Brother Keef

A monk of the Order of the Long Death, formerly resident of the monastery in the mountains north of the Great Tree. Brother Keef was among the original house of monks who built the monastery at the order leadership's direction — a generation who believed they were building a place to log and honor death in the service of Jergul, the Lord of the End of Everything.

Brother Keef lived through the schism that split the order into Day Monks and Night Monks, when the scout-bulbs from the well in the basement began creeping into monk cells in the night and luring the most lonely of them down into the dark. He was, in his time, a Day Monk. He watched the order rot from inside.

His body was preserved in the cocoon at the head of the Gestalt's biomass and was recovered when the party broke the prison-cage of pylons in the chamber below the library. Gryph ate the memory mushroom that grew from his remains and received, in a flood of borrowed memory, the founding history of the monastery and the slow corruption that took it.

In thanks, or in legacy, Brother Keef taught Gryph one of his order's signature techniques — Touch of Death, the trick of drawing vitality from a creature as it dies within arm's reach. Gryph can use it once before the memory fades.

Some part of Brother Keef now lives in Gryph.