On the night of the 27th of Pharast, The Prisoner contacted Bash, Dabwick, Grip, and Pandora while they slept and sent a series of images:
It began in an incredibly jarring fashion. Without any feeling of falling asleep, and without any of the adjustment and softening-of-the-edges that the subconscious mind does with most dreaming experiences, what it felt like for the companions was that they closed their eyes… and then:
BANG! The sound of the bell!
And they were suddenly thrust, mid-stream, into the ongoing story of the Great Race of Yith on Golarion, as Time raced forward. (Or, at least, what the four mortals considered to be “forward,” given their limited perception and understanding.)
A storm (which is the collective noun) of the ancient enemy, the Flying Polyps, arrived on Golarion, wrapped in their shells of air stolen from the last world they conquered.
As we had seen they do.
And the party could start to make these creatures out: nauseating towers of flesh, eyes, mouths, and tendrils, over 30 feet tall, writhing in the air, each surrounded by a strange howling vortex of sucking wind.
The Polyps laid claim to two sites on the shore of a great lake in the northern hemisphere, and one site at an immense outcropping of basalt in a vast desert in the southern hemisphere. They built their standing stones: three in the desert, three at a hilly location on the northern lakeshore, and they began to build the next three on an island at the mouth of a river, but before they could finish the third cluster, the Polyps in the north were wiped out in a terrible pyrrhic battle by an army of Serpentfolk.
Undeterred (and uncaring), the Polyps in the south scoured the basalt pluton with air and grit, carving out a vast metropolis, a cruel mockery of civilized life.
And then they found the Great Race, in their (at that time) cone-shaped, fungal bodies.
As we had seen they do.
And the party could start to make out the bodies of the Yithians in some more detail: lumps of fungus in a perfectly conical shape, erupting with tentacles, pincers, eyes, and tubes.
And the Flying Polyps launched a genocide. Afterward, they enslaved the surviving Yithians and used them as playthings to satisfy their sadistic urges.
And the next Dark Age of the Great Race began.
As we had known it does.
But the war against the Flying Polyps continued.
The bell tolled again…
And Bash, Pandora and Grip’s minds were forcibly ejected into whatever dreamscape found them next.
But Dabwick remained. Watching a flash of white, a winged creature of some sort, soaring above ancient Golarion. They decided to follow, and in the process turned into a magpie. Dabwick-as-magpie soared at supersonic speed over a vast, 2,000-mile-wide desert in pursuit…
And then they woke.
First Reference: Chapter 173
Other Notable References: —