The Limbo-Walkers began as a handful of road-broken survivors after the Shatterfall, when three trade arteries, two cities, and a pilgrimage route collapsed into a season of riots, famine, and vanished families. The first walker, Mael Varo, was a mapmaker's apprentice who claimed that the world had not merely broken, but had become porous. He and eleven others learned to read the strange in-between places where collapsed walls, flooded alleys, abandoned shrines, and half-remembered trails would briefly align into passages. They called these crossings limbo-ways, because no law, banner, or king seemed to hold there for long. At first they guided only the desperate. Then they began ferrying contraband medicine, messages, stolen children, and fugitives through routes no army could march. Their watershed moment came sixty-three years after their founding, during the Night of Forty Gates, when an invading host used the same crossings to unleash a surprise attack. The Limbo-Walkers had to choose between exposing every route they knew or letting a city burn. They burned half their own archive to mislead the invaders, saved the city, and lost the trust of many who believed a guide should never destroy a map. Since then they have lived with a reputation for rescue and betrayal in equal measure.