Chapter 8 – Part 12

The Carrion Tribe that followed the hag who had Blood Crescent in her sights was greater in numbers than anyone had suspected. The hag had carefully recruited members of other tribes who were defeated in battle, choosing to keep some of them rather than slaughtering them all.

She was a clever being, really. It had helped her survive all of her sisters’ assassination attempts.

Fifty of the most expendable had been sacrificed just to gauge Blood Crescent’s defenses. She was not pleased that their loss had taught her nothing other than the fact that Tharashk had acquired an incredibly quick warforged. She had plans of getting the Tharashk wealth and weaponry and using it to assimilate a group called the Moon Reavers. Thus strengthened, she would turn to a careful consolidation of power in the southern Wastes.

Only now she had lost an additional three hundred followers in the attack on the Tharask expedition. The human sorcerer had blasted them with magicks that she hadn’t credited to him. He apparently had a significant number of Tharashk scrolls on him that boosted his natural powers.

And a wand that cast spells that shielded the soldiers from the hag’s magic missiles, confound it.

Her forces were down to barely four score, and they had again surrounded the remains of the Tharashk forces. Six men total, including the human sorcerer, whose remaining spells were weak, pitiful things. Six men, desperately using the carcasses of their dead mounts as makeshift walls against her worshippers.

She hung back, waiting to see the last of it rather than participating in the hand-to-hand combat. If not for those disgusting shield spells, she would be firing her bolts of energy – out of boredom if nothing else – but melee combat was for the lesser creatures.

Annoyingly, she was running out of lesser creatures. She’d thrown away the work of a decade, apparently. It had taken her that long to get to nearly five hundred warriors, and now she had less than a fifth of that. Likely her soldiers would finish off these few rabble in minutes, but it hadn’t been worth it. This whole thing would injure the Tharashk outpost, but not fatally. They’d replace the magic-user with another in weeks, and whatever the artifice was that kept her from entering Blood Crescent ethereally would still be functioning.

A waste.

And thanks to this mysterious warforged, a waste that had produced no serious intelligence.

Something about the warforged made her think she should investigate him more. Perhaps even open up channels to the other fiends. There had been some attempt to contact her a few weeks back, but she had ignored it. She’d gone a century without direct contact with the rajahs and their servants, and she could easily go another century more. Their arrogance was disgusting. Everyone with sense knew that the hags were formed from Khyber’s first drops of blood, not the tiger-men who came later.

She watched as a Tharashk soldier fell, finally succumbing to multiple club blows. Her tribesmen began to pour into the space that the half-orc had been slashing at with the greataxe.

And then everything was spoiled.

She screeched with rage as the warforged jumped high in the air, tackling a whole knot of her worshippers. They screamed with rage and fear, and the Tharashk soldiers hooted with relief and delight. The warforged did not stop moving, dodging blows, kicking stone clubs away from her followers’ hands.

“Kill him you idiots!” she cried, first in her infernal tongue, them in their own, primitive language. But they could not. Oh they occasionally struck the warforged, but only with glancing blows, mere scratches. The warforged hit every time his feet and fists flurried around, or so it seemed. Soon the Tharashk soldiers were merely giving the warforged breathing room, rather than fighting for their lives. Soon thereafter her followers began running, declaring that the stone-and-wood thing could not be killed.

She swore she’d make a paste from their livers. While they watched.

“Stand and fight!” she howled, walking forward. She fired one of her magical missiles at the warforged, and she had the satisfaction of seeing it raise a small, smoking pit on the thing’s back.

The warforged turned around, and from over a hundred feet away she could swear she saw glee in its eyes.

“The hag is mine!” the warforged yelled, somersaulting under the legs of her troops. She hit him with another magical missile, raising another insignificant pit on the thing’s leg. She panicked as he grew closer, firing an enfeebling ray that went wide of its target.

She was pulling out her heartstone to flee into etherealness when he knocked it from her hand.