... Weird idea/inspiration/insight I got from out of nowhere:
What if the Great Maw and Hashut are related? An endlessly-gluttonous Chthonian divinity. Appeased by the Ogres via never-gluttony and food. Appeased by the Fire Dwarfs by the piling on of slaves and gold. (What is this, some kind of dragon, dragon god, or mutant dragon, or divinely ascended/descended mutant dragon?)
That is: some people posted the theory that '
Huh. Maybe the Dawi Zharr are
enslaved by Hashut, and appease him with slaves and sacrifices, and can never escape him...' (No wonder they'd be pissed; the Ancestors hadn't miraculously saved them from it. Of course, in this quest's lore, I think the North Dwarfs and the (Far)East Dwarfs were... basically independent, splinter, Kingdoms. So. In this quest's lore and backstory, they might not have been fully worshipping or being fully ruled over by the Ancestor Gods. Which might be a reason why they weren't miraculously saved by them. But, admittedly, you probably can't fully expect the Ancestor Gods to save you
anyway if you went off to the North or East and said "Screw this, I want to do things my own way." The Ancestor Gods might not be
able to save you if you do that sort of thing. But, that does not mean that they would not feel (ir?)rational resentment at being screwed over by fate and not having any divine backing.)
And then recently I had a thought to myself: "... What if the Comet the Cathayans summoned and hit the Ogres with...
wasn't the arrival of Lavos (
"Laaa-vooos!") like we all thought. Maybe the Cathayans didn't bring him forth from the skies him... maybe they just
woke him up.
Maybe the Bighuge Comet wasn't them calling down Lavos. Maybe it was just them... ... knowing
exactly where to target it. In order to
wake him up. And probably piss him off. ("If you cast this spell, you will destroy a great many kingdoms..." "
Which kingdoms? I've heard this story before, I know how it goes!" "Oh right, sorry -- yeah, it's just the Ogre Kingdoms getting 210 percent wrecked, don't worry.") And/or strike him with a comet of warpstone in the head and mutate him. But probably just wake him up, injure him, and make him want more and more food to appease.
Anyway. This is, again, totally in the Wild Mass Guessing category. And based on pretty much nothing but looking at a few similarities -- Hashut and Great Maw -- and coming up with another explanation of what the Great Comet of Cathay was or did.
Namely -- maybe there is something in the ground in the Warhammer Fantasy planet.
((No, not the same kinds of beings as from the Orcslayer novels. ... Actually I think those may have just been weird Chaos Spawn, or a weird ancient race that had converted to Chaos, like Dragon Ogres and others did, and mostly died out. No, this is something more primeval or primordial; like the magic trees, or some of the watery leviathans of the deep. Except these being beings of the crust and of fire.))
Some old, hoary, chthonic beings.
And in the Mountains of Mourn, these old subterranean beings dwell.
And maybe one of them became Hashut, enslaving some Chaos Dwarfs. And one of them (or maybe a lot of them; maybe they melded together into the Great Maw?) became the Great Maw. Or maybe it's the same type of divinity. Or related. Or maybe it's nothing at all.
Again, just interesting Wild Mass Guessing-tier stuff. But, well... It's interesting to think about.
