vigil watches for you checking in on a schedule you set. Miss it, and a payload you wrote once — a message, a file, an instruction — gets released to whoever you named. There's no account to recover, no password reset: the management token you're given at creation is the whole of it.
Your payload is time-locked (tlock) the moment you write it, and re-wrapped in a fresh layer every time you check in — so even vigil's own operator can't read it early, and a switch that's been running a long time doesn't quietly become more exposed than a new one. If you stop checking in, the lock's own time-release does the rest, whether or not vigil's server is even watching by then.
Every other tool here is ephemeral on purpose — vigil is the opposite on purpose. Durability across weeks, months, or years is the entire point of a dead-man's switch, so vigil keeps a real durable copy (cinder's own memory-only relay can't hold something for two years) and says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise.