In the Act I Epilogue, the party experienced a series of visions while departing Briarstone Isle:
A BELL tolls.
It’s 4718, and four companions row across the surface of a mist-shrouded lake nestled at the heart of a land of hauntings and terrors. Their brows all furrow at the same time as the throbbing in their head starts. And they hear echoes of distant voices…
REMEMBER!
HIDE YOURSELF!
SURVIVE THIS!
DESTROY THEM!
While meanwhile…
Somewhere far away, across a continent, across an ocean, in a cell of grim granite, something stirs. Something alien. It stirs, because…
Somewhere even further away, across another ocean, across a vast desert, there is dead city slouching by another lake. And beneath that lake, something is GROWING. And as it grows ever so slightly—momentarily fertilized by the thoughts of mortals that merely know its name—the ripples are felt for miles.
Over jagged mountains, raptors of gargantuan size scream. Beneath rolling desert hills, the sand worms roar. In deep, shadowy caves, the scorpion people hunker down and steel themselves for the worst.
But back inside its cell of granite and its cell of dying human flesh, the alien mind chafes. The stakes are too high. But it cannot find them.
“They can’t remember. This shouldn’t be possible. FIND THEM.”
The BELL tolls.
And in their boat on Lake Encarthan, four exhausted, broken companions are lanced with excruciating pain as echoes and agonies tumble through the darkness in the depths of their minds.
Though it appears to be possible for memories to be removed from the shelves of the conscious mind and extracted from the caverns of the unconscious depths, perhaps memories may live on in some form… in some fleeting, faint, unreliable, yet still present form… somewhere in the mists and fog, in the part of the subconscious mind that taps into the Dimension of Dreams.
And maybe there, in the Dimension of Dreams, all that the companions know and all that they knew, lives on.
The lenses of mortal perception may be too limited to find them. But perhaps the senses of an alien from beyond the stars are quite different. And so it continues to search.
The BELL tolls again.
And things fill in a little for the companions. The voices from the Act I Prologue and the visions from the Act I Interlude, they remember them now.
First Reference: Act I Epilogue
Other Notable References: —