In its first years, the refuge was a place to hide children whose families had rejected them or whose existence threatened a household's inheritance. Heddik's careful record keeping and Salla's network of midwives, servants, and ferrymen gave the group an unusual strength: it could prove who had been erased and move them before the people responsible returned. The first major triumph came when a fever swept through three villages. The Crown Tally Office refused aid to unregistered households, arguing that no recognized residents lived there. Unentered members carried medicine and food under cover of a funeral procession. Survivors remembered the blank cloth they hung from doorways, and the sign spread beyond the original refuge. The watershed moment came twenty-six years after the founding, during the Sallowbridge registry fire. A magistrate's men raided a shelter to seize a child whose inheritance would have blocked a powerful claimant. The child escaped, but the raid exposed several safe houses. In the chaos, Road Keepers burned the local registry to destroy the confiscated names. The fire also destroyed records that could have established the innocence of dozens of people. The faction saved lives and harmed people in the same night. Since then, its members have argued over whether records are weapons to seize, evidence to preserve, or chains best broken. The Unentered later became more than an escape network. They maintained informal records of abandoned children, disgraced soldiers, dismissed apprentices, and people declared dead by mistake or design. Their help expanded to adults cast out for failing an expected role: the child who would not inherit, the spouse unable to produce an heir, the veteran who returned changed, the bastard whose birth offended a treaty, or the person whose family insisted they should never have been born. Their growth brought patrons and compromise. A few noble families quietly used them to remove inconvenient relatives, then denounced them in public. The Unentered accepted payment from some of those families to fund shelter for people with no patron at all. Today the faction is large enough to be useful to rulers and dangerous to expose, but still too small to protect everyone who comes to its doors.

A converted grain store in a rain-cut ravine, its upper floor used as a dormitory and its root cellar divided into a kitchen, records vault, and two rooms for people who cannot be seen. The entrance is through a cooper's yard. There is no sign, and the rooms are rearranged after any suspected visit. Visitors are asked what they need before they are asked who they are.