("The Litter-Bearer")
filius Nomenclator, of House Manere
apprenticed 343; mage 358
Prima Lux: 324-361
Ad Vim: 361-
Raised at the diabolist covenant Prima Lux in the period between the schisms, Lecticarius' parens Nomenclator was a loyal follower of the Hegemon Tyndareus. Lecticarius himself, however, threw his lot in with Tyndareus' rival, Regulus, whose ascent to power he aided from 358 to 361.
Once Regulus had successfully transplanted Tyndareus, however, Lecticarius became disaffected by Regulus' plan to use his parens as a living sacrifice to help ensure victory against the Western House. He hid his true feelings well, though: in 361, Regulus entrusted him to leave the covenant on an important mission of war. Once away from Prima Lux, however, Lecticarius sped to Covenant Ad Vim Per Veritatem, where the 26th Manere Conjugation had just convened, and attempted to warn the magi there of the imminent diabolic attack planned upon their conjugation. His arrival, though, was viewed as little more than a terrorist ploy of the Prima Luxians, and he was seized, overpowered and imprisoned by the convened Western Manereans, who planned to drag him out for a show trial and execution immediately following the investiture of their 13th Primus Manere, the anti-Dawn Mediastinus.
The ensuing diabolic attack on the covenant threw the Western Manereans into utter disarray, and there were a number of fatalities before a quick- thinking apprentice released Lecticarius from his bondage and enlisted his aid in banishing the diabolic forces arrayed against the covenant. Grateful for his intercession, the Ad Vim magi offered him a place at their covenant, where he has remained ever since.
Gratitude or no gratitude, though, there was just no question that, no matter how you tried to slice it, Lecticarius had been a diabolist --and a supporter of the mad Regulus at that. He was never entrusted with any degree of power within either the covenant or House Manere and, wisely, he sought none --particularly once his erstwhile Prima Luxian enemy Irrumator rose to the position of Primus. Instead, he spent the next forty years quietly engaging in research into the art of vim and--also quite wisely--keeping his findings strictly to himself.
By the end of the century, however, Lecticarius had become so frustrated by his colleagues' apparent inability or unwillingness to take steps to halt their covenant's decline that he finally overcame his reluctance for the spotlight and took a number of steps which he hoped might bring about a resurrection of his covenant. In 396 he forged an alliance with a local Mountain Lord, taking on his son as his apprentice, and in 401, he began releasing for publication all of his long-suppressed writings on the art of vim. In 409, he overrode the wishes of the other covenant elders by formally requesting aid from Annalum.
At first these efforts seemed to be yeilding results: several young magi were drawn by Lecticarius' impressive research to join the covenant, and Annalum sent a Cristoferean "vulture" to its aid in 410. In the long run, however, neither Lecticarius nor Ad Vim Per Veritatem proved capable of retaining young blood at the covenant for any length of time, and Lecticarius himself has been slowly sinking into Twilight for the past decade. While he is still alive, he is rarely anymore at all coherent, and he is not expected to last very much longer. Nonetheless, he has managed to outlive all of his erstwhile enemies of Ad Vim's "Opponents of the Dawn": Falx Astartis and Pertinax died early in the fifth century; the Cristoferean Adversaria Maleficii, whose own student once notoriously claimed that she was "far too mean to die," finally passed early this year.
- Argentum Versutum, 396 to 411
