Early childhood
Dora Krannock was born on the 31st of Kuthona, the last day of the year 4669. Her mother was Thessika Antea, though she took her husband, Thom Krannock’s, name.
Thom and Thessika Krannock lived simple lives as herders and gatherers in the Numerian Plains, near the Blackpipe. Until the Baron rose. In a raid by the Baron’s men, Thom was murdered and Thessika was captured. Thessika lived the rest of her life imprisoned in the Baron’s castle, and it was there that she gave birth to Dora: born in captivity, the daughter of Nicholas Murea—aka Baron Feshka Nellit.
Dora was a curious child, gentle and thoughtful. She loved, more than anything, to read.
And she was exploding with psychic potential. This was not entirely uncommon among the children born near the Blackpipe in those days.
Every day, she tried… little things. And every once in a while, something would happen. A coin would move. A breeze would rustle. Energies would shift.
Dora never remembered much of her earliest years, aside from a general sense of darkness and depravity during her years in the Baron’s castle. But she never forgot the day she was branded with her father’s mark. Marked like cattle. He did it himself: he pressed the red-hot iron into his child’s neck while she screamed and cried. It was a pain she never forgot.
Loss and Consequence
And then it happened. In her ninth year. On the blue-tiled floor of the Baron’s throne room.
The Baron had all his wives and daughters in the throne room. They were sewing, and stitching, and knitting. And, of course, obeying the Baron’s every depraved whim.
Until Thessika refused.
What was the final straw that day? Dora will never know. But something snapped in Thessika Antea, and she said the word you were never to say to “Baron” Feshka Nellit. She said No. And all it took was one of the women saying no, for the rest to get that gleam of NO in their eyes.
Everyone in that blue-tiled room felt the shift. Something was happening. And if the Baron didn’t act quickly, there would be no going back.
So the Baron acted.
He began casting spells on Thessika. With the first one, Excruciating Deformation, Dora watched as her mother’s limbs twisted, and her body contorted, and she screamed in unbearable agony. And it only got worse after that.
Dora stood there helplessly, clutching her knitting, as her mother was brutally tortured. She didn’t know what to do. She felt so helpless, so alone. She knew she had to act. But the will to hurt, to possibly have to kill, it was not in her. She couldn’t do it. Her mother raised her, despite the circumstances, to be kind. To think. To trust. To forgive.
She had to become someone else.
And so, this beautiful, sensitive, loving, caring child—this child nearly exploding with psychic potential—she pictured a metal box, with a hinged cover, roughly the size of a lockbox, but bigger on the inside. And then she took every part of her psyche that was sensitive, that was thoughtful, that was caring, and she boxed it. She locked it away inside a prison in her mind.
She stripped herself of everything that defined herself, in order to release everything inside of her that was anathema to her, to make space in her soul for darkness to grow. To manifest. To become.
She unleashed her viciousness. Her vindictiveness. That which acted on instinct, instead of information. That which clung to slights and wrongs. That which sought to dominate. To punish. To hate.
And when this once-in-a-generation psychic boxed her consciousness, it worked.
Dora needed someone who could do what she was incapable of doing, and so she turned herself into that person. She created Anathema. She became Anathema. And then Anathema did what was necessary.
As the Baron cast the spell that would end his mother’s life, while he was momentarily distracted, Anathema raised her knitting needle and stabbed him right in the eye.
The Baron died, but not before his spell completed. Thessika’s head exploded and her trunk was left slumped over—a shattered monument to what happens when you say NO to the Baron—just as the Baron toppled forward and landed on the needle, face first, shoving it all the way through his head.
Anathema wandered away—left, up, right, up, right, down, up, left. She ignored the cries and chaos, nearly blinded by her tears.
And soon, of course, Weiralai found her. And nothing was ever the same again.
In the immediate aftermath, she knew what she’d done. She knew where she’d put Dora. But once Weiralai had her, she found she needed to be Anathema simply to survive. Returning to that lockbox was not an immediate priority.
And as time passed, it became less and less something she was even aware of. Or remembered.
Until finally, she simply lost it.
Because when Dora boxed herself, she boxed her own psychic talents with her, and Anathema—eventually Thema—retained none of them. She still had Dora’s razor-sharp mind, of course, but that mind was as psychically sensitive as a block of wood. It could figure out how to blow things up or summon aberrations from beyond the veil, but it could no longer read a soul, or plumb its depths, or unlock the mysteries of those deep, secret places inside of others.
Or herself.
Dora needed Thema. So Dora created Thema.
And then Dora sacrificed herself to Thema. And became Thema.
But Dora is Thema. And Thema is Dora. Two personas, but one body. One mind. One life. And in truth:
One person.
The Choice
When Weiralai took Anathema into her custody, she had no plan. No direction. She still believed she could capture Gavrony and Mej (not knowing that was never meant to be), so she dumped Anathema off with her ally Razanil, for him to have his way with while she continued the search for her murderers.
The following years, those years of Change and Transition, of adolescence, they were rough. And she had few Choices. And little Power.
But then something happened that was her Choice.
It was a Choice she likely would never have made if her life had not already been shaped by so much trauma. But still, it was a Choice she made. And she made it alone.
Thema Antea freed a devil to slaughter her captor, all to access the forbidden Knowledge that she sought.
And a road she never would have otherwise stumbled down on her own became her Path.
Exactly as Weiralai wanted. A soul corrupted in darkness. A soul Choosing a life of ruin and waste. A soul that could be molded by Nemira and her son to labor on behalf of the King in Yellow.
Not that this Choice was an immediate flipping of a switch. But it marked what she would later identify as a Turning Point. Perhaps a Point of No Return? And it would come to haunt her, before the end.
After the Choice
Twenty-five years ago, in Rozenport, Thema was sold to Haserton Pragmus Lowls IV, by Weiralai, as a research assistant. To help him in his studies of Carcosa and Hastur.
The research was intoxicating to 23-year-old Thema. A whole new world was opened to her. She realized that there were mysteries out there even more profound than those of this reality. There were visions, and journeys, and power to be had.
She was also, of course, on a lot of drugs. She needed to be changed. Miacknian Mun made the drugs and gave them to Lowls. Lowls gave them to Vatticus. And Vatticus administered them to Thema.
And they worked.
For years. And years.
Thema’s mind was opened, and she was made compliant.
And whether or not it was driven by the drugs, Thema became fascinated by Hastur. The story of a simple shepherd walking into the throne room of a palace and unleashing terror, it struck a chord. She imagined herself as the Pallid Mask to Feshka Nellit’s Queen Cassilda. And the thought of unleashing madness in a royal court gave her shivers of ecstasy.
This was also when Melisenn entered the picture. And those two hated each other from the jump.
Thema had a nightly ritual where she would try to quiet her mind and focus. There was something she’d lost, something she’d forgotten. She would sit in front of a mirror and imagine another version of herself walking around it. But every time she almost got deep enough within herself, every time she almost found what she was looking for, she’d be interrupted by a banging on the door.
Melisenn. Just being awful.
This happened over and over and over.
If there had ever been a hope that Thema could recover the Dora within her, it died during those years.
Nexuses
Eventually, Thema gave birth to Brayden.
Melisenn had given Lowls the idea a few years earlier: wouldn’t it be hilarious if Vatticus was fucking Thema? I mean, she was so drugged up, what could she do about it? A piece of her on the inside would be screaming in rage, but what could she do?
Nothing.
So, Brayden was born. And it came as no surprise to anyone—except Ray—how much she hated him.
Two years later, Lowls III died, and Nemira (supposedly), too, a month later. Lowls IV moved his entourage to Iris Hill in Thrushmoor.
It was actually Thema who gave Lowls the idea to keep his mother in the attic. It was an experiment of sorts. Nemira had given her soul to Hastur. She had delved deep into the mysteries. Would the “mysteries” keep her alive? Without food? Without water?
They did. In a way.
A year later, Thema was weaned off the drugs. Her devotion to Hastur was complete. The narcotics were unnecessary. They only got in the way of her fully exploiting her higher brain functions.
A year after that, Thema and Vatticus got married. Why not? By that point, Thema honestly thought it would be funny. Marry her rapist while a bunch of locals bled out in the Court of the Unspeakable One, far below Iris Hill? Hastur would approve.
And that is night when Thema was seeded with Xhamen-Dor. By Mun.
It was something she hadn’t known she’d been waiting for all her life.
By this point, she’d been Thema for decades. She’d been steeped in the worship of Hastur for years. She had murdered. She’d summoned devils. None of this was a life she’d Chosen, but it was the life she had.
And she was all in.
That’s the thing about Xhamen-Dor. Once He’s up in there, entangled in your brain folds, entwined in your consciousness, He whispers to you not just of Unspeakable Secrets, Endless Life, and Immortal Power, but also of Change, of Transformation, and the secret, undeniable Truth: that you are the worst version of yourself. You are less than the shit scraped loose by the cloak of an Elder God, in a stinking sewer, in a forgotten city that fell to ruin before it was even built. Yet even as lowly and wretched as you are, you can be a Change Agent in the universe and bring about cataclysmic Transformation.
The appeal is real.
Or, at least, it was real for Thema. And for Lowls. And over the many years they worked, theorized, and plotted together, they came to be, in many ways, like twisted siblings.
Eventually, fifteen years ago, Rony and Riptusk were sold to Lowls and everyone was under the same roof.
Thema, of course, immediately seeded Rony and Riptusk.
And there was an Incident.
Rony was slippery. He got out. And he started whispering the name. Damage control was tough. Some had to be murdered. Some were taken into Iris Hill as new staff. But a few slipped notice.
One victim wound up in Briarstone Asylum, where he committed suicide in the Northwest Tower one afternoon. Just one of six patients, sitting in their rocking chairs, staring out over the north lawn. As he slit his throat, he managed to get just half of the Inmost Blot’s name out in a feeble, gurgling croak. Not enough to infect the others, but it wasn’t long after that that Ulver Zandalus began drawing the lone standing stone on the island. Which he had never laid eyes on.
Soon he was drawing others: the ones in the hills of Thrushmoor. And the ones in wastes of Neruzavin.
Consequence.
After the Nexuses
Rony and Riptusk were first drugged into compliance, and then into the devoted worship of Hastur. Daria was born, and then died. And at age 15, Ray left for Cheliax.
For years, Thema spent all her time neck-deep in dark tomes relating to legends of Carcosa. Stroking the finger bones of the dead daughter she’d named after the part of herself she’d forgotten ever existed. And always, always Cultivating.
By five years ago, the hedge wall went up around Iris Hill. Lowls’ and Thema’s studies were progressing. The world needed to REALLY be kept out.
‘Cuz Lowls was cooking on something.
No one was totally clear on exactly what Lowls was trying to puzzle out. But isn’t that the way of closed little cults? There’s no need to ask questions: Hastur and Xhamen-Dor have all the answers! Take the little rewards that make you think you’re doing GREAT, and just keep reading, cultivating, and killing.
Years passed. Lowls spent all the county’s money on books, and Thema’s research practically exploded.
Ray eventually came back. He was promptly seeded by his mother. Why’d she waited so long?
Eventually, their studies lead them to the Oasis.
The Oasis
On the 6th of Sarenith, 4715, the party entered the Dreamlands for the first time.
Rony, Riptusk, Ray, and Vatticus knew almost nothing about what they were heading into. They knew they were going somewhere. They knew they needed to keep Lowls alive. They knew they were seeking someone called the Mad Poet. But that’s about it.
Lowls and Thema kept from them all knowledge of the Dreamlands, what it was, that that was even where they were going. They explained that they’d be going Somewhere Else, and that their only way back would be a command word which only Lowls could speak.
So they didn’t understand that they were in a dream. But they sure found out.
They met the Mad Poet. It didn’t go well. And they all died.
When they woke, it was almost a month later.
Thema was very concerned because this wasn’t how the ritual was supposed to work. Apparently, the rules were not Rules. Or the Rules were flexible? Or the Rules simply didn’t apply at the Mad Poet’s Oasis?
There was so much more to Learn.
The Quests
When they did wake up, they were all mad. None of them truly understood how lucky they were that Melisenn didn’t kill them when they were helpless. When they eventually recovered, Lowls learned about the need to bring Gifts to the Mad Poet, and the hunt for suitable Gifts began.
Lowls went to the Dreamlands night after night, sometimes with his crew, sometimes with hired mercenaries, sometimes with a mix. Everyone was filled in on the basics of Dream Travel. To a point. Just what they needed to know. Lowls, in his paranoia, made sure that the others were drugged every time they went. Even Thema. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea of his being asleep while the rest might wake up first.
Over and over they went. They did it in the guest rooms upstairs at Iris Hill: he and Thema had the beds, some of the others would get pallets to collapse on. Brayden and any mercenaries got the floor.
In the Dream, Lowls learned about the Mad Poet and passed the information on to Thema. In the Waking World, Rony and Riptusk secured books about ritual magic and brought them to Thema. Thema learned that you could use passphrases to bring you to a specific spot in the Dreamlands, but she had to create the passphrases—a process that took time. Months, in fact, for the first one she made.
They went after the Signet Ring first, on the night of the 3rd of Calistril, 4718.
They arrived in Brellin’s ballroom and arranged a meeting with the viscount, which Lowls took alone, while the others waited. For hours. And hours. Thema had been feeling like a true partner to Lowls, but being left out of this conversation gave her pause. And the others seemed to be left feeling troubled by the experience as well.
They secured the ring and woke.
In the waking world, it took a few weeks for Thema to finish the passphrase for direct travel to the Enchanted Wood.
They went after the Pard Tail on the 21st of Calistril.
Lowls was hopped-up and excited, talking up a storm. Thema stuck close to him, refusing to be left out of anything, and because of their similar mannerisms and Xhamen-Dor fungal growth, the Zoogs dubbed her “Evil Sister.”
Thema thought they should negotiate with the Zoogs. Lowls agreed, but Ray ran out of patience and strong-armed the Zoogs into taking them to the Pards.
The fight was brutal. Within moments, Vatticus, Lowls and Thema woke themselves up, just to ensure their survival. But Riptusk secured the tail.
They went after the Skull of Ghoul Royalty the very next night. Thema wasn’t sure she had her next passphrase sufficiently honed, but Riptusk egged Lowls on.
They arrived outside of Igguzqaiz on a cliff overlooking the Leng Ghoul necropolis metropolis. (Thema pointed out that this wouldn’t have happened if she’d been given more time to work on her passphrase.) There was a civil war brewing between two halves of the mighty civilization, and a group of insurgent arcanists were summoning outsiders to help them in their battle.
As the party materialized there, they all got glimpses into alternate lives and the experience was INTENSE. Thema was haunted by a glimpse of herself as a kindly educator.
With a different name.
She tried to brush the vision aside, but it burrowed in.
Lowls called an abort and everyone woke themselves up.
Except for Rony, apparently. He stayed. And he secured the ruby-encrusted skull.
In the waking world, once again, Thema begged for more time before they went after the Idol. She knew she could land the party somewhere in Sarnath, but she didn’t know yet if she could actually get them exactly where the idol could be found.
But nobody was listening to Thema.
Especially Lowls.
They went after the Green Stone Idol of the Water Lizard the very next night.
They arrived in the palace of King John of the Bone Crown, on the 10th anniversary of the razing of Ib. The mood of the place was muted. First, because of the storm brewing out over the lake. Second, the green stone idol (stolen by Lord Dunsany and his conquering army when they destroyed the city of Ib) had vanished the previous night. It had been held in the temple of Tamash the Illusion, but the high priest had been found dead that very morning. Before his demise, he’d scrawled a single word onto the empty altar: DOOM.
The idol wasn’t in Sarnath anymore.
The next logical place to check would be Ib, but they hadn’t really thought of this quest in trekking terms, and so they wondered if they weren’t better off waking up, having Thema see if she could learn more, and then popping back in. Not having processed yet what happens when you leave the Dreamlands and return to the same location, they woke.
In the waking world, Thema dove into research. After many weeks, she couldn’t find any writings on what happened to the idol, and said they should just return, and think of this quest as a longer-term, exploratory hunt.
They returned to the Dreamlands on the night of the 8th of Gozran.
They arrived in the reign of King Edward the Learned, on the 37th anniversary of the razing of Ib. The city was celebrating. The anniversary of the slaughter had become a local holiday. They were partying—and the waters of the lake were rising. The group trekked around the lake over the course of four days and found the ruins of Ib. They walked the empty streets until they found a small stone altar on the lakeshore, upon which sat a glowing green idol. When they approached, Ib Shades rose and killed the whole party before they could wake. All except for Lowls, who got himself out in time.
In the waking world, everyone but Lowls “woke” in a catatonic state. It took a month, due to the general lack of healing and counseling he had access to, but he eventually got the group on their feet again.
They went back on the 3rd of Desnus. They arrived during the reign of King Howard the Mad, on the 75th anniversary of the razing of Ib. Nobody died this time, but they had to prematurely wake themselves.
And then this just went on, and on, and on, and on.
They’d go. It would be later. The waters of the lake were higher. The storm was closer. They’d trek around the lake. They’d enter Ib. And the Ib Shades would be too numerous to overcome.
They went nearly every night. Sometimes they’d pause briefly, but never long enough to truly recover.
Thema was a machine at first, but after a time even her will began to falter.
When the party went to Sarnath on the night of the 26th of Sarenith, they finally cleared the Ib Shades, but as Lowls stepped forward to grab the idol, Bokrug rose from the lake and the sight drove them mad.
They all woke blind. Their eyes, according to Melisenn, seemed to be functional, but none of them were receiving visual input. It took time to heal and cure this psychosomatic damage.
On and on this went. Over and over. Sometimes they’d make through the Shades, and sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d avoid seeing Bokrug. But sometimes they wouldn’t. Trauma. Madness. And mind-numbing repetition.
In the end, it was Ray who finally got the idol
Back in the Waking World, Vatticus, basically wanting to die at this point, revealed to Thema that he and Ray had killed Daria. And Thema talked to Melisenn that very same night.
Everything was falling apart, but there were still three more gifts to get.
On the 11th of Lamashan, they went to Dylath-Leen. They orchestrated an attack on Quaveandra and left with the Heartstone.
Go, go, go. They went after the Captain’s Tricorne on the night of the 12th of Lamashan.
The bleakness hanging over the crew was bad at this point. Riptusk and Ray didn’t even bother to show up. Lowls decided to rely solely on Thema for this one. She descended the stairs alone.
When she was done with Vadrack and had his hat, she looked around at who she was, and what she’d been reduced to, and she found herself looking at the vial of silver dust she always kept hidden on her person.
The vial had been a talisman of sorts, all her life. She’d always thought of it as a reminder of her own resourcefulness. But now it screamed to her that she was trapped—as surely as the Salikotal Devil had been.
And something broke in her.
So she dropped it. She left that piece of herself behind.
In the waking world, the next morning Thema used a Contact Other Plane spell. The Pallid Mask, Hastur’s emissary, responded. From him, she learned of the Mad Poet’s requirement of a Sacrifice. And she learned the nature of Lowls’ intended Sacrifice:
All of them.
They were the price Lowls was willing to pay to find Neruzavin.
On the 13th of Lamashan, they went to Arventon for the Red Webbed Foot.
When they arrived, there was bitter disagreement about how to put together an expedition to the Black Lake. The fighting got so heated that Lowls just pulled the plug and decided six gifts were enough. So everyone poofed out.
Everyone, except Thema.
She stayed.
She found a scholar at Humbrecht University with access to the secret vaults in the darkest depositories of knowledge. She killed him and took his identity. And then she dove into the dark lore locked away below Humbrecht, and she researched the city’s origin.
For decades.
She, of course, went slowly—but surely—insane as the years passed.
Her lucid dream body began having lucid dreams, inside the Dreamlands, of being an amorphous being with no physical form. She became a dream inside the dream of a dream. Then she dreamed that she was somebody else’s madness. That she was nothing more than somebody else’s emotion, so warped and twisted that it couldn’t do what it actually wanted to do.
Which was to just Let Go.
On the morning of her eighty-fifth birthday, when she finally found the information Arventon had kept hidden for so long, she walked out into the streets and spoke the Secret Name of the city. She destroyed everything and everyone there, and then, as Arventon shattered, she was shunted back into her body. And she finally woke up.
After 37 years.
The next morning, she went to the others. And they listened to her. They listened when she spoke of freedom. Of an end to the struggle. An end to Memory. And the Self. An escape, not only from the bleak pointlessness of life, but from all the horrors awaiting them after death.
And rather than killing Lowls, they chose to march to their own Oblivion with full knowledge of what was about to happen.
Lowls had thought he’d outsmarted them, but in the end they outsmarted him and welcomed with open arms the Sacrifice he intended to make of them. He would steal nothing from them. They would make a Choice. And they would finally be free of the lives Weiralai had cursed them with.
On the night of 14th of Lamashan, they entered the Dreamlands and traveled to the Mad Poet’s Oasis a second time. They presented their Gifts.
And Lowls made his Sacrifice.
He drowned them all in the pool.
The Sacrifice
But when the Moment came—the moment Thema felt everything she was, all she knew, all she’d learned, and all she’d lost—from the depths of her soul, clinging to the faint belief that she didn’t deserve this, that this wasn’t her fault, hoping against hope for another chance, a little piece of herself cried out.
As the waters filled her lungs, Thema’s soul cried out to REMEMBER.
And Thema did remember.
She remembered the little girl named Dora who’d died that morning all those decades ago. She remembered who she was and who she could be. And this psychic’s mind—caught in the tide between worlds, entangled with the mind of a Great Old One, fueled by reserves of mental power beyond the grasp of most mortals…
She REMEMBERED.
As that powerful mind slipped into oblivion, she boxed the monster she’d become, and she sank into those waters as Dora, hoping against hope she could somehow defy her cruel fate.
First Reference: Chapter 150 (Part 3)
Other Notable References: —