In Chapter 108, Dora performed psychometry on an old, discarded tattoo needle the party discovered in the Enchanted Wood:
She saw the exterior of a tawny-colored silken tent. It was nearing dusk in some brutal rocky desert environment. The shape of jagged mountains could be seen in the distance by the light of the falling sun. The air was thick and dry and hot and stale. Weiralai, the Stranger, sat beneath a canopy created by the expensive tent, wrapped in her silks and leather. She was sharpening her rapier. She seemed pleased with herself.
Next to her, exposed to the sky, where he’d been left for the past several hours, a young Gruk lay in chains and manacles. He wasn’t nine years old any more. It was hard to tell exactly how old he was because orcs grow to maturity much faster than humans. He seemed more like an adolescent than a child, though, even though he still hadn’t quite grown into his full size yet.
He was in a period of Transition.
He was battered and bruised, and splattered with blood… though the blood didn’t appear to be all his. The needle was tucked into a seam of his left boot. He always had it with him. It was much newer at this time. No rust at this point.
The Stranger finished her work and turned her alien face to study the half-orc. She dragged a claw over one of Gruk’s arms, nudging at the partially-completed tattoos. “These. What are these?”
It took a moment for Gruk to generate enough saliva to croak out a response. “The Scourge.”
A moment passed. The Stranger seemed displeased.
“Say. More.”
“Our Lord. The Sun”
“Speak the name.”
“Nurgal.”
The Stranger cocked her head. “The demon Nurgal?” Gruk just nodded. “You worshipped this thing? Your idiot clansmen?” Gruk nodded again, weakly. She laughed. “And these sigils…?”
“Not finished… Too young… Not time yet…”
“Do you know the rites?”
Gruk nodded. He seemed on the verge of passing out.
The Stranger writhed upward to a standing position. She raised her arms to the darkening sky and howled a hideous cackle of glee. It lasted an uncomfortably long time.
Her hollow, bitter laughter echoed through the campsite around them. A dozen (or so) gnolls had tents of their own, and were cooking what looked like orc meat over the flames. Hulking, muscular bodies coated in tan and black fur. Grotesque, leering, slavering hyena faces with cunning, dead eyes. And so many blades.
All eyes turned to the Stranger and watched her as she laughed. Soon their sharp canine noses picked up the smell of each other’s fear. They watched with growing anxiety as Weiralai stooped over the young orc-ling, listening eagerly as Gruk whispered to her what she wanted to hear.
By the time the sun rose the next morning, the gnolls were staked and chained in a circle around Gruk. They howled in rage, and desperately tried to break their bonds, but Weiralai knew a thing or two about imprisoning people. They’d been stripped of their clothes and armor. They were helpless. They were witnessing their last sunrise and they all knew it. These men with the faces of dogs—or were they dogs that almost looked like people?—they pissed themselves and writhed and screamed and threatened and begged. But their barking fell on deaf ears.
Gruk himself was chained as well, but the Stranger needn’t have secured him. At this moment, the poor unfortunate soul thought he’d outsmarted her. He thought the god of his people was about to give him the power to defeat her—not knowing that that moment won’t come for many years.
Over the next six hours, as Weiralai urged him on, Gruk spoke the prayers he’d been learning since he was able to form words. He used jagged blades heated on stone slabs to remove the proper organs. He drained the proper fluids and mixed them together with the blood from their veins and an inky tar that pooled in the lee of certain rocks out here (if you knew how to find it). Though he had all of his fingers, his work was crude, and excruciatingly painful to the victims. But he wasn’t trying to prolong their suffering. This was not torture.
This was sacrifice.
He mixed the secretions and created his ink, and then slowly, painstakingly, as the sun pounded mercilessly down upon him, he completed his crude tattoos with this needle, this tiny implement given to him by his brother after he’d finished marking his own flesh. And as the sun hit its zenith in the sky, Gruk’s art was complete. He licked the needle clean and tucked it back into the seam of his boot.
Then he finished off the gnolls, beneath the hateful glare of the Demon Lord he was raised to cherish. Their part in his ascension was over. They were just meat now. It’s how he was taught to think of them.
And it was easier this time: killing.
And this time… it was a Choice.
A choice made for Power.
The Stranger fetched a whip encrusted with salt and handed it to Gruk. Gruk lashed himself for an hour. At the end, he collapsed to his knees.
“Is it done?” Weiralai pressed. “Is it done?”
Gruk shook his head wearily, then leaned down and scooped up a full handful of sand. Certain that his fortunes were about to change forever… and fully cognizant of the consequences, too… he leaned his head back and poured the sand into his mouth. He gagged and hacked, but knew he had to swallow it. All of it. The pain was excruciating. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. The world wavered and he blacked out.
The Stranger watched breathlessly for an endless, silent, still moment.
Then, WHOMP. His dark tattoos briefly flared bright red and Gruk wrenched up to a seated position, hacking and coughing great gobs of sand out of his mouth. He felt it. HE FELT IT. He felt stronger already. He turned to the Stranger with a vicious grin so obvious, he didn’t realize how pathetic and pitiable it looked to his immortal captor, this moment he thought he had beaten her.
“You are bound to him now?” she asked. “Your soul is his?”
“That is it. Now meet… your—”
Gruk didn’t even get the end of his threat out before Weiralai’s blasphemous mouthparts exploded out of her body and latched onto him, holding him still. A pair of lips opened amidst the heap of vile flesh cocooning him, and they whispered into Gruk’s ear.
“When your Lord claims your soul after the blasphemies I will make you commit… give him a kiss for me.”
And the vision faded.
First Reference: Chapter 108
Other Notable References: Chapter 150 (Part 3), Chapter 174