Vaela

Mistress Vaela — the only woman among the four scholar Meisters of The Hollow House, the second of them to die, and the first hard proof in the record that something in that hall was holding time off. Black-haired, hard-eyed, and unchanged across the whole of the gravekeeper's life: "She had the same hard eyes and black hair when I was a lad of twelve." Buried on the 11th Day of Frosty Paths, Year of the Creaked Gibbe, per the gravekeeper's diary "The Loge of ye Gravekeeper" (Session 42).

The eight-year argument

Her one recorded scene is a fight. Carrying coal into the Hall House in the Year of the Walled Crooke, the gravekeeper found Vaela and Halren "near came to blows" over a stone-slab, each swearing the same mark held a different meaning after eight years of study:

• Halren read the symbol as sunlight.
• Vaela read it as danger.
• Old Jerris muttered it might mean both at the same time.

It is the sharpest surviving glimpse of how the Ancients' script was actually cracked — not by vocabulary but by argument, over walls lined with charcoal-and-chalk copies. By that same entry the scholars had "begun finding pattern in the stones." Vaela did not live to see the breakthrough two entries later.

"Laila" / "Vala" — the same woman

The Session 42 translation reported a black-haired unaging woman, "Laila," who died second, and filed her alongside rather than among the four scholars; the vault has since carried her as a name-collision with Laila of The Urina, noted in Canon Questions and Connections & Theories. The gravekeeper's own document resolves it: the black-haired unaging woman who died second is Mistress Vaela, a scholar Meister of the Hall House in her own right. The living Laila of the Urina is unrelated, and the collision appears to have been a mis-hearing rather than a GM name-reuse at all.

Where she lies

Buried by the gravekeeper. Two statue-sarcophagi and two noise-activated lower tombs in the Hollow House burial chamber were left unopened by the party in Session 42; by the record's count, Vaela and Corvene should lie among them.