A Silencer is seen as an absence: a stretch of corridor where the drifting glyphs go dark, a shadow with no shape inside it, and sometimes a long grey hand holding a blade or a stone of black wax. Where it passes, writing on the walls smudges, and the chains of glowing script that hang between beings grow dim and snap. It makes no sound. Visitors report a sudden pressure in the ears near one, as if the world had been stoppered.

They keep to the deepest archives, near the records of names, and are rare.

Silencers are cold and purposeful. They erase names on commission, for their own reasons, or as the zone’s ultimate punishment, and they do not explain which. They avoid talk. A Silencer who has been set on a name does not stop for bargaining.

A Silencer can strike a name from the record of the zone, and the being it named, if present in the zone, ceases to exist. Whether this reaches a being outside the zone is not known, and is much feared.

No one admits to using a Silencer, and their commissions are whispered of. They are deadly to the named, and above all to those whose names are already written.

Beyond the zone, the Silencers lie behind the old curse of striking a name from a stone or a roll, and some believe that erasing a dead enemy’s name anywhere does a Silencer’s work. It does not: outside the zone, striking a name only shames the dead. Scholars disagree whether erasure in the zone is death or something else.

Sorcerers who want a rival gone are said to pay delvers to carry his name into the zone, and the tale of the lord whose household woke one morning not knowing whose hall they lived in is told as the worst revenge of all.