The Blightward Keepers

Overview

The Blightward Keepers are the first major Thaluren custodial civilization to emerge from the closure of The First Nesting Confluence. They are a civilization within The Returning Concord, not a separate species and not a clean break from it. They began as an answer to a holy water gone deadly: if the place where a people was born has turned to poison, someone must still stand guard over it, keep out the thieves, name its dead, and never let it be forgotten.

Before the sworn watch, the blight was met with prayer for absolute stillness to Ulaun the Stilled Hour, a god who faded when containment became a prison. The Keepers' faithful containment is the living answer to her failure.

How It Holds Together

The Keepers rule nothing but wounds. Their keepers stand watch over blighted or suspect spawning waters, closed channels, and spoiled sanctuary margins, and decide whether a place is poisoned, recovering, forbidden, or still owed care. To them a closed water is not abandoned. It is a debt, and a damaged run is still Thaluren even when living clutches must climb elsewhere.

They are severe, but they do not worship death. They watch the water, keep the young away from it, warn of blight, and refuse every comforting lie about it. They keep the names of failed clutches, remember how each water went wrong, and stand guard with spears where other Thaluren would rather not look: against pearl-poachers who dig in the closed reaches by night, against egg-takers, and against the curious who kneel at a still pool and do not rise. The Concord's own Sanctuary Custodians alone judge whether a water can recover; the Keepers keep the watch and the memory around that judgement.

Daily Life

Much of a Blightward life is ordinary Thaluren life at sea, as the Tidebound Reaches' Ordinary Life tells it. The Keepers differ in two things: their custodians live where other Thaluren only pass through, and they remember the clutches nobody else names.

What a custodian fears is the water itself. The still pools of the closed reaches hold silt like smoke in windless air, and some who go in after a thief or a speared egg-taker are found floating a spear's length inside the edge, eyes open, neither drowned nor living. Blighted pearls fetch a high price downriver, so bands of pearl-thieves keep coming, and custodians have died at the reed-edge holding them off. Every custodian has heard the story told at the confluence of a thief who knelt to drink and stayed kneeling. The custodians' warning to their young is four words long, never kneel, never drink, and the ones who forget it are the ones the next watch names.

Medieval Role

The Keepers keep the Thaluren's oldest wound open to answer, and every redirected water in the Reaches is measured against what they hold.

• A sea settlement may ask the Keepers for a custodian when its spawning water shows the first signs of wrongness, and find custodians barring its own young from that water before the season is out.
• A run-watcher may be asked at the Naming Reach whether their run came to its water for need or for convenience, and have to answer before custodians who remember the last time the answer was a lie.
• A Kavari bank council may call on Blightward custodians to swear that a redirected Thaluren run is carrying blight risk into its nursery-water.
• A Gnome gauge-keeper of the Gaugeward Leagues may be asked to measure a disputed reach below a suspect water, and find the custodians more interested in how the record is kept than in what it says.
• A custodian may follow a pearl-poacher band all the way down to the coast to take back what was dug from a closed water, and return it to the silt it came from.
• A downriver guide may sell the way past the guards to a band of pearl-thieves and, in the same season, sell the band's names to the custodians, and the custodians will pay him and remember his face.
• A buyer in the estuary markets may wear a blighted pearl as proof of nerve, and find no Thaluren in the market will trade with him again.

The Keepers keep their heroes in the Keepers' roll beside the failed clutches, and recite them in the same breath: the custodian who held the Naming Reach alone through a whole night against a band of pearl-thieves and was found at dawn still holding it, her spear fixed upright where she stood; the old keeper who walked into a still pool after a lost child and pushed her back out before the water took him, who floats there still, a spear's length inside the edge, and is named to his face each season; and the line that named every one of its failed clutches aloud at the closed water for a thousand seasons without missing one.

History

The Keepers began in the blight told in The Closure of the First Nesting Confluence (c. 178,000-c. 162,000 BR), which forced the Thaluren to close their oldest named spawning water to ordinary return. Without them the closure might have been mourned once and forgotten as the runs climbed elsewhere. With them the wound stayed open, and the old sanctuary stayed in every Thaluren prayer and every quarrel long after the runs had gone.

Their first open conflict with the redirected runs was The Second-Channel Feud (c. 160,000-c. 156,000 BR). There they made memory-debt towards the damaged source the price of accepting the Second Channel at all. Their next test came in The Gravel Oath Accord (c. 153,000-c. 148,000 BR), where Blightward closure-reckoners helped keep redirected return answerable as it entered Kavari dwelling-water.

Tensions

The still pool that has spread, and the inspection nobody will order, are the confluence's own Tensions. Wider ones:

• Who keeps the watch. Fewer young Blightward Thaluren are willing to spend their seasons upriver, and some watch-stations are kept by custodians long past the span they agreed to.
• A name for a hatched clutch. A clutch that the custodians named as failed in a suspect water is found to have hatched late and in part.
• The guide in the reed. A watch-station has caught one of the downriver guides who sell the way past the guards.
• Accusing the sea. Custodians accuse sea settlements of convenience whenever a run chooses an easier water.