The faction began after the Sable Thaw, when a sequence of black frosts killed reeds, poisoned wells, and drove the Moonmold Folk from the low marshes into roadside camps. In the first winter, a circle of healers, boatwrights, and grave-tenders gathered around a widowed mapmaker named Ilyra Neth, who had lost her children to a river fever that no priest would treat because the sickness seemed tied to lunar vapors and swamp rot. Ilyra and her companions discovered that the Moonmold Folk's oldest songs did more than comfort the dying. Sung in the right places, under the right moon, they could draw sickness into woven reeds, preserve memory in silvered wax, and blur the sight of predators. What began as emergency survival became a disciplined order of sanctuary builders and ritual custodians. Their watershed moment came thirty-six years later during the Ember Reed Night, when a rival magistrate accused them of harboring fugitives and ordered the burning of their central refuge, the House of Hollow Lanterns. The faction chose to save the refugees instead of its archives, and from the ashes recovered only three things intact: a bell, a genealogy slab, and the revelation that the Moonmold Folk were no longer merely a scattered people. They were a people with a memory system, a network, and a future. The decision made them beloved among the desperate and hated by those who profit from control.