Dorotea awakens on a desolate beach marred by millions of pieces of broken glass. Her hands and legs are webbed with networks of cuts that ebb and flow gouts of blood with the tide. She crawls to her feet. Her stomach giving her horrid pains. She is shocked to see her body polluted with a parasite. She knows the signs of pregnancy but she can’t believe it. Time past and present are lost to her but she knows she is not yet a woman and under no circumstance should she be pregnant. She has never laid with a man, and has no reason to believe in miraculous conception.
Dorotea falls to her knees in the sand. Eyes pooling while a rancid spasm of vomit builds in her throat. She screams and pounds the sand with her fists, forgetting the glass shards and cries out. Going into convulsions of pain both physical and spiritual. She sees flashes of her sisters and brother in trouble. Stark scenes of violence in malevolent catacombs. She remembers the evil smirk of Barstowe, the haunted eyes of his Djinn, the tired eyes of clowns just in it for a buck and a cot to sleep.
Overcome by sickness she spouts out endless streams of putrid poison from within her bowels while tearing at her wet dress. She feels lightning and great tumult of violence in her bones. Her fingernails ripping backwards with the strain of purging this darkness from her womb. Her eyes running black with makeup down her face in a deathlike visage. Her skin pale and bruised she looks up to see the horizon beyond is wreckage of some ugly land. Brutalist architecture of un-ornate stone and brick blasted some unknown shade of beige and white. But something is wrong with this place. A miasma is in the air, brown and smoky it burns the eyes. She smells chemicals and decay. Beyond what is normal for the seaside of rotten fish and scuttled boats. Something industrial and malicious.
Before her in this sprawling Necropolis is no life save for birds and bones of ancient life. It is a graveyard of half submerged ruins, falling at severe angles. On every surface is something nasty. Tens of thousands of red bulbous masses stream over roofs down walls and blighting whole cinderblock towers with some hideous debris. Walking among the decay she sees what the red blobs are, a dried up and wind whipped school of blood red jellyfish left behind by some phantom black wave that has long since left these creatures writhing in pain, stolen from their home in the depths and stuck in limbo, spending eternity in some pained state of Undeath. She feels sad for them but also disgusted as their translucent spines seems to blow free in the wind. Tangling around her legs like invisible thorny vines as they whisp by.
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From behind her she feels a heat, something massive racing from the direction of the sea. She gasps as it looks as if the sun has turned black and begun to fall from the sky. A fallen star coming directly towards her, seeking her alone for eradication from somewhere deep in the blackness of space. She looks to see a mighty streak of black and purple flame that rips her ear drums as it crosses over head. Slamming into the ruined city of Blighted Sepulchers. The wind is knocked out of her while the air itself seems to vibrate with a monumental forces of the higher spheres of the universe. Every where around her facades crumble, towers of petrified corpses fall into powerful blasts of powdered stone and asbestos.
From the center of the blast radius she sees a moving shape. Mercury, The Black Knight, rises from a crater of molten glass. Dorotea is speechless as he walks up to her. She can’t place why but she feels an unease. She slowly reaches out and lifts the face plate of his mask revealing the true form of Sorsos. With a snarl he plunges a flaming sword into her belly. She feels as if the blow would vaporize her soul to dust but the opposite, she feels more real than she ever has.
While the shrieking black form of a slithering deformed baby is pulled from her stomach. She looks and sees something writhing in its death throes that would be described as looking more like a deadly spider, a crab and a cockroach than a giant angry baby with skull features more like a troll or goblin than man. Seeing this vile demon freed from her soul, she feels like something profound was lost as she again slips from one world to the next. One word on her lips, “Lamashtu”. She doesn’t know what it means but feels a maddening itch fill her soul.