Astronomer at Al-Hakim University — studies using the stars to navigate over long distances. Has a telescope.
What We Know
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Gave the party an overview of proto-sextant navigation — potentially useful at sea. (S3)
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Something about his studies made Gnaeus connect them to The Recovered Documents; some document diagrams resemble his stellar diagrams. (S3)
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Said that leylines are, at their source, of old elvish origin. (S3)
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Library check: his “revolutionary” devices have precedent — House Mennenius (House Menenia) used similar ones in the Old Empire. He oversold his originality. (S3)
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Shown the orrery (S8) — Haroun very successfully bluffed him about its origins. The party’s impression: he is intimidated by the orrery and how it was produced. He had ideas about what the different rings are — specific stars, constellations, the moon, etc. — and those notes led Ari to the intersecting, less static lines. See The Sanctum Investigation.
Remember the cover story
Najlad now holds a false account of where the orrery came from. The notes don’t record what Haroun told him — worth writing down before it has to be repeated.
Speculation
An astronomer who oversold his own “revolutionary” instruments (S3) being intimidated by how this one was made is a data point about the orrery: it outclasses the best instrument-maker Hazad’s university has. Estelle calls it a copy of the original; the party suspects a reverse-engineered copy of the Monastery of the Dawn’s jeweled orrery (S8).
Speculation
He’s either an honest scholar who rediscovered old techniques, or someone repackaging knowledge from a source he won’t name. Given how central star-position-over-leyline math now looks to The Sanctum Investigation, which one matters.