The Web-Spell laid on the land of Valdemar acted as an early warning system, sounding an 'alarm' whenever anything was seriously wrong. The spell required four Web-Guardians, one for each quarter, to feed power into the spell and monitor it for alarms. During the reign of Randale, Herald-Mages were slowly decimated without being replaced. Before long their were only four Herald-Mages in the entire kingdom who had sufficient power to serve as Web-Guardians: Savil, Kilchas, Lissandra and Vanyel.