-Elemental forms.
A fire shrine has provided guidance. Specifically..
You are on tan-coloured sands, with the sun rising in the distance, behind a string of distant hills. Behind you there is nothing, but long stretches of dune-covered trackless waterless desert.
Uncle was able to narrow this down with some effort. It'll be somewhere in the Great Western Desert, the high, deeply landlocked tan sands far west of Mosral City on the western continent.
There is a wind shrine on the east side of Rustian which you had to skip. As you once more plan on heading up with trade goods, it'll be a costly detour to hit that one up. And it wouldn't actually give you the form, simply point you to where you need to go to actually acquire the forms.
-Nautical letters to the museum pirate.
Quite doable. The village is along the coast, and you should be able to get this done with a boat and a day.
Added.
-Gods that hate spellcasters.
"The main problem is that magic is independent of the gods. Dorren is not a clerical caster, and doesn't rely on the gods to do anything.
Arngrim is a clerical caster, but he's channeling the Concordat. In a place of power, it may be possible to set something up to shut down an opposed clerical caster, but the problem with that is we're going to be fighting a caster channeling the Concordat on the Isle Perilous. It's the reverse situation.
I shouldn't need to worry about being cut off. A good conversation or two and a couple weeks to plan it out, and I shouldn't have any trouble channeling whatever abilities I get right in their faces, although there isn't going to be anything spontaneous, like the red balls of Klamati or that blue creature belonging to the Tulian City-Cult. As for Klamati", at this Alice nudges Sessha, "It's kinda Klamati's hat to avoid getting shut down, even when someone wants to stop that from happening. Sessha has nothing to worry about on that front."
..Something else comes to Alice's mind.
"Straight up god-on-god fights are rough, brutal, and usually quite weird. The gods don't usually throw things in, all-or-nothing, on any one fight, no matter what's going on. It does still happen, however..
..but it gets weird. Sometimes they fight each other to nearly nothing, and retreat, having solved nothing and depleted their power for decades. Sometimes one wins and the other mostly vanishes in a puff of nonsense, for any length of time. Could be a few weeks. Could be forever. Sometimes you end up with new gods this way, from them stripping power fragments from each other, into new gods. Sometimes it even gets into god sex, and well.. that's probably not a good idea here.
I'm not sold on going weird just to counter Dorren. It might be useful, very useful, but I think Dorren and Spar are probably pretty damn good at handling weird. Spar, because 'I kill you now', is an
incredibly simple and straightforward plan when things go weird, and Dorren, because a mage with a spell list long enough to require its own library section probably has some stupid trick he can pull."
.."Still, if you want weirdness, there are some god options. And they might be useful.."
-anything especially unique in the world that's directly on the way
Well, you just came this way, so you've seen the best places. There's the Bite, which you visited. There's Robot Antarctica, which you just left. So nothing particularly stands out on the return journey as you having missed that.
-Ancient map
Uncle: "The map dates to the time of the arrival of the Concordat, several thousand years ago, right around when Trence came along. So it predates Trisamore."
Deep in the southern icy lands there's a larger island, bigger than the Isle Perilous, but not that much bigger. Far Eastern Hemisphere, maybe icelocked, maybe not. Uncle knows nothing about it, implying that it hasn't been visited post-Trisamore. Trisamore likely knew about it, but there is no guarantee they actually did anything with it.
Unknown Coastal Swamp City in the Western Continent. Uncle doesn't know about this one as well, but he has a number of theories. Theories he's been unwilling to tell the rest of you to keep speculation down. It's significantly out of your way, and you'll have to arrange a trip there at additional cost or separate from your cargo. It is, however, not a voyage of exploration necessary for the previous choice.
Various places in the northeastern desert. There are known ruins in there, but these are quite new to him. No telling what you might find there. Could be amazing treasures, could be houses buried in sand. Very, very much out of your way at this time.