The Seekers began with a collapse. During the Glass Refrain, a catastrophic year of famine, flood, and riots, three family caravans met at the ruined shrine of a river saint. Each carried fragments of the same bedtime hymn, a song their grandparents swore was older than the world and needed to be sung in full before the end of days. The elders of the three caravans argued, sang, and nearly came to blows until Leora Van Tassel's great-grandmother, Mara, proposed a bargain: they would travel together until they found the missing verses or died trying. That vow saved them. The combined caravan survived a winter that killed half the roads around them, and in the spring they were hired to repair bells at a monastery where a blind novice recognized the hymn as a corruption of an older Milil canticle. From then on, the clan understood their search as both family duty and holy work. The watershed moment came thirty-one years later at the Shatterbridge Delve, where they found a stone chamber that answered their chant with a harmonic pulse strong enough to crack the floor. They recovered only a few notes before collapsing the tunnel, but those notes changed everything. The clan became convinced the song was real, dangerous, and incomplete without them.