Corvene
Master Corvene of the Hall House — the first of the four scholar Meisters of The Hollow House to die, and the man who told the gravekeeper what the black stone-slabs on their tables actually were. "A spare man, all bone and parchment-skin." Buried on the 3rd Day of Rain, Year of the Bane Elme, in the opening entry of the gravekeeper's diary "The Loge of ye Gravekeeper" — the document the party recovered and Silithane translated in Session 42. He is the "Corvian" of that in-play translation; the diary itself also writes his name once as "Corven."
What he said about the Ancients
- The carvings on the slabs were "older than kings, older than roads, older than any tale remembered by man."
- He named the script the speech of the Ancients, the work of a folk of the elder dark "before all keeping of years" — the Elder race / Foredwellers, described from inside their own age-gap and before any calendar existed to measure it.
- His death is the moment the hall "grows quieter"; the surviving three — Vaela, Halren and Jerris — carried the work on for generations after him.
The longevity question
The Session 42 table-translation counted Corvene among four scholars who gained unnaturally long life from the Elder tablets. The record does not actually attest that of him. He dies in the first entry, before the gravekeeper has noticed anything strange; the unaging is only remarked on later, of Vaela ("the same hard eyes and black hair when I was a lad of twelve") and then of Halren and Jerris, with the gravekeeper writing "years have passed since Corven" as a measure of how long the others had already outlasted him. Whether Corvene drank, or died too early to, is open — and it bears on whether the hall's longevity came from the study itself or from something found part-way through it (see Ambrosia, and Connections & Theories).
Where he lies
The gravekeeper buried him personally. The Session 42 party left two flanking statue-sarcophagi (an elderly man with a hammer; a younger man with a two-handed axe) and two noise-activated lower tombs unopened in the Hollow House's burial chamber, judging the risk of waking two more Halren-grade mini-bosses too high — by the record's count, Corvene should be in one of them.