Jerris

The last of the four scholar Meisters of The Hollow House — the only one the gravekeeper never buried. He outlived Corvene, Vaela and Halren across generations of the diary "The Loge of ye Gravekeeper", and then walked out of the sealed hall alive and unaccounted for. He is the "Jairus" of the Session 42 table-translation, of whom Silithane reported that he spoke the ancient words and may still be alive today — one of the campaign's oldest open threads.

"Both at the same time"

Jerris's one line in the record is the smartest thing anyone in the hall says. After eight years in which Halren and Vaela had argued a single mark to the edge of blows — Halren insisting it meant sunlight, Vaela insisting it meant danger — "old Jerris muttered it might mean both at the same time."

It is a warning-label reading of the Ancients' script: a mark that says the light itself is the hazard. Given what the Elder race's legacy has turned out to be everywhere else the party has dug — the elixir that is also the god-killing shard, one substance with two edges (Session 52) — Jerris arguing that a single Ancient symbol carries both meanings at once reads less like a muddle and more like the correct answer.

The last entry, and the walking-out

In the Year of the Praised Reache the gravekeeper buried Halren in the east row and wrote that Jerris is all that remains of them all. He did not take it well:

• He "spoke wildly, as if secret vows sworn were unmaken by the deaths of all but he" — the record's only sign that the Meisters had sworn something to each other, and that Jerris considered himself released from it.
• He spoke "of the ancients, their magics, their warnings." The word warnings is his, and it sits directly on top of his sunlight-and-danger reading.
• He abandoned the Halls shortly after. The gravekeeper then resolves to "seal the door with this diary within it."

Nothing in the record says he died. Nothing in the vault says it either.

Why he still matters

• No grave, no body. Corvene, Vaela and Halren were all buried by the gravekeeper and the last of them rose again as the crypt's dungeon-lord in Session 42. Jerris simply left. The two unopened statue-sarcophagi and two noise-activated lower tombs in the Hollow House burial chamber should hold his colleagues, not him.
• He knows what they found. He was present for the breakthrough — the wet-stone cast Halren tried to hide, "arranged in lines and boxes and patterns" — and for whatever kept four scholars from aging while the gravekeeper's hands stiffened. If any living thing can read the deciphering tablet outright, it is him.
• He carries the vow. Whatever the Meisters swore, Jerris is the only one who could still be keeping or breaking it.

The vault's standing "slow clocks" thread (see Connections & Theories) lists him among the long-fuse leads still burning at Session 52. His name in play is settled here as Jerris; earlier notes and recaps say Jairus, which was a best-guess from a once-read translation.