The roads of the Ninth Sheet were surveyed before the Wardens existed. Their original markers were meant to make travel possible between settlements whose written records were incomplete, inconsistent, or held by distant authorities. Over time, routes shifted, settlements moved, and the markers remained. The Road Keepers once maintained bridges and roadside shelters, while the Third Survey Office checked distances and marker faces. Neither group could command enough labor to do both jobs. During a period of failed harvests, arguments over who was responsible for a missing wayhouse became a fight over whether a whole settlement should be supplied at all. The resulting Surveyor's Truce merged the two organizations into The Third Roadwardens. Their defining moment came during the famine years. A patrol discovered that an original marker directed travelers toward a settlement that had lost its stores and could no longer support arrivals. The Wardens' predecessor had to choose between honoring the marker and sending desperate people into danger. They removed it. The settlement survived the winter, but the act was treated as an assault on the authority of the survey. The Wardens were founded soon afterward with a charter allowing them to report hazards, but not to alter original markers without a council's approval. For a generation they gained trust by maintaining practical routes, escorting supply trains, and keeping the roads open through local crises. Their best-known triumph was a coordinated chain of patrols that carried warning of a washed-out crossing faster than any official messenger network. Their greatest setback followed when a senior patrol leader sold copies of route records to private toll collectors. The scandal led to strict custody rules for maps and a lasting suspicion of anyone who asks to copy them. Today, The Third Roadwardens are small, respected, and stretched thin. They protect the main surveyed roads and the settlements that rely on the original markers, but they cannot keep every path safe. Their old success has made them an authority in practice, even as their charter insists they are only custodians.

Their headquarters is a squat, repaired wayhouse built around an old survey table. Its walls hold rubbing copies of marker faces, patrol ledgers, and a public board listing closures. One room is kept locked for damaged originals. The Wardens claim it is a conservation store; a few senior members know it also contains records that contradict the official maps.