Venessa Hasek

Venessa Hasek is the Custodian of Vigil, which makes her keeper of the library and answerable for what the town is taught. She is a robed, unhurried, pensive woman of late middle age, half Peren and half human, and she stands one of three at the head of a town that has spent a hundred and twenty-five years staying off maps.

Background

She was a citizen of Peredhel once, and left, which is the detail everything else about her office turns on. She is an expert on Peren history and a former Professor of the Bardh’s University, and she was considered a mother figure to Lady Vigil Octavia, who was murdered before the party ever came up the lake.

Vigil sends its own out for years at a time to be taught things its own shelves cannot teach, and she is the example the town cites when it explains the practice. Many years ago, she says, she studied to the south, at Lux Astralis. She gives what she studied there as anatomy. Lux Astralis is a college of enchantment and illusion, known for charmed minds and convincing sights, and the two have never been squared. She came back with an education deliberately broader than her library, which was the point of sending her.

She knew Kadero from those years, and traded Mikhail news of him: his old mentor teaches at Talesong now, and advises on the ethics of enchantment.

The Library

Her duty, in her own account of it, is to oversee what the town has in the way of books and what the town does with them. Vigilites learn to read and write there, and after that strategy, engineering, theology and history. The shelves hold a complete Mól Encyclopædia and a quantity of untranslated Taal nobody has got to the bottom of.

The other half of it is deliberate. Vigil takes in people who grew up inside Peredhel’s account of itself, and the public library is stocked against that account: the same century of history written from outside it, or from the point of view of the nations the Peren conquered, in books Peredhel would ban or burn. She lectures newcomers out of them. A haven that only fed and housed its refugees would leave the propaganda where it sat, and Vigil decided a long time ago that it would not.

She gave Mikhail the run of the whole of it for a month, and her own help alongside it, which is worth more than the shelves. He came out of that month with two more volumes of the Encyclopædia deciphered and a great deal he had not gone in looking for.

What she could not give him was a seventh keep. There is nothing in Vigil’s library to say the Valley of Doom’s curse ever broke, nothing to corroborate that a seventh keep exists at all, and Venessa herself has never heard of one.

Personality

She is the diplomat of the three, and the one who talks. She speaks the town’s formulas over a man’s account of himself: let it be written, judged, and remembered at the head of it, with a finality in the phrasing that the party could hear, and the page remembers when the deeds are done being spoken.

When Aldo refused to rank his own deeds and Commander Casimir Kasun called that unwise, she cut in and took Aldo’s side against him: there is wisdom in not boasting of a single deed over the whole of a life, and the page remembers all of it anyway. She defended Koa in the same room by pointing at a record of work already done in two towns rather than at anything he had said. She reads people as genuine or not and says which, and Theresa Sarros was near flabbergasted while Venessa was merely impressed.

She casts, at least well enough to tell a magical thing from an ordinary one herself. When Mikhail asked for a scroll she fetched it, apologized for the delay, and handed him a pair of reading spectacles with it, on the grounds that he had no time to study the thing and these would help him read it. He already could. She had no way of knowing that, and he kept them. Her parting advice to him was about knowing when to stay your hand, your blade, or your tongue.

Current Role

The Custodian and the Commander advise the Lady Vigil and argue in front of her; the Lady Vigil decides. With the seat filled by a young Assessor who had not expected it, that arrangement is doing more work than it was built for.

It was Venessa who carried the three scroll cases to the oath ceremony, and who signed beside Koa and Mikhail and sealed the case over their names. She explained the sponsorship afterwards without decoration: with no Lady Vigil chosen the assessors cannot travel abroad, and Vigil has decided the party are Eravil’s instrument for putting Haudh-Gwenn back in order, which would let Vigil flourish. Resources were offered within reason. None of them have been called on.

She is alive, in office, and untouched by any of what happened afterwards. The last thing she did in front of any of them was hand Mikhail her library for a month.