Ashvareth is High Priest of Origins in Yaif, and in matters of the flame his word carries as far as Queen Seraphel's. The priesthood he leads tends the Flame of First Fire and guards the Hall of Origins and the Archive of Ashes beneath it. No decision that touches the sacred is made in Yaif without him.
What makes him more than a temple official is what the Archive holds. When Yaif's priests carried fire north to light the Evertorch, they did not give it away. They lent it, and they wrote the terms of that loan into treated stone, the lending the Neferati remember as the Carried Fire. Ashvareth keeps those records. He can name who carried the flame and recite, clause by clause, exactly what Tarkhon swore in return and has not paid. When Yaif speaks of collecting on the Evertorch, it is Ashvareth who holds the bill.
He also claims to have been there. By his own account he is old enough to have watched the fire leave the Temple of First Fire with his own eyes, six centuries gone. Yaif is divided on whether this is truth, exaggeration, or the kind of sacred fiction a priesthood finds useful, and Ashvareth has never troubled to settle it. The claim serves him whichever it is. A witness is harder to argue with than an archive, and he is the only man who says he is both.