The faction began in the winter of the Gray Flood, when the lower port district lost half its piers and the city delayed relief for weeks. Four people survived by organizing hunger, not charity. Nera Voss, a ledger clerk dismissed for exposing embezzlement, learned which officials skimmed disaster funds. Tovan Mire, a rat-catcher turned tunnel guide, knew every drainage route under the old quay. Sister Halme, a dockside healer, had access to the wounded and the desperate. Bram Sol, a former petty smuggler, had the boats. They did not begin as thieves. They began as a relief ring that stole grain from corrupt warehouses and sold it back at prices the poor could pay. When the city retaliated, the ring burned its moral papers, killed the informant who betrayed them, and became something harder. The watershed moment came during the Lantern Trial, when the founder Nera Voss was publicly acquitted for charity fraud after bribing the magistrate with the same money they had stolen. The crowd cheered the acquittal, but the founders understood the lesson. In this city, law was just another market. They chose to dominate it rather than appeal to it.