On the night of the 28th of Pharast, The Prisoner contacted Bash, Dabwick, Grip, and Pandora while they slept and sent a series of images:
It was the same jarring experience of dropping right into a story mid-stream. There was the sound of the bell at the Shrine of Thaffaar, and then the story of the Great Race of Yith continued…
As Time raced forward.
The Flying Polyps had found Golarion. The Polyps had raised their beacons and built their city. And they had captured and enslaved the Great Race.
But eventually, the Yithians rose up and exterminated as many of the Polyps as they could. They then drove the remainders of their species into subterranean tunnels beneath the Polyps’ city. Into the earth. Into the stony depths of Golarion.
And they sealed those tunnels with stone and magic. A nearly perfect prison. And as long as the wards are maintained… an unescapable prison.
But we knew we DO fight them again. But… the how… and the where were… difficult to see…
So the Yithians set guards to ensure that the wards would not fail and none of the Ancient Enemy could return to the surface unnoticed. They left 20 guardians behind.
And Bash, Dabwick, Grip, and Pandora saw those 20 Yithians Guardians standing in a circle underground. Waving their tentacles and pincers. Generally doing incomprehensible alien shit. And they understood that one of them—otherwise visually indistinguishable (to them) from its kin—was the one who was transmitting this story to them. It was the Prisoner.
And so, with their Guardians in place, the Great Race left the city that would one day be known as Neruzavin. They constructed their own city of Kothrekis and rebuilt their society. They returned to exploring the past, present, and future. And while gathering extensive knowledge on science, philosophy, and metaphysics, they also discovered that a small number of Flying Polyps had managed to escape Golarion’s gravity well during the war, and had flown out into space to invade and terrorize new worlds.
The Yithian governors decided they must seek out those fugitives and destroy them before they could cause further destruction. During their preparations, the Yithians cultivated the development of a species of beetle-like creatures that lived some hundreds of million years in the past and made plans to escape into those bodies in the event of calamity at the hands of the Polyps.
And having developed new—but dangerous—powers to bend space and time, the Yithians moved their entire city of Kothrekis off Golarion and onto a different world, in the future. (Far in their future, but still long, long ago in the party’s past). The act damaged the city, but the Yithians managed nonetheless to mount their war against the Polyps on this new, nameless, world.
The war went well at first, however…
The Yithians did not know that the Polyps were cultivating Xhamen-Dor on this world.
We had not seen this. We somehow could not see it.
The bell tolled again…
And Bash, Dabwick, Grip and Pandora’s minds were ejected into new dreamscapes.
Pandora found herself on a horse. On a horse? What?
Grip and Bash were in the dark. And a faint whisper reached their ears: “Fear the Corpse Orgy.”
And Dabwick was a magpie again. Flying over a vast desert, at supersonic speeds. The flash of white was SO far ahead of them. They could barely see it anymore. And they’d been flying for so long. Their muscles ached. Their eyes were strained. It was getting harder and harder to focus, and harder and harder to believe they could ever possibly catch up with that flash of white in the air so far ahead…
And then they woke.
First Reference: Chapter 175
Other Notable References: —