STATUS Deceased – destroyed at the doorway he swore to guard
ASSIGNMENT Ward of the Sleeper, elven cleric of Fenmarel Mestarine
ORIGINS An elf, stationed alone at the ziggurat some six to seven hundred years before the Agents found him
FIRST ON RECORD Session 60 – described secondhand, by a Kaka-Taibo elder who could still say his name without saying much else

Long before the Agents ever climbed the steps of the Ziggurat, Priest Vasille of Fenmarel Mestarine held it alone.

The honour of the posting was real enough that his own people still spoke of a celebration when he took it up – Ward of the Sleeper, guardian of a walled garden that, by his own community’s later admission, was “too much like a prison” for one elf to keep for six or seven centuries without it costing him something.

What it cost him was everything. By the time the Agents reached the temple, Vasille was no longer a priest in any sense that mattered – he was a huecuva, the undead remnant of a cleric whose vows had failed him, leathery and taut under tattered, corroded vestments, dragging a flail inlaid with the bones of a lifetime’s worth of small cruelties.

FILE NOTES

He spoke only in ritual Elvish, monotone, breathed out rather than said – a handful of phrases repeated like a liturgy he could no longer stop performing:

advenae et emundet, “cleanse the intruders”;
ad istam januam, “secure the door”;
consopeetus est exseetarey, “the sleeper must awaken”;
veneet ad bellum, “a war is coming.”

Whatever function that last line once served in his order’s rites, out of his mouth in a desecrated hall it read as prophecy.

His job, as best the Agents could reconstruct it, was simple and singular: prevent anything from entering or leaving the mountain temple past the half line of his desecrated sanctuary.

He didn’t attack on sight – he chuckled, appraised the party’s weapons for silver, and let a distorting glamour walk him straight past Raven disguised as a stooped old woman, close enough to strike and be struck, without either side raising a hand.

Six centuries alone had left him patient rather than reckless.

The patience ran out once the illusion failed.

He fought with a desecrated sanctuary at his back, bull strength called up through his god’s own tooth-shaped symbol, and a curse aimed at Raven that only just missed landing.

It took silver steel and a run of fireballs through the pillared hall to put him down for good – decapitated, finally, mid-shriek.

“Consopeetus est exseetarey.”

Priest Vasille, at the ziggurat door – “the sleeper must awaken”

STATUS: Filed under The Unknown. A cursed cleric, not a chosen one – the notes on huecuvas are explicit that the affliction can fall on a priest who kept his vows just as easily as one who broke them. Vasille guarded that door faithfully for the better part of a millennium. What finally isolated him into whatever he became by the end is a question Section 18 has no way left to ask him.