In Chapter 125, Dora performed psychometry on Deggorhbaatha‘s magical headband:
She saw Deggorhbaatha pacing on the deck of the Bloodwind, seething. But Vadrack was nearby… and so was Ellish… so he paced—and seethed—quietly. After over twenty months of traveling together, their patience with him was nearing an end, and he knew it. And he’d be damned if he’d slip up now—now, when the end of this quest was almost, almost, EVER-SO-CLOSE to wrapping up. So he focused his entire essence, his entire strength of personality—bolstered and buoyed by his magical headband, of course—into the task of quieting the instinctual rage that boils eternally in the blood of all his kind.
Digging his claws into his palms, driving his hook-like teeth deep into his froggy tongue, he tasted the pain, and allowed it to flow over, and through him, and drive him to a stillness befitting his tenuous position aboard this ship. He stared out over the empty, pale, pockmarked landscape—utterly alien to Dora’s eyes—and then looked up. And what was floating overhead was so unbelievably massive and overwhelming that it threatened to kick Dora’s consciousness right out of this vision.
It was a hovering blue and green and yellow orb. Right overhead. Right there. And so big it couldn’t even be described relative to the size of the sky or the horizon because it took up more of the sky and horizon than could even be processed. It was bigger than the horizon. It was scales of magnitude larger than the world(?) upon which Deggorhbaatha stood, and it was only because Thema once studied interplanetary physics that Dora could even slow her racing mind and this suffocating feeling long enough to confirm that they must be on some object orbiting a planet.
A moon.
Deggorhbaatha was standing on a moon.
The moon? No, not Somal, Golarion’s moon.
Which means up there—or, probably, technically, down there—what Dora was seeing was a vast living map of the Dreamlands laid out before her eyes… perhaps there was a way to parse the geography? Spot some landmarks? Map some distances? Maybe? Possibly?
But the exercise was over before it began, because Deggorhbaatha looked back down at the deck. That thing FREAKED him out. Perhaps, in fact, part of the panic Dora was feeling was not her own, but the sympathetic reverberations of her dive into this memory. And the memory plowed ahead.
Soon, a lone figure emerged from the large, windowless building nearby, constructed of gargantuan, close-fitting pale stone blocks, and sulking on the shore of this vast motionless lake of sludgy black liquid upon which the Bloodwind floated. “Nepenthe,” Vadrack called it. Whatever that means.
She’s nigh, the Skum thought in the Abolethi tongue. The Mistress.
And if Dora didn’t know to assume this was Weiralai, she might never have recognized her. Of course, her equipment was different. A new rapier, this one glowing yellow. And new armor—a collection of jaundiced, seemingly living strips of flesh wrapped around her, actively squirming and writhing, every inch covered in those same impossible sigils that bedeck a Star Stela. Why do those stars have so many points? And Weiralai’s body was changed. Simultaneously hollowed-out… yet larger. And atop her skull sprouted two massive horns, at least four feet long by the look of them, straight up for much of their length, then curled like a nautilus at the ends.
She walked, deathly silent, across the surface of the moon, on her goat hooves, back to the Bloodwind. Vadrack leapt down to meet her.
“We are done?” Vadrack asked.
“We are done.”
“What’s next for you?”
And, here, Weiralai spoke a word that meant nothing to Deggorhbaatha, and seemed (as far as Dora could tell) to mean nothing to Vadrack. But Dora recognized the four specific syllables, in that very specific order, and she knew what NERUZAVIN meant.
With that, and nothing more—no words of parting, no handshake or exchange of blasphemous mouth-part fluid—Vadrack simply turned away and climbed back onto his deck.
And it was at that moment, that Deggorhbaatha felt the utter elation of knowing AT LONG LAST the trials of this quest were finally over. Weeks of sailing. Months upon endless months in the wastes. Dear god, the MOLTING. The horrors of the Moon-beasts and the “music” of their hideous, hollow pipes. The new Weiralai, even more terrifying than before—touched by the King. The recruitment of the soldiers of Leng. The return to the Dreamlands. That dreadful Mister Wanderlust and the hunt for the Shantaks. The terrible endless flight. The assault. The even WORSE flight, up up up to the moon…
Finally… it was over. ALL OVER. And now the hunt for the witch Thema Antea could begin.
“She has no idea what’s coming for her!” Deggorhbaatha cackled with fishy glee…
And the vision faded.
First Reference: Chapter 125
Other Notable References: —