The River Readers began as a handful of boat scribes, flood pilots, and funerary record-keepers who survived the Year of Eight Drownings. In that season, three levees failed in nine days, and the towns of the lower basin lost their grain stores, their maps, and nearly all reliable records of debt, burial, and inheritance. A woman named Ilyra the Reed-Sighted, once a humble tally keeper, gathered survivors at the broken ford of Tern Crossing and taught them to read the river as both a natural force and a record of human behavior. She noticed that floods followed not only weather, but greed, deforestation, bribed gatekeepers, and neglected ditches. The first Readers became known for predicting disaster, but also for settling disputes over lost property and identifying the dead when graves were washed open. Their original charter was simple: preserve memory, warn the living, and keep the river from being owned by the powerful. Over time, they became indispensable. Kings consulted them before campaigning, merchants before loading barges, and villages before planting. Their status grew after the Watershed Verdict, when a Reader-led inquiry proved that a provincial duke had deliberately weakened a levee to flood rebel granaries and then blamed bandits. The duke was ruined, the Readers were legitimized, and the faction gained both prestige and enemies. Their power deepened during the Saltwinter Collapse, when they alone maintained records of which canals still ran, which bridges were safe, and which families had the right to reclaim rebuilt land. That crisis made them more centralized, more secretive, and less idealistic. Today they are respected as guardians of river knowledge, feared as arbiters of memory, and distrusted by anyone who has ever been corrected by one of their ledgers.