Auntie Dirtha Bonebender
A hag who first appeared at Grit's camp to collect her cauldron — seven feet tall, hunched, and carried on swirling dust. She was known to the court records of ancient Ramkheret as She Who Speaks to Empty Places, the woman of no noble house who married the Lord of the Eternal Sand three hundred years ago and walked the desert ever after.
Her true name — broken into three pieces and hidden across the trials of the Sunken Pyramid — was Imetka.
Her Nature: Dirtha was mortal once — a merchant's daughter from the eastern reaches who walked into the desert with nothing. She found something there. Something answered when she spoke her name to the deep sand, and she came back with everything. She bound herself to Ramkheret the king and gave him years — three hundred of them — but she kept forever for herself. When he finally tried to break free, she released him rather than keep him bound any longer. "Men. Even dead ones."
Her sisters were Granny IceTooth and Mother Malice.
Her Reach (in life):
- Traveled on the wind and in the water; could be at the oasis at any time
- Wove mirages through dust elementals to lure travelers off course
- Transformed living creatures into other forms — lizards, tortoises, birds — and bound them around her oasis
- Spoke to empty places and they answered
The Bargain: Grit was bound to her by a deal involving raw magic and potions brewed from cactid remains. Madam Helena had been singled out for special attention since their first encounter at Grit's camp.
The Game: Dirtha traded in deals — "One truth for one thing freely given. You choose I give, a deal's a deal." She drew bone cards over Helena and Aldric and summoned creatures bound to each — the Tower, the Hanged Man, and a third card (Judgment) she put away. "That one's not for today."
Her Defeat: In the depths of the Sunken Pyramid, the party assembled the three pieces of her true name — the first two paid for with a Feywild favor that Kouzlo will owe twice over, the third sealed inside the clay heart of the king-golem and broken open by Thalen's Oathbow. Imetka. Spoken aloud, the name unwound her. She was reduced to bone, then to sand, then to nothing.
Her last words, rattled out from a skull half-buried in the drift:
"THE TOWER. RUIN THAT WAS UNINVITED. THE HANGED MAN. THE DROWNED KING. EVERYTHING WAS TAKEN. JUDGMENT… The empty throne… They weren't your fortunes… they were mine…"
Her Sisters' Verdict: As Helena lifted Dirtha's bone deck from the sand, the chamber chilled and Granny IceTooth and Mother Malice stepped through the wall. They did not regard the party at all. Mother Malice opened a mouth that was nothing of any honest creature and swallowed Dirtha's body whole. Then both sisters vanished.