Zoratha, The Time Hag
The Birth Beneath the Dying Sky
Zoratha was born in the aftermath of the Great Eclipse War, a conflict that scarred the land and drew Krorone’s shadow across the world. During the darkest hour of that celestial calamity, three infants emerged into the world—each crying not with innocence, but with something far more ancient.
Zoratha came first. When she took her first breath, clocks stopped in the surrounding city. Sundials refused to cast shadows. The air grew thick with stillness, and several nearby midwives swore they aged a year in a blink. Her sisters followed: Agasyl, whose presence made dreamers weep in sleep, and Eryndra, whose birth knot unraveled a tapestry that had predicted generations of births.
The locals believed the children were cursed—a prophecy in flesh. Their father had long since died in the war, and their mother, herself trembling from visions and haggard from grief, refused to surrender them to the city’s decree of execution.
That night, she fled into the desert, clutching all three to her chest, chased by the fear of her neighbors and the cold howls of superstition.
The Orphaned Daughters of Dread
She did not survive.
Her body was found days later, frozen under the desert’s frigid night sky. But the children lived. Their cries had drawn something ancient, something watchful. Their bodies were wrapped in midnight-colored cloth, untouched by frost. The one who found them was Lorthys the Nightsewn, a hermit-witch who wandered the shifting places between mortal realms and shadows.
Whether drawn by pity, prophecy, or the scent of power, Lorthys took them in.
She raised them in an abandoned shrine carved into obsidian cliffs, its halls echoing with forgotten rituals. There, the girls were taught the lost languages of dread, the art of weaving emotions into magic, and how to bend reality by manipulating the unseen strings that tie all living things to fate, time, and sorrow.
Zoratha’s Nature Revealed
Even among the three, Zoratha was different. She never cried. She never slept easily. Her gaze was unnerving—focused, quiet, like she was always listening to something no one else could hear. She could predict when things would fall, when lightning would strike.
Lorthys quickly identified her domain: time—but not just its passage. Its will. Zoratha would later say that time wasn’t a river—it was a predator, hunting all things. And she alone could walk beside it.
She began stealing moments from animals, pausing their deaths to study the edge of life. She dissected shadows to track how they bent around choices. And slowly, she began collecting regrets, bottling them like they were currency.
Though the sisters were raised as one, Zoratha grew into the leader—not by force, but by inevitability. She was always first to speak, first to act, and first to know.
The Pact and Rise of the Weavers
In adolescence, the sisters performed their Pact under Lorthys’s guidance. They reached into the Hells and were answered by Lord Vrothak, the Decayed Sovereign, a demon of rot, entropy, and endings.
Zoratha’s bond with him was deep—an echo of her own philosophy. If time hunted all things, Vrothak was the rot it left behind. She wielded his gift with terrifying grace: decay made elegant, seconds that could shatter bone, and spells that made entire days unravel like old cloth.
As the Weavers of Dread, the three sowed fear across the land. They unraveled armies by breaking morale before blades were ever drawn. Whole families were cursed into forgetting they had ever been born. Zoratha wove timelines into traps. She once cursed a man to relive the worst hour of his life every time he blinked.
But her ambition was not conquest—it was control. Not of others, but of fate itself.
The Fraying of Unity
For years, the Weavers of Dread were inseparable—a trio of sorrow, time, and fate bound not just by blood, but by their shared pact to Vrothak. Yet within this unity, discord simmered. As they matured into their domains, the differences in their philosophies grew stark.
Zoratha, ever drawn to the unraveling threads of causality, began testing the limits of her power. She conducted unauthorized temporal experiments, manipulating battlefield outcomes, resurrecting brief echoes of the dead, and attempting to alter historic events—not just observe them. To her, time was no longer something to bend; it was something to rewrite.
Her sister Agasyl, though loyal to Vrothak, began to fear Zoratha's reach. Agasyl's power fed off despair—the natural decay of hope. But what Zoratha sought was dominion over certainty itself. If she could change outcomes before they occurred, then there would be no despair. No endings. Just rewrites. Zoratha’s pursuit of “perfect causality” threatened to erase everything Agasyl had built her power on.
Unable to confront Zoratha directly, Agasyl turned to their third sister—Eryndra, the enigmatic weaver of fate. But by then, Eryndra had already withdrawn. She had grown disillusioned with the pact, seeing it no longer as a gift but a cage. Vrothak’s rot had touched every part of them. Their bodies. Their thoughts. Their futures.
Eryndra proposed the unthinkable: sever the pact. Not to destroy it, but to reclaim control. To live free of demonic tethering. To wield their dread as their own, not as extensions of Vrothak's decay.
The Severing and Exile
Zoratha was incensed.
To cut the tether was to cut time itself, to sever the source of her momentum, the ink of her narrative. And more than that, it meant submission—admitting that power must be relinquished for the sake of balance. She saw it as cowardice. As fear.
Agasyl, torn between her two sisters, ultimately sided with Zoratha. Not out of ambition, but because losing the pact meant losing herself. Without Vrothak’s power, her despair would fade into silence.
When Eryndra attempted the severance ritual, Zoratha and Agasyl intervened. The confrontation shattered the coven bond. Words became hexes. Shadows turned to claws. And in the end, the ritual failed—but not before permanently scarring their connection.
Eryndra, broken and betrayed, was cast out, her sigil burned from the shared grimoire. She disappeared into the mortal realm, her fate hidden from prophecy.
Zoratha and Agasyl remained behind—still tethered to Vrothak, but the Weavers were no longer whole. The harmony of their dread had become discordant.
Zoratha Alone
Though she had won, Zoratha felt no triumph.
In private, she began to question Vrothak. His decay was inevitable. Predictable. And Zoratha hated predictability. She had bent time to her will—should she not now bend her patron? The idea bloomed into obsession: undo the limits he imposed. Break past entropy. Move beyond dread.
But Vrothak was a god of endings. He gave power to close stories, not rewrite them. And so, he remained silent. Distant. Perhaps even wary of his own pawn.
In that silence, another voice emerged.
The Whispering Veil
He was not a god to her at first. He was a theorem—a phenomenon wrapped in denial, erased from history so completely that even time dared not acknowledge him. And for Zoratha, that was irresistible. To her, Vecna was a paradox made real: a god who was forgotten by all, yet could still speak.
His words were unlike Vrothak’s commands. They were seductive. Quiet. He didn’t demand power—he offered authorship. Control. Secrets. Truths even the gods feared to remember. And above all: the power to rewrite the Weave itself.
Where Vrothak promised endings, Vecna promised revision.
And Zoratha, for the first time in her existence, felt like she could become something more than a herald of decay. She could be the author of history itself.
She didn’t renounce Vrothak—not openly. Not at first. But she began acting without his consent. She stopped answering Agasyl’s summons. She vanished from dread rituals. She began laying threads across timelines—not as traps, but as anchors.
The Conduit Between Realms
Using her mastery of time, Zoratha identified astral confluences—fractures in the ley lines where reality bent thinner, where the Astral Sea lapped at the edges of the world. These places had been sealed by gods long ago to prevent any outsider from crossing the veil of stars.
Zoratha unsealed them.
She used fragments of failed timelines—shattered versions of herself and others—to fuel the lattice of an astral conduit, one capable of serving as Vecna’s anchor to the world. The process was meticulous. It wasn’t a summoning. It was a correction, as if Vecna had always belonged, and she was simply restoring the memory of his presence.
She did not tell Agasyl. She did not seek her sisters. She no longer needed them.
They had clung to decay, to despair, to fate. Zoratha now wielded truth.
Or so she believed.
The Final Stand
Her ritual came to fruition during the events of Campaign 2. The world began to twist—portents unraveled, futures folded into themselves, and the sky above the Astral Veil pulsed with forgotten symbols.
It was then that the Five Guys, the adventuring party who had stood against divine schemes before, uncovered her plot. They tracked the disturbance to the threshold of the conduit, where time bled like a wounded animal and stars shimmered with Vecna’s unholy breath.
The battle that followed was not of this world.
Zoratha fractured the battlefield across competing timelines, dragging her enemies into echoes of futures where they had failed. Her last act was to sacrifice her own place in time, anchoring the portal to her very existence. But in doing so, she exposed the core of her power—and the Five Guys shattered it. Zoratha collapsed, her body flickering between childhood, age, decay, and nothingness. In her final moment, she reached for Vecna, believing he would pull her across the Sea.
But Vecna never touched her.
Because Vecna never needed her.
She was just the door...and she had failed.
Comments