did not.

A Guardian is as still-bound as the spring: it does not age, wear, or tire, and it cannot be worn down by waiting. It moves when it must, slowly and with great force. Inside the zone wounds do not heal, and a Guardian’s blows leave hurts that stay exactly as they were until they are tended outside. Spirits among the Guardians are said to hold a trespasser still, as the spring holds a flower in bloom.

To the villages beside a spring, the Guardians are protection: the old of such a village do not die, and they mean to keep it so. To those who would contain the zone, close it, or carry it off, the Guardians are the first obstacle, and behind them stand the Stilled.

Those who live by a spring believe its Guardians were set by the spring’s own god and that to harm one is to age a year for every blow. Seekers who come from far away tell of guardian statues that are really earlier seekers, frozen for their greed. Some springs do have such figures, the Frozen, but they were turned to stone as a warning, not for greed, and they guard only by being seen. Scholars of the zones say the moving Guardians were made by those who have most to lose when the spring ends, and of the Stilled that is plainly true.