In the Act III Epilogue, the party experienced a series of visions while awakening from the Mad Poet’s Oasis:
Dora, Grip, and Vik hover in the terrible abyss that lies between Sleeping and Waking. Between Now and THEN. The void between lives. The void outside of Time. All is darkness. And the darkness is eternal, without beginning or end…
Until:
In the void there is the sound of a BELL.
Grip and Vik know it now. Very well. They heard it twice a day, day in and day out, for years. It’s the bell at the Shrine of Thaffaar, tolling out over Okeno: over the Skindock, over the Fleshfairs, over the Shipwreck and the Circus… tolling dawn or dusk, the time of change and transition, to the city’s myriad residents: the Governor, the Princess, the Master of Auctions… the gnolls, and humans, and ratfolk… even the Corpse Orgy must surely hear it, down in the Sweatways.
They know this bell well, and they even know exactly where it’s being heard from: inside Blossoming Thorn. Biting Lash’s stronghold.
Then there’s a series of WHIRS and CLICKS. (And a… BUZZING?)
And then a voice. Flat, genderless, inhuman:
“Locating.”
It’s not language, per se. It’s a word. Or an idea? In their heads.
“Locating.”
The BELL tolls again.
Then…
An image explodes into their minds from across the impossible void. They see Okeno, from above: a yellow city baking in the sun, dry as a bone despite the Obari Ocean surrounding it on one side and a towering ring of mist-covered mountains enclosing it on the other.
Then…
Now, they’re in the city. At street level. They hear a gluttonous cacophony of growls and barks, like hyenas squabbling over a carcass. They hear screams, human screams, screams of pain and anguish. They see flags: of chained skulls, of burning whips, of inverted ships. They see banners, in a riot of different languages: Kelish, Mwangi, Osiriani. And a truly weird concoction that baffles Dora, for it uses the Abyssal script, but not its words. Vik and Grip recognize it at once, though they cannot read it: it’s the written form of the Gnoll tongue.
Then…
Now they’re viewing a building: a three-story, 100+ feet tall, perfectly circular fortress of grim granite. It’s Blossoming Thorn.
Then…
CLOSE UP: a face. They see the face of an old woman. Human. Brown, wind-scoured, leathery skin. Eyes cloudy with glaucoma. Long, thin, wispy gray hair.
It’s the Prisoner.
She looks up from the floor, stares right into their souls with her cloudy gray eyes. And without opening her mouth, she speaks. A direct transmission of her thought directly into the inside of their minds.
“There you are. At Last.”
A single tear wets her left cheek.
“Now… WAKE UP. SAVE ME!”
And at long last, they do wake, in Dabwick’s living room in Cassomir. On the 23rd of Pharast, 4719.
First Reference: Act III Epilogue
Other Notable References: —