The town is set in Australia, somewhere in the outback or a national park, not far from Sydney, according to the coordinates given in The Dark.
The Guardians of Time (known also as The Guard) is a society dedicated to preserving history against the attempts of the Order of Chaos to alter it.
It is headed by a sexless immortal called Lorian who is backed by a Tribunal of nine members, each a representative of a house.
The headquarters of the Tribunal, as well as the Guard itself, is located in Athens, year 200 BC, outside of the mortal measurements of time.
For their purposes they also use a place called the Citadel, connected to another area known as the labyrinth (also used by Order of Chaos) which serves as a disembarkation point for the Guards' missions into the past.
The Order seeks to alter the Prophecy predicting their fall by changing the events of the past.
Her ultimate goal is to gain control of the world because she believes that she should have been born first, rather than her brother Lorian.
This bridge is destroyed in The Key and replaced with a portal leading directly to the Underworld.
Any souls not trapped in the Underworld can enter this realm upon death (it can also be visited by those who are not dead as well, as long as guided with an Immortal).
John Wren enters this realm on level 1 after being freed from the Underworld.
At the center of an acid lake there is a building capable of opening a rift into a similar room inside the Citadel.
When Atlantis sank into the ocean the survivors then built the Citadel and made it invisible to natives of the Earthly realm, as their technology was far too advanced to be seen by them.
In Marianne Curley's Guardians of Time Trilogy series of fictional books, members of the Guard and Order usually have two birth powers, sometimes three.
They are responsible for initiating new members into the Guard, deciding on important issues, and rendering judgments cases such as power abuse, etc.
It is inferred that there are thousands of members of the Guard, but only nine belong to the Named, an elite group destined to take on the Order of Chaos.