THE CELESTIAL CENSOR
There is a reason world-shattering manuscripts, fulminating prophecies and scrolls of Befoul are rare to find, and it isn’t that people are, inherently, good.
No, the cause of the scarcity is the Celestial Censor. This diligent and librarian-volumed outsider enters the Material Plane on an ideally irregular basis for the express purpose of finding and destroying forbidden and apocalyptically catastrophic texts.
The Celestial Censor has long been thought (by those well-read enough to grasp the historical patterns of screeds cut short) to be an entire subset of celestials, a force dedicated to the mission of “Perdere Horrificus Sacris” (or “Unwrite Wrong Rites”). However, that has recently been discovered to be partially incorrect in that there is only one Celestial Censor, but that one being is capable of becoming legion.
When there are multiple copies of a text, or when there are—Sovereigns forbid—multiple forbidden texts in circulation simultaneously, the Celestial Censor will split their essence and inhabit multiple avatars to simultaneously remove said texts from the world by any means necessary.
Essentially, they divide and censor.
That said, there has been a significant uptick in the number of “evil” or dangerous rituals being successfully created and/or circulated. The implication seemed to be that the Celestial Censors were otherwise engaged (or blocked from entering our plane of existence), but the knowledge that there is only one of them (and the further knowledge that they have been trapped for the last almost three decades) certainly explains the preponderance of vile tracts.
