The Scattered Keepers

The first challenge was finding them. The Archipelago was a vast and fractured place, and the individuals with the talent for narrative translation were not a guild, but a scattered collection of isolated eccentrics. They were the keepers of lost languages, the collectors of forgotten stories, the individuals who had, for one reason or another, resisted the pull of a single, coherent narrative. They were the ones who had always lived in the interstitial, in the spaces between stories, and they had always been seen as outcasts, as madmen, as heretics. Now, they were the most valuable resource in the Archipelago, the key to its future. And so, Maia and Jester sent out a call, not a proclamation, but a quiet, whispered invitation, a story of their own, designed to resonate only with those who had the ears to hear it.