Horned Skeleton

An animated skeleton of a pre-Fall Elder race — horned, hooved, tall and once-bulky (the GM likened the living form to a halfway point between a feral demon and a tiefling/minotaur) — buried for roughly 400 years beneath the ground that became the Clapton's Hammer tavern in Gwyndinas. In life a self-described mediocre fisherman; in undeath, a polite, regal, helpful figure who speaks only a language that predates Common. He rose, with the others, from burial-protection magic when the inn's construction disturbed the grave.

His society had elders ("handlers") who guided and trained small groups, naive younglings (the small "hornless ones" he was teaching to fish — ancestors of today's elves), and "the greatest," immortalized in shrines ("to be the greatest at something was to become immortal"). For all that he was a fisherman, his people feared the open sea — "I have never been off the coast; it is too dangerous to go into the water" — fishing only the shallows and walking inland to their shrine.

Session 13

• After the party cleansed the grief demon, Silithane interviewed him via Comprehend Languages + Message (with Thalia).
• Translated the Ankley Island runes: ultimate authority / warning / door / do not open / prison of our enemies. Confirmed "aberration" is an ancient word for monster that survived intact across every fallen people.
• Identified Ankley Island as an ancient prison on the map, and a separate inland Shrine of the Immortals ("no one is buried there — they have ascended"). His fearful last question: "Were the guards still at the prison?"
• Wishes to be re-laid to rest; agreed to wait and answer more questions next session.

Session 14

• Still awaiting re-burial: the party plans to wall off his burial chamber (and plug the grief-hole) so he and the other ancient dead can sleep again — leaving one small gap until Lash had finished crawling out. Fenric led the scrounging of boards and mortar; the actual sealing is carried over.

Session 27

• His race named as the prison-builders. Deep in the under-prison, the prisoner Viana describes the long-dead jailers and elixir-makers as "darker skin, scaled, horns, hooves" — which Silithane explicitly ties back to this Elder-race skeleton ("hooves and horns, and back-skeletonation implying lost wings"). They are also the makers of the lost immortality elixir that Malifax and the other raiders drank — and possibly the "demon-kind of the depths" said to be the original race.