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.

Session 52 (his race, deepened)

• A term and a purpose. The scientists of the deep research facility under the Middle Tor call his people the "Foredwellers" (also "Prehistorians"/"Ancients") and reveal that the green "panache" they mastered both grants immortality and slays gods — i.e. the immortality elixir (Ambrosia) his race made is the same substance as the god-slaying Shard of the Autarch. The Foredwellers "were extremely competent in creating, refining, and using this green-shard substance, both to create and destroy life." A likely-confirming answer to the open "canon term for the Elder race" question.

Session 53 (his translations audited, and the Ascension darkened)

• Graded by a professional. Silithane shows his charcoal tracings of the Ankley Island runes to Minimika, chief translator of The Foredweller Research Facility. Her verdict on the fisherman's work: broadly sound, but "door" actually reads "door with hinges" — "Whoever you spoke to was uneducated, which is funny to say because he was a fisherman." She also supplies the grammar he never mentioned: in Foredweller writing, how deep a glyph is engraved encodes its magnitude — shallow, a symbol pair means cupboard; deep enough, the same pair means prison. His warnings were, if anything, understated.
• The Ascension was a disaster, not an honour. He described the inland Shrine of the Immortals as the place where "no one is buried — they have ascended," the reward for being the greatest at something. The ruin's own runes say otherwise: Minimika finds the writing around the Ascension is about mourning, loss and leaving behind, and "I do not think many people survived the Ascension" — which would explain why the Foredwellers' world is empty.
• His people's shape, confirmed again. The facility's Foredweller storeroom holds clothing cut with tail holes and trouser legs reverse-tapered for hooves, sized for creatures far taller than any race of man.