Amara
“Mendax!”
Her scream was cut short as the scimitar of the screaming mutant came down mere inches from her forehead, cutting through the threads of her fringe.
She launched a firebolt at the Scorpioness on impulse, using the momentum to carry herself through the sea of sand and watch as the abomination reeled back and roared – it’s mouth opening to reveal a web of gnashing, insect mandibles.
Her eyes shifted to Mendax. He was just standing there, slipping into the sands, showing no awareness of his surroundings at all.
And when the stinging tails of the Lord of Bhashera came for him, it was Amara who had to jump to his defense.
Infernal Cloak: Activated
She watched the beast cry with fury as it retracted its tails, wreathed in fire, and she turned to regard the sallow face of the beast.
“Mendax!” She shouted over the din of Frezia’s rage. “We have to fight!”
He just stared blankly at the ground.
“Lokar…”
Another tail came down and threw them both back across the chamber, and Amara coughed up bouts of sand as she looked up to see the demonic beast glide through the air towards them, weapons raised.
She held her hands high and kept channeling her cloak, feeling the sands around her feet begin to melt and give way, causing what precious little footing she had to become even more uneven.
When the beast’s scimitars came down again, they did so while ignoring the pain of her fire altogether, and she felt herself trailing through the air once more, blood dripping from her cranium.
HP: -6
HP: 9
She felt herself going queasy again, trying to resolve the image of the monolithic Dominion Lord that crawled towards her again, completely at home snaking her way through the sands with her scorpion pincers.
She saw Mendax lying before her in a heap of fur and sand grains, shrugging them off and not acknowledging the impending danger at all.
“What – what are you doing!?” she roared.
Now he did look at her, turning around just as the Scorpioness charged them.
“Kimon – dead,” he said gravely. “Lokar – gone.”
Frezia roared with the certainty of her victory, rising to prepare her stingers for another strike.
“Why am I the one who was destined for this…” Mendax murmured. “Is this where I die? Here? With you?”
With little other option she took him by the arm and tried to shift him and then, seeing that her strength wasn’t anywhere near his, realized there was little else she could do.
GLANCE CHANNEL: Fireball
She aimed at the ground, jumped, and felt herself and the Gnoll fly from the trailing pincers of Frezia. They sailed towards the chamber mouth and fell just short of the edge.
“Damn it!”
Once again, Amara tasted nothing but sand and failure, and the inhuman roars of the Dominion Lord enveloped them all again.
“Why?”
Mendax was looking at her, now.
“Why are you helping me?”
She watched the Scorpion-woman eye her with pure hatred, and began preparing her next incantation.
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GLANCE: 30/40
The robe was helping. But, scanning the Lord’s stats, she saw she was barely even tickling the thing.
DOMINION LORD: Frezia, Scorpioness of Bhashera
LVL: 6
HP: 155/195
She could keep pelting it, but ultimately it could close the distance between them faster. She could maybe get off one or two motes of flame before the beast’s pincers found her throat…
Mom wasn’t here, and so all she had was her own words yet again to address her fallen soldier.
And how well have they served me so far…
When Frezia charged her this time, however, she loosed her firebolt with a solemn promise to the hound:
“Because your people didn’t die in vain!” she screamed as her fireball simply whizzed by the advancing beast. “This is it, right? This is the end. After this, you can go home. Like Kimon said!”
He wheezed. It might have been an attempt at laughter. She wasn’t sure.
“Home,” he scoffed. “Home was my Brothers. There is no home for me, now…”
Amara readied another fireball before she could even acknowledge his inconvenient bout of depression, but let it fizzle out at the Scorpionness’ next move.
In the blink of an eye, the creature dived.
It jumped, fell, and then melted into the sand dunes with as little fanfare as a professional swimmer.
Then Amara noted the slowly emerging tremors moving towards her feet.
She rounded on Mendax, grabbing him by his ragged shoulders, shaking him in desperation.
“We came so far! You can’t give up now. You just – you can’t!”
He stared back at her pleading eyes. “From the start, we were deceived…”
“Mendax, please!” she wailed. Then: overcome suddenly with a wild notion: “Are you a dog or a man!?”
She said this as the sands gave way beneath them and Frezia emerged, both gleaming blades at the ready, and aimed squarely at Amara’s throat.
She closed her eyes and heard the distinct *clink* of blade meeting blade.
Mendax was standing over her.
“Don’t,” he said through a grimace, struggling to hold back the strength of the mutated beast. “Don’t. Call. Me. A DOG!”
He struck her blade aside and flew at her torso, embedding his greataxe right in her abdomen, snarling up at her scream of animal pain. As the Lord’s second blade twisted and arced down to scrape the Gnoll’s back, Amara’s primed fireball knocked it clean, too.
“Prove you aren’t one then,” she said with an impish grin as she backed off. “Let’s take this thing down.”
He dislodged his blade and seethed at the spurting purple geyser that sprayed from Frezia’s open wound. He batted away her rending claws and dug his nails into her flesh, propelling himself up through sheer willpower to claw at her skull.
As he did so, Amara took aim again.
But not at Frezia.
This time, it was the Lord’s turn to feel disoriented: the sand around its pincers began to melt around it, succumbing to Amara’s sustained Flame Gout.
“Just try and dive now, freak!” she screamed, probably a little louder than was necessary.
Before the great Scoprion could respond with a roar of rage Mendax scratched at her throat, hoisted himself above her head, and brought his axe down to cleave through it.
Amara watched with terrified fascination as the Scorpion’s head flew back to avoid the blow, instead allowing the Gnoll’s greataxe to embed itself in her neck. Mendax’s grin of victory was short lived: in the next second a pincer speared him through the eye.
“Mendax!”
The scream from Frezia was now on the verge of frenzy, and Amara could barely focus on the sight of Mendax writhing in the air before her, trying frantically to claw his way off of the pincer that was beginning to pump poison into his eye socket.
Frezia’s two other pincers jutted out from her side and sailed towards him – and once again a timely fireball from the disoriented Pyromancer won the day.
Mendax fell in an agonized heap into the heated sands as Frezia drew back towards the egg sacks at the far end of the room, her form torn, eviscerated, and still burning from Amara’s conflagrations.
She watched it warily as she ran to her companion, dropping into a kneel before him.
DOMINION LORD: Frezia, Scorpioness of Bhashera
LVL: 6
HP: 80/195
Wounded and wary, just like an animal.
But so were they.
Mendax breathed deep and latched onto her with one blood-coated claw.
“Does she look…worse…than me?”
Amara ignored his delusional quip. She focused instead on the poison seeping from his empty eye socket.
She looked at him silent futility. Her voice died in her throat.
Her eyes flew to her hands and watched nothing but the power to harm run down the pale grooves of her palms.
Because that’s what I’m made for, isn’t it? To kill.
A sudden crack at the end of the room brought her attention back to the Scorpionness that called this place her lair. She had scaled the wall, one brown insectoid claw clutching her oozing neck and shoulder, and used one pincer to pierce a pulsing egg.
A tiny Scorpirex dropped to the ground, flailing around in its own mucas. Amara saw it and felt her heart sink. Those eggs – the entire wall in fact – it must be full of them. Infants. This place was their birthing chamber.
The mutant dubbed Frezia dropped down with the little one, inspecting it with an odd fascination almost approaching the love of a mother. The creature’s eyes opened, saw its progenitor, and cawed like a baby bird.
Then the mouth of the mother came down, and Amara watched as she devoured the babe whole, elongating her jaw like a serpent and forcing the entire creature down her pale throat.
DOMINION LORD: Frezia, Scorpioness of Bhashera
LVL: 6
HP: 150/195
Amara’s hands dropped, feeling the color drain from her face. The creature’s wounds had closed. It’s energy had returned, and it cracked its neck in satisfaction.
If every egg up there could be a source of life for this…demon…then they had been wasting their time, after all.
GLANCE: 13/40
She’d wasted her energy…all over again.
“Heh…” Mendax scoffed. “Dying with…the Lightbringer…isn’t that…new?”
She dropped to her knees with him, and looked again from her hands to the beast that was now charging them anew, rearing up for another dive that would end them both.
Her whole body shook, feeling the tremors as the demon raced towards them again.
“Go on…Amara…” Mendax choked, his life slowly draining away. “Send us out…with a bang.”
She could do it. She knew she could. She could finish it all, right now, couldn’t she?
The sands beneath began to shake.
Is that what you wanted all along, mom?
The Scorprioness rose above them both, bellowing its ferocious warcry.
And looking into the descending maw of the beast, she primed one last fireball.