Gurgaramata

The stories passed down in every region I have visited describe a creature shrouded in dark smoke that left a trail of smelly haze wherever it traveled. There are so many accounts of this from the various peoples that - when combined with the Ascetics own record of the Rite - I feel confident this description of the Gurgaramata is accurate.
— Korik Anglefar, The Rite

The Birth of a Beast

The origins of the Gugaramata are the muddiest part of its history because there are lots of different myths about how it came to be. The most common belief in Naemore is that it began life as the first companion - the only one to preceed the Rite of Mon-Aere - to a sickly child born in the Giant's Shadow. The beast and the child were forcibly separated when the beast was captured. Eventually the beast broke free and began to search for its person. However, the child died before their companion could find them. Normally when a person dies, their companion dies or vanishes as well but this companion was different. It was transformed by its person's death and became the Gurgaramata.

The Search Continues

Even after its transformation the Gurgaramata continued its search for the child. It swam every river, climbed every tree, and scoured every cave. When it had run out of places to search it traveled to Mount Kalna and climbed up the mountain slopes until it reached the top and looked into the caldera of the volcano. It hadn't yet searched this placed that smelled of sulfur and descended into the pit of magma. It was difficult to see in this pit of molten rock and gas but it searched and searched. Eventually it saw something move in the smoke and desperately tried to get to it jumping from stone to stone but slipped and fell into the magma. The Gurgaramata had already defied death once and would do it again and again, as many times as it would take to find the child.

The Monster of Mon-Aere

What emerged from the bit was not what had entered. Burned and deformed and shrouded in a choking smoke. From then on Mount Kalna lay dormant, its energy absorbed by the Gurgaramata. It is this beast about which most stories are told. The beast that ravaged the countryside and laid waste to forests. The beast that drank rivers and turned fertile soil into the Parchland. The Gurgaramata left the Giant's Shadow having upturned every stone and traveled far always leaving destruction in its wake. Generations later it began to make its way back to Mount Kalna. This time the Aerean Ascetics had devised a ritual - the Rite of Mon-Aere to defeat the creature. On that day it came through the sky like a burning storm consuming everything in its path. The rite was performed and the Gurgaramata was erased from the world but it fought to hold on - to shun death one more time - but was defeated, leaving only the Scar.

Varied Depictions

The mortal form of the Gurgaramata - the shape it had while it was merely a companion - is inconsistent across different tellings of the tale. In some it is a black dog while in others it is a three-legged sabertooth or a giant bat. These inconsistent tellings all have one thread in common, the Gurgaramata was always an animal. Companions can take on many forms and animals are only one which scholars believe indicates that it was an animal of some kind - the scholars that don't insist that it couldn't have been a companion because it existed before companions were introduced to the world by the ritual that defeated it. Others argue that companions only exist because the rite was performed against the Gurgaramata, a companion itself.

Wrath Given Form

In some tellings of the story the child is killed by other people and the Gugaramata seeks vengeance against those that killed them. In this telling it changes form to the burning cloud when it finds the body of the child and then consumes any humans it can find.