The Scavenger Storyline

Rosetta's account of the myth behind the Scavenger's Daughter, given in the one room the gods cannot listen in on. Before the current pantheon there were older, wilder gods; the new ones banished one to Sheol, drove others into the Nothing and murdered the rest, and where a god fought too hard they went after its worshippers instead, since a god whose worshippers are all dead or converted simply fades. The all-tree, both a real tree in the dungeon and a figure for existence itself, gave fruit to those old gods, among them Nekhebit, now called the Scavenger Mother of Mothers, a life and protector deity pictured as a vulture, the one who cleaned up after the others. She was not allowed children and had three anyway: a son, a daughter and a centipede. The daughter, Apito, was made pregnant either by the all-tree or by herself, and it was Apito who brought her mother down last of all the old gods by absorbing the last of her worshippers. From there the versions diverge. Sometimes Scolopendra is the Scavenger, so the Daughter comes of a union with her; sometimes it is the son, who exists in the empty plane cleaning up the souls that escape, and is also called the first mortal despite arriving too late for that; sometimes all three are one divine trinity that has been split. Every version agrees on the child: she carries the power Apito had, enough to erase the pantheon and start over, with the addition that she can take the powers of gods and use them herself. Rosetta's own reading is that the dungeon keeps every version and picks whichever suits it, because myths are what people build when they cannot explain what they see, the way her own culture explained a mobile red algae bloom as an ocean goddess with sapient blood.

Book 8 appearances

• Chapter 69 — Carl asks Rosetta for everything she knows about the Scavenger storyline and gets the old gods, the all-tree, Nekhebit as the vulture Mother of Mothers, her three children, Apito's rise over her own mother, and three competing candidates for who the Scavenger actually is; Elle summarises it as a vulture lady with three babies and a headache, Donut compares the Daughter to a television character, and Carl is left unconvinced that the sand ooze the party already fought is any kind of god killer.

Related entries

• Nekhebit (Character)
• Apito (The Oak Mother) (Character)
• Scolopendra (Creature)
• The All-Tree (Place)
• The Nothing (Place)
• Sheol (Floor 15) (Place)
• Rosetta Thagra (Character)
• The Scavenger's Daughter (Celestial Patch) (Item)
• Samantha (Psamathe) (Character)
• War Mages (Lore)
• Warlord Akuma (Character)
• Vengeance of the Daughter (Storyline) (Event)
• The Celestial Thorn Room (Notification)
• Caprids (Character)
• The Guild Add-On Room Bug (Lore)

Browse

• All Dungeon Lore & Know-How
• Everything debuting in Book 8, Chapter 69
• All of A Parade of Horribles