Like all remnants, Sable doesn't remember his childhood, having never had one. As all remnants are abandoned by their god shortly after creation, the most they have is a few fleeting memories of their god, along with the final gift their god gives them - a name. Sable was so disoriented when he was created that he missed his, and he was sent to the Void without ever learning it. The Void Runner team that found him in a pocket of new creation could tell him a lot about himself - that he was a remnant of the god of earth, that his eyes denoted a higher latent magical ability, that he would need reading glasses and that he was now a part of the great city of Praecidia...but they could not tell him what his name should have been. His feelings about his own abandonment got tied up very quickly into his self-consciousness about not having a name, and while he quickly picked one out himself on his journey back to Praecidia, the knowledge that it was not his real name still haunted him.
In the hope of figuring out where he belonged and maybe who he was, Sable elected to settle in the primary neighborhood for earth remnants in Praecidia, Tel Terrum, despite the earth remnant within his Void Runner team cautioning against it. He soon found out why: newly-arrived remnants of earth are approached by and welcomed into one of the several clans within Tel Terrum, which forms their first support system and the basis of their entire life in the neighborhood. But once word got out that Sable's nontraditional name was because his own god hadn't given him one, the clans stayed well away, unwilling to welcome in a remnant whose creation had gone that poorly. Left without any volunteers to be his guide and guardian during the early months of settling in, the Void Runners simply assigned him one...which is how Sable soon found himself a resident and employee of Tel Terrum's largest crypt, as well as the soon-to-be protege of the lithos in charge of it - appropriately named Cryptkeeper.
While a lithos's duty as a living stockpile of knowledge on a single subject made them invaluable members of earth remnant society, it made them poor guardians. While Sable was able to glean some of the basics of remnant life, much of his time in the crypt was devoted to studying remnant death - specifically, the numerous rules, ceremonies, and traditions that dictated what to do from the moment an earth remnant died to the moment they were interred into the very earth they lived with. The knowledge proved useful, as he soon became a valuable helper to the Keepers working within the crypt, able to advise them on even the most obscure religious practices they needed to observe for one corpse or another. His colleagues soon began to joke that he was far more at home with corpses than he was with people - while he could carry out conversations related to work just fine, anything beyond that often had him stumbling over his words or outright clamming up. He accepted the teasing without complaint, along with the feeling that this was where he belonged, even if he wasn't quite satisfied with it. After all, Cryptkeeper was proud of him, and he'd been the only thing keeping a remnant from being buried entirely wrong a few times...his own feelings of imprisonment and inability to really get close to any of his coworkers because of his personal relationship with their boss paled in comparison to those achievements. Right?
And so he stayed, in denial about his growing misery over the situation he was in, until a remnant from another part of Praecidia entirely barged into the crypt one day, with the corpse of a dwarf nobody'd seen in years. One of the merchant clans eventually identified her - she was one of many traveling merchants under their name, one of many that left on a trip and simply never came back...until her sudden return, dead, with a non-earth wife nobody knew about, who was demanding that she be given the proper burial so she could meet her god again. While the real High Keepers did their best to untangle the absolute theocratic mess this made, Sable was left to recognize the real horror beyond this moment - this dwarf was not the only one who's never come back. How many have died out there, unknown, without any of the rites their god expects?
Unable to stand the thought of it, Sable went straight to his former guardian and submitted a formal leave request. He would not return to the crypt until he could account for as many of the missing dead as he could. The other Keepers would have to survive without him until then. The old lithos could never say no to their greatest pupil, and so Sable departed, soon discovering just how much knowledge the remnants of earth have lost. He was able to approach the clans again, not as a nameless new remnant, but instead as the envoy of their people's holiest site...and even then, it soon became clear that what they didn't know about their wayward members far outweighed what they did. Most couldn't even tell him when their missing remnants had joined the clan, something he personally found abhorrent with how much emphasis he'd placed on his own date of arrival. This was clearly not something that only the earth god's children could solve. And so he gathered what names and information he could and set his sights on the Void Runners once more. If they were in chrage of uniting teams of all the gods' remnants and sending them out into parts unknown, surely they had the power he needed to find those the earth remnants had lost.
The trip to Praecidia Luxor from his home was long and terrifying, but he persevered until he finally found himself at the headquarters of the Void Runners. He walked straight in, barging directly into an otherwise routine Void Council meeting to present his findings and demand change. While he had hoped they would listen, he hadn't expected they they would take action so soon - the Office of Records was founded that very day. He also hadn't expected that he'd be placed in charge of it, but so it went, as he was too stunned by the whole ordeal to even think of refusing the post. It was only when he was led to his new office and finally left to his own devices that the reality of the situation hit him, and it took all he had in him to not break down right there and call the whole thing off. He'd only wanted to bring these lost remnants to the Council's attention, and instead he found himself responsible for each and every one of them...and every other remnant besides. If he failed...they'll all stay dead and unremembered, and every passing day made it more and more likely that they'd be forgotten for good. He didn't know where to even begin, but he knew he also didn't have time to find somebody else, somebody better qualified to do this. It would be him, or it would be nobody.
He might still have fallen into despair, had a certain alchemist not burst into his office soon after, uninivited, unannounced...and bearing a pack full of medical supplies. And tea. Who then offered it to him. Eiran, as he would soon come to know, was exactly the sort of madman who would hear news of a brand new office within the Council, headed up by a remnant nobody had ever heard of, and immediately barge in to try and help. But as it turned out, he didn't mind all that much - after a few cups of tea and a lot of thought, Sable soon realized with Eiran's help that the one thing all remnants had in common were their doctors, in some form or another. Doctors kept copious notes, as Eiran was all too happy to demonstrate, and were all too often the first to know when a remnant died. He could compile their paperwork with his own knowledge of his crypt's paperwork, and with some luck, his office could start to gather a sizeable number of records after all. And having a plan meant that he could recruit other remnants to help him carry it out. Soon enough, that was exactly what he did.
Once the Office of Records had clawed its way out of infancy and into something that actually benefitted Praecidia as whole, Sable found himself with more freedom than he thought he would ever have, and a few true friends and allies along with it. He was able to practice the magic he'd let languish in his time in Tel Terrum, able to indulge his need to explore by venturing into historical areas for long-forgotten graves for his work, and even had time to devote himself to a few hobbies. While things were still far from perfect, Sable was beginning to feel at last like he knew who he was, and that he belonged somewhere he could be proud of.
