The Dustbound

Keepers of The Forgotten Form

The Dustbound are non-magical, tradition heavy caste of archivists. Found within the forgotten, decaying, abandoned parts of the library, dustbinders care for the library. They're unrivaled in knowledge, memory-discipline and physical resilience.

Civilization and Culture

---

Roles and Duties

Hierarchy is determined not by titles but by experience and scars. Earned in silence these ranks determine what one can do within the community. Written into bone-ledgers and passed through dust, these titles are essential to the workings of the dustbound.

The Dust-Elder Council

The Council is made up of seven members, each guarding a forgotten wing. Closest to centralized leadership the dustbound have, the council is responsible for managing and repairing the wings.

The Grainsworn

The Grainsworn are operatives who act as protectors and field arachivists. There are four main sub professions:

• Ash-Walkers: mainly used for unstructural exploration
• Vein-Speakers: carrying oral-maps and pathways though hallways
• Pale Indexes: archive keepers, silent by choice
• Page-Mourners: Funerary rites

The Hollow Hands

The hands are tasked with manual labor, recovery, and preservation. Mostly rebinding walls, rescuing texts, the hands are physically stronger and more weathered than others. While maintaining the hierarchy, hands are seen as silent pillars of the community.

The Stillborn

The stillborn are initiates and acolytes who haven't completed their rites.

The Gravebinders

A specialized caste within the dustbound, they perform ritual erasure, burial, and disappearing names from history. Trusted with heretical texts, gravebinders memorize burn and then forget those texts.
In order for one to advance in the community, they must survive rites and be chosen by one of the higher members.

Rites

• Veil Rite: One must cross into a partially collapsed wing and return with a salvaged text. Promotion into The Grainsworn.
• Lament of Pages: recite 1000 burned books from memory. Promotion into the Gravebinders
• Bone-soot Binding: a shard of a book is burned into your palm. You are then granted the rite to speak. Promotion into the Hollow Hands

Religion

---

Beliefs

A ruined page still remembers ink

Fading is sacred. entropy is inevitable and a holy cycle. Abandoned books, rotten maps and fallen stories are only vessels in transition, ready to be remembered.

Forgetting is sorrow, misremembering is still a form of defiance

Memory is a form of resistance, where others seek erasure the dustbound resist by remembering. Memory and stories are sacred, no one can erase it unless willingly forgotten.

Even the most dangerous knowledge should be buried, mourned, and remembered

Erasure is the true sin, to erase or burn a book is heresy.

Flesh is memory's last sanctuary

The body is an archive of memories and stories. The body stores what the archive can not. Scars and tattoos record stories and rituals require eating ashes to internalize memory.

Silence is not peace, only pause

True peace lies in the whispers and murmurs, remembered names and language over ruin.

Symbols

• Cracked Spines
• Veils dipped in Ash
• Bone Quills

Afterlife

To be forgotten is the second death

The soul become resonant ash, whispers that are in the forgotten alleys and corners.

Rituals

• Ashkeeping: keeping the ash of books and people at shrines.
• Lamenting Chants: soft mourning songs, sung while repairing bindings.
• Inkfasting: ritual where no written word is allowed only spoken and remembered knowledge.
• Echoes: rite where memories are told by many voices overlapping truth and fiction.

Sacred Sites

• Chamber of Cracks: wing where fractured texts are left, unreadable.
• Memory Pyres: place where erased names and released to the air
• Shivering Vault: tomb-library where lost words are entombed

Clergy

• Ashbearers: leads death rites
• Whisper- Mothers: record-keepers who chant forgotten names