Vault Keeper Wixwell was raised in a Land of Rebirth monastery. Though indoctrinated from childhood, he was rebellious, questioning, and transgressive. While poking about in the monastery’s wine cellar as a lad, he accidentally triggered a hidden pressure plate. The back of a wine cask swung open, revealing a secret compartment with a trapdoor. Thrilled, Wixwell descended the cobwebbed ladder there, arriving in an antechamber of a vast cavern that stretched away into darkness.
Then he heard footsteps above, and feared it was Edicus, the monastery’s old groundskeeper. Wixwell crept up the ladder and hid, planning to return at night. To his surprise, when he did, the man was in the secret chamber himself, sorting and boxing various objects. Edicus saw him but did not seem angry, only amazed and nervous. Wixwell fled, and tried to avoid the old man, but could not do so for long. Eventually Edicus confronted him, and the boy threatened to tell his elders about the secret chamber unless Edicus told him the truth. At first the groundskeeper frowned, but saw the boy’s intense curiosity, softened, and told Wixwell to never repeat what he was about to learn.
Edicus was, in reality, a Vault Keeper. The antechamber was just the mouth of a huge cave network, one even Edicus had not fully explored, forming one massive vault for the Arbiter’s treasures and Shards. Wixwell scoffed, for the Order rejected the Arbiter’s authority. Edicus told the boy to return to hear more, to open his mind beyond the dogma. Wixwell agreed, though more intrigued by the cave than doctrinal discussion.
Through many more secret lessons, Edicus convinced Wixwell that the Order made a terrible mistake in rejecting the Arbiter. He showed Wixwell Apocrypha from the vault, tales of heroes preserved within her Shards for the sake of protecting Teleria. Wixwell cautiously tested the boundaries of heresy when questioning his mentors, and the violent backlash he received confirmed to him the Sacred Order’s hypocritical, self-serving nature.
When Wixwell’s tutors sent him on a pilgrimage to mark his coming of age, he instead secretly doubled back and descended into the caverns — when he did not return, his teachers vilified him as an apostate. Edicus, aged and sickly, made Wixwell his successor. Wixwell decided that, to best protect the vault, he would have to explore it.
The vault’s contents were widely dispersed to protect them from theft en masse, and hidden with carefully calculated haphazardness. Ancient charms, scrolls, and amulets were concealed in nooks and under rocks, weapons and armor rested behind obscuring spiderwebs, and priceless Shards lay camouflaged amid piles of lesser jewels. Artificial tunnels connected different rooms, certain stalagmites were in fact secret switches, and optical illusions disguised passageways.
Traps were commonplace, including doors that slammed shut behind Wixwell and deadfalls of rock. The mysteries and mechanisms only enticed him.
Months turned to years as Wixwell ranged further, subsisting on mushrooms, cave fish, and spring water. After more than a decade of meticulous map-making, Wixwell emerged from the gloom at a cave mouth deep in the mountains girdling the Land of Rebirth. He noted the exit and returned, fully obsessed with the chthonic world he had sworn to protect.
Wixwell stored maps and treasures in a stout, puzzle-locked chest he strapped to his body. He also used an enormous brass key he had found as both a walking-stick and a weapon against gloom-dwelling beasts. As the years rolled on Wixwell’s ‘maps’ became sporadic and highly stylized, with shorthand and glyphs only he could understand. His mind bent from the isolation and darkness. His hair and beard grew long and white with age, but he remained fit and strong from the demands of his constant journeying. He jabbered to himself incessantly.
After some seventy years, Wixwell encountered Chronicler Adelyn, who was exploring the vault after discovering one of its entrances. Wixwell cringed from her torchlight, gibbering and muttering in some unknown language, behaving like a frightened animal. It took all Adelyn’s patience and kindness to coax Wixwell into trusting her so she could begin to unravel the lifetime of secrets and lore locked within his aged head. She soon learned Wixwell has yet to explore much of the vault, and that he was immensely powerful thanks to the wealth of magical knowledge he had acquired over years of reading hundreds of spell scrolls hidden within the enormous archive.
Adelyn is unsure whether to drag Wixwell out of the caves and integrate him into the modern Vault Keeper network, or leave him to spend his last days pursuing his obsession. She has, however, asked if Wixwell wishes to train a successor of his own, which left him in a state of deep cogitation. On her every return visit Adelyn has asked him, and he has never had an answer.
