The Beast Fears Fire - Custodial Spirits

The two of you who voted for the Night Things, I'm afraid, are going to have to wait. I only have 4 of the needed 6 so far, and I don't expect I will have them done by the time I am done with this. The Night Things are really tough to make. In the meantime, the other group that got two were the custodial spirits, so they're up.

You're less likely to encounter a manifested custodial spirit than you are creatures that are far less numerous and common. And they are very, very common. Some people think that most of the material of the world is composed of them, in a sense. At any given time, there are four or five of them in your house, and four or five of the things you do each day, without thinking, without marking the action at all, are little rituals to propitiate them. They are a part of your life and your world, whether you see one with your eyes or live and die without anything ever drawing your attention to their presence.

They generally don't want to be noticed, that's not why they are here. Actually, there's not a lot in the way of hard evidence for a reason of their being. They just are, and explanations for them tend to devolve into circular reasoning and pure speculation. There are five kinds of spirits for the five elements. There are five elements because there are five spirits that correspond to them - Shadow, Earth, Water, Wind and Wood. There are also custodial spirits for animals and spirits for people.

The center of Crickton is dominated by the Gulf of Catastrophe, and if the name didn't spoil it for you, let me. There used to be a forest where that gulf is, the Ketteleye. This forest had a problem from way back with the spirits not being properly linked, and requiring all kinds of rituals, special phrases, placement of items, layouts of buildings and that kind of thing in order to keep the ground stable, the plants growing, and the sea not rushing in. There are still islands in the middle of the Gulf, the Shivering Islands, where things are still not quite right. No one is quite certain what job the custodial spirits exactly do, but no one disputes that it's important.

Custodial spirits usually only manifest when a witch calls them forth, or screws up their magic so badly that it riles them. If you see a custodial spirit (and it's not an elf), it's usually a witch's fault.