On the night of the 30th of Pharast, The Prisoner contacted Bash, Dabwick, Grip, Pandora, and Tharivol while they slept:
It began, of course, with the same dread and despair they always felt, as their dreams of God blended with their dreams for God and from God… but then, once again…
They heard the bell from the Shrine of Thaffar.
The Prisoner reached into their minds from across the boundaries of space. And, perhaps, the boundaries of Time? All of them heard the weak whisper in their minds:
You will doubt my motivations? After all we’ve been through?
We haven’t been through it yet? When is Now?
I will show you, if you insist.
Then…
Twenty Yithian guardians stood in a circle underground, waving their tentacles and pincers; doing, as always, incomprehensible alien shit.
They saw one in particular, and understood it to be the Prisoner.
You already know my name, of course, but it is Kaklatath.
Kaklatath. The Prisoner.
The twenty Yithians left behind to protect Golarion, to maintain the wards of the subterranean prison where the hoard of Flying Polyps lay slumbering and trapped, those twenty Yithians had just absorbed the contents of the Mnemonic Depository left them by their kin. And they grappled with their new reality: they can never rejoin the Great Race. To do so would be to destroy them all.
But these remaining twenty are now solely responsible for protecting the Great Race… AND Golarion… AND the entire galaxy, from this terrible storm of Polyps trapped in the earth beneath this city.
They can never leave. THIS world was their home. Now and forever.
And they knew they must find a way to come to peace with this, these twenty Yithians.
So they did.
They took shifts. Each of the twenty watched the wards with singular focus for a century, then passed the responsibility on to the next in the chain.
While not watching the wards, the others—at first—worked. They explored the ins & outs of their cone-shaped bodies with a level of scrutiny they’d never truly needed to apply before, in their long, long history. And it turned out that with the proper treatments, with rejuvenation and stasis, they could be made to live much, MUCH longer than the scant 5,000 years the original inhabitants of these bodies squeezed out of them.
And the centuries… and, eventually, the Ages… began to pass.
And in time, a new routine was established. At any given moment, one Guardian waked and watched. Nine lay in their pods, rejuvenating and hibernating. And ten were allowed to LIVE.
And they did. They lived. For centuries at a time, they swaped bodies with the other lifeforms that came and went on Golarion. They learned, and watched, and processed, and… they lived. As best they could.
Then, when their time in the cycle came, they returned for their shift watching the wards. Then they hibernated for a time. Then out they came, ready for more living. Ready to make the best of their lives of service and sacrifice. Rinse and repeat.
It was not an ideal life, but they made it work. They had to, or all was lost. Not just for the Great Race, but for this planet, this singular little planet, floating lonely in the dark… this place that had slowly come to feel like Home to this small group of Yithians.
Yet, as time passed, of course, they also begin to experience the slow degradation of their sight and understanding. Past, present, and future started to collapse, ever so slowly, into that sad, flat, pale, nearly-lifeless thing that we would simply call “Now.” It didn’t entirely collapse, of course. But mostly. And living only NOW was a kind of death for them. Perhaps not a “death.” But certainly a Prison.
Yet they learned to live with it. Inside of it.
They had no other choice.
And it was all because of Carcosa’s influence. They were too close. And they understood exactly how close, when Xhamen-Dor came literally crashing down into the heart of the city. Right above the wards. And from that point on they had to spend the rest of their days in physical proximity to the Inmost Blot.
At least, it slumbered. That was good.
If we leave it be, perhaps it will sleep forever.
And from that point forward, their duty was twofold: guard the wards, and allow nothing to disturb the Star Seed. The entire world was relying on them.
And so it did, unknowingly, for Ages.
Then it happened…
Kaklatath was experiencing life in the body of a human woman named Elari—and the party SAW Elari, chained in her cell in Blossoming Thorn, or they saw Elari’s body with Kaklatath in it: brown, wind-scoured, leathery skin. Eyes cloudy with glaucoma. Long, thin, wispy gray hair. And they see them in their cell when the call came.
Breach in the wards detected. All Return. All Return At Once.
And so Kaklatath swapped back into their body…
Only, it didn’t work.
They hadn’t tried to switch back for over sixty years, so they don’t know exactly when whatever happened, happened… but somehow, for some reason, it didn’t work. Something had happened. Something they did not, could not, foresee. Again and again, they tried to swap back. But they were stuck. In this metaphysical prison of flesh, locked in this literal prison of chains and misery.
The Flying Polyps are breaching containment. The Guardians must join the fight. But Kaklatath can’t.
Panic. Fear. Dread. These feelings overwhelmed them.
…
Calm. Focus.
Look. See.
It had gotten so hard, but still Kaklatath tried.
What happens? What happens to me?
They couldn’t see much these days, besides the slim, grim now, and they could barely process what they DID see… not that they SAW it, but somehow they FELT it…
I am freed.
I think?
But by who? They didn’t know. But they felt… something. Some primal connection. A connection to four beings they somehow thought of as… Saviors? No. That’s not right. There is no such thing as a Savior.
But… Cruxes? Somehow?
Locating.
Locating.
It wasn’t working. Kaklatath couldn’t find them. Either they were too weak, or there was some sort of…
Identify the nature of the interference.
Nothing.
Commence probing.
It couldn’t find their minds because their minds had been broken. But pieces of their True Selves, pieces of their souls, pieces of Who They Were and Who They Will Become lived on in the dark caverns of their subconscious minds. So Kaklatath probed, and poked…
Wake up. Wake up. Save…
And they suddenly felt a terrible weariness. They felt the effort and pain it was taking for Kaklatath to talk to them this way. They felt exactly how unsustainable it was for them and how they simply couldn’t manage this anymore. This may be the end.
But just before the connection was cut, Kaklatath whispered one last time:
A message, for you, FROM you. When we meet, ask me about my Theories. While there is still time. Brain function sporadic and deteriorating. Must return to Neruzavin as soon as—
The bell tolled again…
And Bash, Dabwick, Grip and Pandora’s minds were ejected into new dreamscapes.
Pandora was no longer dreaming of the horse. She had dismounted that horse. She was focused on… a piece of equipment? A tool or something? And she was fixing it? Adjusting it? What is this thing?
Fear the Corpse Orgy. Grip did. Grip feared it. Grip prefered not to think about it.
Fear the Corpse Orgy. Rony, however, bent his mind toward it.
While Dabwick, the magpie, soared through the sewers of Cassomir. They heard the beating of their own wings. But they heard less and less of their quarry up ahead. They saw less and less of those flashes of white. Because… why are you even following it?
And then they woke.
First Reference: Chapter 185
Other Notable References: —