In the evernight abyss, if you gather up the sticks (one is enough to break the quest) needed to run the Rollie before actually discovering Rollie, then sticks that the minions are carrying will disappear and thus breaking the entire quest for you.

So that's basically what's happened, I can't restart the quest because the game autosaved and there are now no sticks that you can insert into Rollie to continue the quest.

Must be some other combination. First you can not get to the sticks unless you go pass Rollie. I did not start Rollie before I found either stick and it worked fine for me. As soon as the minions found the sticks it carried it to the machine. I went back to a previous save and tried it again and still had no problem.

The AutoSaved feature is a pain. If you do not make backups of your save (AutoSaved) game you will have no way to go back. I normally make a copy of the AutoSaved file whenever I stop playing, still not the best way but at least it gives me a few restarting points.

Can't reproduce the glitch, but it's possible that there's no solution to this. Maybe it's just a bug.
You can try to search for the stick, because it could be, it was just dropped somewhere when recalling your minions.
Repeat the way from the original stick position to Rollie and permanently send out minions in all directions. If you're lucky they come back with the missing stick. You can change the autosave slot to permanently keep a savegame. Any further autosaves overwrite the new slot, until you change it again.

The thing is, afaik (was some time ago since I played now) I could walk past rollie without really discovering it, if the minions then found a stick they would carry it to the undiscovered rollie and then the stick would just disappear, so when I discovered (or whatever you might call it) there would be a stick missing.

This might be the case, as I just encountered the same bug, under the circumstances you described. Too sad I only found out about this now that it's too late.