Prior to Aroden’s tragic and mysterious death just over a century ago, the land of Sarkoris stood firm between the Realm of the Mammoth Lords and Mendev along the edge of the icy Crown of the World. The primitive Kellid tribes who called the land home lived in relative peace, and little changed for them from century to century. That is, little changed until that fateful night in 4606 ar, when a rift opened up near the city of Iz in the nation’s center and hosts of demons flooded into the realm. In that moment, Sarkoris was gone. Its people—or at least the lucky ones—fled into neighboring Mendev, Numeria, and Ustalav, but countless thousands were lost to the demonic invaders and the harsh environment as their once great land began to quickly resemble the chaotic Abyss. What was left of their home was now known only as the Worldwound.
Not long after Sarkoris was lost, scholars and collectors of esoteric lore began to make several connections between a series of obscure prophecies and the events that had recently transpired. More than a hundred years before, a Sarkorian oracle had been overcome by what was assumed to be a malevolent spirit and wrote relentlessly for weeks on end, creating what soon formed a vast library of tomes. Some called her mad, while others assumed she was possessed, but the end result was undebatable—she had written tens of thousands of pages of cryptic predictions about events which it seemed would occur over the next 500 years. When questioned later, the oracle remembered nothing of her months of continual writing, and she died shortly thereafter from sheer exhaustion. The library itself was housed in a Pathfinder Society safe house a short distance from Storasta and mostly forgotten about.
It certainly wasn’t on anyone’s mind when the world ripped open and the Pathfinders in the safe house fled for their lives with the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Recently, a Pathfinder initiate cataloguing crates of assorted papers as part of his training in the bowels of the Grand Lodge in Absalom came across a passing mention of a vast collection of insane riddles and ramblings.
Recognizing the quote’s connection to rumors he’d heard among novice chatter about a rising threat to the Pathfinder Society itself, he immediately alerted hissuperiors, who in turn passed the message all the way to the Decemvirate. Their decision was swift and their edict clear: the Society must retrieve this prophecy in full—as much as has survived a century of Abyssal destruction.
The Ten are not alone in hoping to find this document and mine it for a hint at what lies in the Society’s future. High-ranking members of the organization with loyalties to the Shadow Lodge are also keen to possess this seemingly accurate account of events to come. A Shadow Lodge agent named Caggrigar in Whitethrone has been dispatched with his best Pathfinders to retrieve the Sarkorian Prophecy first. While he is loyal to the Shadow Lodge’s cause, Caggrigar is not so loyal as to put his own interests second. A high-ranking member of Deskari’s cult outside of the Worldwound, the Sarkorian descended witch hopes to recover the prophecy for his own use, expecting to find it full of elevations about his lord’s pending conquest of the Material Plane. His allies know nothing of this plan, but if Caggrigar gets his way, more than a set of old books will be lost should the PCs fail; all of Golarion may bow before the Lord of the Locust Host.
