The Early Chronicles of the Oddlot I: 11. The Third Hag

We sorted ourselves out. With Leffe in such rough shape, he was in no condition to continue on with us. Dalvin, his oldest friend, volunteered to stay with the maimed dwarf, using what he could find in the skull cave to nurse him. While Nedwyn had great interest in exploring the skull caver herself, we convinced her that shiner things laid ahead of us, if she and 2zard were willing to help us finish the third hag.

“We might find information on how to get you home, too,” I offered. Strangely, the couple didn’t really find that an urgent need. Nedwyn seemed comfortable where ever she was, and 2zard was happy to follow her lead.

“Well, maybe we’ll find some other sort of magic on the third hag.”

“Magic?” 2zard said. It was hard to tell by his robotic voice, but the size of his eye lights increased to show I’d piqued his interest.

So, leaving two of the people I’d known the longest in this part of the world, though honestly it hadn’t been that long, I trooped off with: a half-giant paladin, a half-possessed human warrior, a slightly demonic looking tiefling sorcerer, a fully-chatty halfling rogue, and whatever the hell a warforged wizard was. And here I thought I might not fit into an adventuring company.

We got to the edge of the cliff and rigged our ropes together to allow for the fifty foot descent to a cave entrance in the sheer face of the rock wall. Nedwyn and I slid down together first, the most silent of the group. Enolo followed and somehow managed to keep his armor from clanking. 2zard and Tyrael came next, with Mordo bringing up the rear.

I almost called out to stop the warrior, for what I saw in the cave frightened me. The center of the chamber had been mostly filled by the enormous ribcage of a dragon. If I was a betting man, and I am, I’d have wagered that we found the bones of Grixmax. Bringing his soul back to it from within Mordo sounded like a bad idea, but then if he was topside with the ropes and our only escape, we’d be in potentially worse trouble.

Also in the cave, the nightmare nuzzled the third hag, a wretched and shriveled mockery of a woman. The hag turned to yell at something else flying around the high ceiling.

“That’d be an imp, less I missed my mark,” Enolo said.

“Imp!” the hag screamed.

“Told ya.”

“Imp! Get down here and get ready,” the hag continued. Then turning to where we hid, she smiled at us with rotten teeth. “We have company.”

Enolo and Mordo charged, seeking to end the hag where she stood. The old crone proved more agile than they figured, and easily side stepped them. She grabbed the mane of the nightmare as it bound toward the ceiling of the cave.

We moved in. Those of us with missile weapons switched to them, scoring minor hits on the hag and the nightmare.

The imp interposed itself between us and our targets. I felt a wave of something come from it, a charm. Again, my mother’s ancestry gifted me, this time with immunity to such magic. Tyrael, though, had no such luck.

“A unicorn!” he exclaimed. “How lovely!”

I checked the others and suddenly understood why I had seen a wall in the skull cave. 2zard enacted a spell that covered him with rocks similar to the cave around us. It must have been his illusion of a wall that fooled me.

Nedwyn, like me, had also not been affected. She dodged as the nightmare came swooping in. I fired a bolt that missed.

Nedwyn dropped her bow. “This thing will never bring down that big sucker! Hey, Mordo! Get me up there!” Mordo complied, heaving the halfling up at the nightmare. Nedwyn switched weapons, grabbed a hoof and badly wounded the Nightmare with her halfling-sized scimitar. Weaken by the cut, the nightmare shuddered and fell, dipping low enough that I could make a grab for it. I missed it, but snared the hag’s leg. Though we shot back up into the air, I tried to mimic Nedwyn’s heroism and land an attack with my rapier. I missed, but as the nightmare banked, I flipped up to mount the Nightmare myself.

I wished I hadn’t. Out of the pile of rocks that now hid 2zard, arrows of pure energy shot out and slammed into the nightmare. The hellish beast screamed. The hag screamed. Nedwyn may have screamed, but I couldn’t hear her over my own squeal. The nightmare’s head lolled to the side and we crashed to the ground. In a rare bit of successful swashbuckling, I flipped off the dead thing’s back and skidded to a perfect landing.

Nedwyn wasn’t as lucky, though she did manage to avoid the nightmare falling on her. She bounced off the ground and lay motionless. The hag landed the best of us all, some twenty feet away from me. Rage filled her awful face. She lifted her leg high in the air and drove it through the illusionary rocks. They disappeared and I could see she had pinned 2zard to the ground with her foot.

I checked to see where my companions were, if someone was closer than me. Tyrael, hands down and looking thoroughly enamored with the imp, was completely defenseless when it sank it’s claws into his arm.

“Why, Unicorn? Why?” he screamed as the imp’s claws pierced his flesh.

Mordo was closer to the hag and 2zard. He tried to hack off the leg that pinned the warforged, but the hag lifted it and flipped around him.

Enolo’s stony face gave way to a rage of his own. I supposed that as a paladin, the radiating evil of the rogue, the imp and the dracolich combined to drive him into a fit. He swung his sword with a force so mighty it was scary. Unfortunately, he lacked control. Mordo took the blow in the chest, a small dent forming in his armor.

“Ugh. Gross,” 2zard said as he slipped around the ichor of the dead nightmare. He launched his metal first into the hag’s jaw, snapping it around. He was no warrior monk, though, and scurried away as the hag snapped her head back. He roused Nedwyn.

“Fools!” she hissed like something out of the evil overlords of my stories. I expected her to run down our failings next, but she surprised me. “Why do you fight me, your loving goddess?”

Huh? What was she playing at? Then I felt a wave of magic like the imp had exerted, another charm. Again, it had no effect on me, but my two biggest allies could not claim the same thing. The rage faded from Enolo’s face, replaced by a look of utter love. Mordo’s sword dipped and, while not necessarily enamored with the hag, he definitely looked stunned.

“Oh, my handsome goliath,” the hag said in a tone meant to be seductive. “Do me one little favor? Kill this fool! Release the master!” She pointed at Mordo.

To my horror, Enolo reared back and plastered Mordo with a shield slam. The warrior went flying, then stopped in mid air.

“Tyr bless it!” I whispered.

Mordo’s body surged with muscle and a non-corperal power. He hovered in mid-air, a darkness radiating from his body as his eye turned fully black.

“Yes! Yes!” the hag cackled. She danced with glee.

Nedwyn gathered herself and attacked the hag from behind, landing such a back-stab that it surely would have ended the life of any mortal creature. The hag, though she shrieked, seemed barely effected by the stab.

I was too far away to attack. I tried a different approach.

“My goddess, you are the very picture of beauty. Tell me your bidding! I will bring you the world if only you would touch me, hold me!”

The hag blinked and her head cocked. Her tongue licked her withered lips as she drank me in from head to toe, lingering somewhere in the middle, than back up again. I raised my hand out to her and ran to her, like a beau running to his lover on a warm beach.

“Come here, you sweet morsel!” the hag croaked, running to me.

Right before we embraced, I slashed my rapier up, opening an awful wound in her torso.

As she recoiled, her hold on Enolo broke. His head was spinning, though, so his sword missed the hag. 2zard stood up and pushed against Enolo. I hadn’t thought that he could be charmed, but there he was. He waggled his fingers and lights exploded in the ribcage like fireworks. “Give peace a chance, gentle giant,” he said in voice both spacey and metallic.

“Master! Master! Master has returned!” the imp chortled as it danced around Mordo. “Tell me your bidding, Master. Free me from the orders of this unworthy hag!”

“You traitorous dog!” the hag yelled at the imp. “I’ll banish you back to hell!”

The exchange between the two gave me a chance to disengage. No one needed to tell me that if the dracolich got free of Mordo and into its bones, our chance of surviving plummeted. I sang to inspire Mordo, filling his psyche, the real part of him, with a power with which to break free. It wasn’t much, but the only next thing to do was what Tyrael had suggested in the swamp.

Nedwyn tried to hag again, this time aiming for her hand. Her aim was true, and the hag’s hand tumbled away in a trail of black ichor.

The hag did not falter, however. She drove the long nails of her good hand into Nedwyn’s chest, and the little rogue arched in agony and fell away. Then, she turned to me.

“You’re beautiful voice won’t stop the Master,” she hissed. “Nor will your pretty face!”

He clawed hand cut through my cheek before I could parry. I fell three steps back and felt the hot blood gush from my face.

“No!” Nedwyn yelled. I couldn’t believe the halfling had such stern stuff in her. Again her scimitar slashed down on the hag, this time taking her other hand. Disarmed, or dis-handed I suppose, she could do nothing to deflect my rapier as it flicked in. She only barely got her head out of the way, but not before I cut off her nose.

“Mordo smash!”

Yes! The mighty warrior had once again asserted his indomitable will over the dracolich. Going with a classic, he brought his heavy maul down on the hag, shattering her back.

“My life doesn’t matter! You’ve failed!” the hag spat. Mordo’s hammer came down again and ended further conversation.

I took in the carnage. The final hag was dead. The nightmare was, literally, over.

“Where’s the imp?” I asked.

No one knew.

“Where’s the unicorn?” I asked Tyrael.

“Flew away,” he said sadly, holding his arm.

“Your face,” Nedwyn said.

“Your everything,” I replied.

We all dropped then, exhausted and feeling more wounds than we had a right to survive. No one was in danger of dying, even Mordo who’d absorbed two blows by Enolo. He wasn’t exactly healthy, though, and drank one of the potions we’d taken off the kobold shaman. 2zard saw to Nedwyn’s injuries. Tyrael needed nothing more than his wound cleaned up and a bandage.

Seeing no one else in greater need, I recited my poem of healing for my damaged face.

Enolo sat on a rock, sulking.

“What’s the problem, fella?” Nedwyn asked him.

“Me,” he said. “I’m supposed to protect my friends, and here I went and almost killed Mordo.”

“She charmed more than you,” I said. “Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

“Also, no, goliath did not almost kill Mordo,” Mordo said. “Mordo feel pretty good.”

“You sure? You looked pretty hurt?” Enolo said.

“Nah, is good. Goliath not hit that hard.”

“Actually, you were in quite a bit of pain,” Enolo replied.

“Not really.”

“Yeah, you kind of were.”

“Nah.”

I cleared my throat. “Could we not provoke the guy possessed by a dracolich, in the dracolich’s lair?”

“Oh. Right,” Enolo said.

Though we badly needed rest, we dared not stay in the cave. We’d pressed our luck already by having Grixmax’s soul so close to its remains. We did, however, take a quick look around. I found a fine cloak of crimson and gold that smelled faintly of brimstone. Uttering a quick prayer to Tyr, I put it on. Other than continuing to smell of brimstone and making me look quite dashing, nothing happened.

More clearly, we discovered a macabre necklace. What looked to be a real eye had been encased in the pendant of a necklace. 2zard experimented with it and said it could be used to see in the dark.

Weary as we were, we took care when climbing back out of the cave. With our only other choice to try the treacherous swamp at night, we risked staying over in the skull cave. Dalvin greeted us and let us know that Leffe was resting and recovering, but had no great magic to reattach his feet. He had found some sort of magic bag and something he called a heartstone, a treasure from one of the fallen hags.

We took turns keeping watch throughout the night. When I finally got to settle my head down to rest, it was not without a strange dream.

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