Judging by that rather curious ship and its aberrant captain, I imagine you had rather an interesting voyage here.
Now, Inquisitor Maligaro... we must have his soul. He has most certainly returned to his old haunt, yet his manifestations are like wisps on the wind: there one moment, gone the next. While I am familiar with the phantasmal trails and tributaries that filigree this reality, Maligaro's exact whereabouts eludes me.
You should speak with these desperates who cling to this broken bridge, that young Templar scholar in particular. Their mundane knowledge must provide where my enlightened sapience cannot.
Our brutal construction nears completion and now only the wretched Doedre Darktongue remains.
Unlike her compeers who, in undeath, have yearned for the familiar, Doedre appears drawn to the old wounds of calamity. The cataclysm took Sarn and left much that a parasite like Doedre might enjoy.
I shall meet you in Sarn, where I hope you shall make swift and bloody work of that foul hag.
There was a time before the Beast, bathed in the shadows of lost memory, when men and women like you could ascend. Through rareness of quality and the adoration of their people, these few could reach out into the quickening mists of immortality and grasp the power of godhood.
Mind you, transcendence is never easy. Like the pains of childbirth, it reeks of agony, tragedy and sacrifice. The sacrifice most often being of one's humanity. That is simply the way of it. Those of us who seek the immortal throne live long enough to see ourselves become truly monstrous.
Let us go hunting. This time amongst the ruins of an encampment most familiar to you... once inhabited by your friends, the Azmeri.
Hmmm... Ralakesh. He's ruthless and cruel, with cunning unfathomable. Yet he bears one defining weakness. A fear he forged into chains of his own keeping. His is the terror of grasping too much and having it all slip through his fingers. It makes him irrational, and therefore vulnerable.
Ralakesh, the illustrious "Master of a Million Faces". I call him the God of Hide and Seek.
While other deities waged wars, spread their seed, and laid waste to whole empires, Ralakesh perched on his throne in a dark palace of ebony, choked with incense, blinded by obedience and deafened by a senseless cacophony of brass gongs.
Thankfully, he never had the courage to peek over the high walls he'd built, else the world might have been in trouble.
Into the most dreaded of thickets you must go, I'm afraid. For there, Gruthkul the Despairing sulks and schemes.
The Vaal laid waste to her kingdom and placed her slaughtered children at her feet. Grief enveloped Gruthkul, transformed her, flooded her mind with a singular thought. To share her suffering with those who had murdered her daughters.
Though she has returned, her sanity has not. There is no fury like a mother bereaved.
The tragedy is that our world, our kind, may turn something as pure and honourable as a mother's love into such a vicious weapon of wrath and butchery.
I only hope that Gruthkul will find her children, happy in her arms, in the realms beyond.
I wonder if Gruthkul would still grieve for her children if she knew the truth.
The Spinner of Shadows had no aspirations until Gruthkul's daughters plotted against her. They saw her power over the people, her miraculous potions, her intoxicating lusts.
They feared Arakaali, thought she might threaten their legacy. Yet that's the curious thing about spiders. They only leave their web when you force them to.
A temptress and a predator. Vaal legends say she crawled up from the blackest of pits during the creation of the world.
No, her beginnings were far more mundane, a mortal harlot whose endless lust for loin and lecherous delight saw her transformed into the very image of her dark desires.
'The Spinner of Shadows' they once called her. She sees herself as a regular goddess of love, and has the romantically forged temple to prove it.
That's where you'll find her. Yet there's little romance to the lady herself. At least, I doubt the corpses that now embrace her carapace would think so.
Many an artist of Azmerian descent has engaged in the sad worship of that sultry arachnid, but you looked her in those hypnotic eyes, and then ripped them out. She lies in her bed of sordid memory... alone.
A little of this spider yet creeps and crawls in my palm. A touch more power for my subduer of gods?
Answering the call of a royal invitation, I visited the Spinner of Shadows as an emissary for a small and fragile alliance of gods. Mostly weak deities huddling together in terror of being consumed by their greaters. At this time, Queen Arakaali ruled an empire, and so invited me to gaze upon her mighty works with appropriate wonder.
If I'd looked past this pretense, I may have chanced to see her hidden desire to have me share her bed. For years I lay trapped in her webbed sheets. Some days she enjoyed my prowess, other days we enjoyed each other.
Yet, this illusion of love and leisure simply veiled the morbid reality that I was not free to leave. I languished under her bewitching spell until the day the spider was betrayed by her own flies, and sealed within that temple of her own fevered making.
The tragedy is that our world, our kind, may turn something as pure and honourable as a mother's love into such a vicious weapon of wrath and butchery.
I only hope that Gruthkul will find her children, happy in her arms, in the realms beyond.
Many an artist of Azmerian descent has engaged in the sad worship of that sultry arachnid, but you looked her in those hypnotic eyes, and then ripped them out. She lies in her bed of sordid memory... alone.
A little of this spider yet creeps and crawls in my palm. A touch more power for my subduer of gods?
Our brutal construction nears completion and now only the wretched Doedre Darktongue remains.
Unlike her compeers who, in undeath, have yearned for the familiar, Doedre appears drawn to the old wounds of calamity. The cataclysm took Sarn and left much that a parasite like Doedre might enjoy.
I shall meet you in Sarn, where I hope you shall make swift and bloody work of that foul hag.