The Custodians are entirely human. They possess no supernatural gifts, inherited protections or immunity to the forces they investigate. What separates them from everyone else is knowledge and the willingness to carry it.
Operating through the secretive Lantern Office, they investigate unexplained incidents, document disturbances in the Veil, secure dangerous evidence and contain threats that cannot safely enter public awareness.
Their purpose is not to eradicate every supernatural being, but to prevent unstable phenomena from endangering the island or exposing truths capable of causing widespread panic.
Their records are preserved within Nevermore, an archive built from generations of case files, medical reports, confiscated objects and institutional mistakes. Their interventions are selective, their methods rarely visible, and their existence remains unknown to most residents.

Small, overworked and deeply embedded within island life, the Oulbury Constabulary is responsible for the dangers residents can see: missing persons, thefts, disputes, suspicious substances, public disturbances and the ordinary crimes that persist even in an extraordinary place.
Its officers work with limited resources and within a community where everyone knows someone involved. They are expected to protect the public, preserve evidence and maintain order even when witness accounts contradict one another or a case refuses to obey reasonable explanation.
When an investigation crosses into territory the Constabulary cannot identify, evidence may disappear into restricted files, official explanations may change, and unfamiliar authorities may quietly take an interest. Most officers are never given the complete truth.

Isolation makes every emergency more dangerous. Oulbury’s medical personnel and first responders provide urgent care, crisis stabilization and continuing treatment when mainland assistance may be hours, or an impossible ferry crossing, away.
They respond to accidents, illness, exposure, storms, unexplained injuries and the psychological consequences of living somewhere reality does not always remain stable.
Their responsibility is to treat the person before them, protect patient confidentiality and preserve life without demanding that every wound arrive with a believable explanation.
Nevermore supports psychiatric crisis care, supervised recovery and longer-term treatment. Publicly, it is a medical institution rebuilding its place within the community. Behind restricted doors, however, some cases require observation that ordinary medicine cannot fully explain.

A Shattered is a person whose body has lost the ability to remain entirely human beneath supernatural pressure. The condition does not place an animal, monster, spirit, or alternate personality inside them. There is no hidden beast waiting to be negotiated with. There is only the person, the pressure, and a body trying desperately to adapt.Bones alter because the existing structure is no longer sufficient. Muscles tear and reform because the body believes greater force is necessary. The senses sharpen because something within the nervous system has decided ordinary awareness is no longer safe.Instinct overwhelms reason because reason is slower. The Shattered do not become something else. They become what their body believes might survive. The body is often wrong.

A Drained is neither dead nor undead. They are biologically alive, but their body can no longer produce enough vitality to sustain itself.Their heart beats. Their lungs function. Their wounds heal. Their body ages. But every process is weakened, incomplete, and dependent upon life drawn from elsewhere.The Drained do not drink blood because they are vampires. Blood is merely one of the strongest carriers of vitality. They do not consume souls. They do not steal years directly. They take the immediate force that allows a living body to remain active, warm, alert, and whole.Without it, they begin returning to the condition from which they escaped. Stillness. Cold. Darkness. The coffin.

The Deep were once entirely human. Their bodies were altered after descending into a region where the sea and the Veil overlap. They are not mermaids, sea spirits, or members of an aquatic species. They do not command the ocean. They do not belong naturally beneath it. Their bodies were forced to adapt to pressure, cold, darkness, and supernatural currents that should have destroyed them.The adaptation did not end when they surfaced. The sea remains present within their breathing, circulation, senses, and nervous system. Salt water now provides something their bodies cannot produce independently. Away from it, they gradually deteriorate.Near it, they become more capable and more vulnerable to whatever first changed them.The sea sustains the Deep. It also continues trying to take them back.

The Indebted are ordinary human beings who have opened an ongoing transaction with the Veil. They do not generate magical power. They do not possess an internal source of energy. They cannot command the Veil through bloodline, confidence, emotion, or force of will. They create conditions under which the Veil may be persuaded to produce a limited effect. The effect is the borrowing. The consequence is the debt. A skilled Indebted is not someone who avoids paying. They are someone who understands what they are risking, recognizes when the price is becoming unsustainable, and knows how to make the smallest possible request.The most dangerous Indebted are not necessarily the strongest. They are the ones who have convinced themselves that consequences can always be postponed.

A Whispered is not a human being haunted by an outside presence. A Whispered is the presence. The human body, identity, history, and memories it wears once belonged to someone else. By the time a character is recognized as one of the Whispered, the possession is already largely complete.The original person is not sitting intact somewhere inside, waiting to be rescued.Most of them are gone.What remains are fragments:a reflexive fear;an affection without an explanation;a name that still causes grief;a memory that surfaces incorrectly;a habit the entity never chose;a sudden refusal from the body it believed it controlled.These fragments are not another complete personality. They are residue. They are the stains left behind when a life is removed imperfectly.

A Lingering is the surviving consciousness of a dead person, held within the living world by an Anchor. They are not resurrected. They do not possess a functioning biological body.They do not breathe, age, heal, eat, sleep, or produce body heat as the living do.The form others see is a supernatural reconstruction created from memory, habit, and the influence of the Veil. It may resemble the person as they appeared shortly before death.It may resemble an earlier version of themself. It may slowly become distorted by the way others remember them. The longer a Lingering remains, the more difficult it becomes to determine which parts of their identity are genuine memories and which parts were reconstructed from stories, photographs, grief, and repetition.A Lingering may look human. They may speak, work, form relationships, and participate in the town. But their continued existence depends upon something outside themselves. They are a person whose soul has become a haunting.

Coming soon.

Coming soon.

Founded in 2003
Founder: Augusta Windsor
The First Warden of the Lantern

‍The Lantern Office began after an incident inside the Oulbury Asylum in 2003. For six nights, patients reported seeing a corridor that did not appear on the building plans. Several staff members dismissed the reports as shared delusion.

On the seventh night, three patients entered the corridor. Only one returned. The survivor could no longer remember their own name but accurately described sealed rooms beneath the asylum that had not been opened in decades.

At the time, Augusta Windsor was already investigating irregularities within Oulbury’s public institutions. Through municipal records and restricted Custodian archives, she discovered that similar incidents had occurred repeatedly and had been concealed independently by physicians, police officers, clergy, and town officials.
The information existed. No one had been coordinating it. Augusta gathered the scattered Custodian cells into a single investigative institution: the Lantern Office.

Its purpose was to illuminate what others ignored, record what could be proven, and contain active threats before fear or misinformation spread through the town.

Founded in 2005
Founder: Fabrizio Davonius
The First Keeper of Accounts

‍The Red Ledger was created during a winter remembered among the Drained as the Season of Empty Veins. Several established sources of vitality disappeared within a matter of weeks. Donors withdrew, medical supplies were restricted, and remedies used by the Indebted began failing under increasing Veil pressure.

Desperate Drained fed without permission. Indebted practitioners performed emergency workings without accounting for the cost. Favors were promised, broken, transferred, and denied. No one knew who owed what or who had already paid.

Founded in 2006
Founder: Mara Edevane
The First Guide of Thresholds

‍Mara Edevane arrived in Oulbury during the event known as the White Tide. For three days, the fog covered the island without moving. Roads led to the wrong streets. Doors opened into buildings miles away.People heard relatives calling from the shoreline, including relatives who had been dead for years. Seventeen residents disappeared.

Mara, a Moonbound with no recorded history before her arrival, guided eleven of them back.She explained that the fog was not merely concealing Oulbury. It was creating crossings through the Veil. Until then, Moonbound, Lingered, and other beings sensitive to thresholds had acted independently. They guided travelers, protected Anchors, interpreted omens, or tended to hauntings without shared records or coordination.Mara gathered them into the Threshold House. It was called a House because its purpose was not simply to watch doors. It was to provide somewhere for those standing between worlds to return.