Bel took a moment to push her snakes away from her eyes, hefted her procured pilum, and charged at the knot of fighting that surrounded the rest of the gorgons. The dhvaras archers had been taken out – Bel guessed by Crecerelle – and the two flying gorgons were occupying the remaining garuda. That left the dhvaras warriors who had surrounded the gorgons, two rows of dhvaras deep, with spears in the back and wicked, curved short swords in the front. The five gorgons had backed up to the stairway, using the narrow space to protect their flanks. Orseis occasionally darted forward, hurling her spear through a dhvaras or two and then retreating before she could be stabbed in return.
Despite a good number of the dhvaras being dead or petrified, they seemed determined to push forward. The gorgons were still vastly outnumbered; at any moment the sheer weight of the dhvaras would win out. Bel shook off the lethargy that followed her transformations and charged.
She struck from the side, taking advantage of the restricted views from the dhvaras helmets so they would’t see her coming. She hurled the pilum through the back of an unsuspecting dhvaras and jabbed her metal nails through the gorget and neck of a second, killing them and ripping the essence from their body. As she shook the body from her hand, she punched a third dhvaras with a liquid shockwave, spraying bits of body and metal into their companions.
As the dhvaras turned towards Bel, and the rest of the gorgons pressed forward, encasing the feet of several dhvaras in ice and making quick work of the distracted front line. As their discipline broke, some of the dhvaras lost their composure and made the mistake of looking a gorgon in the eyes. Several of them turned to stone, and their formation broke.
Bel felt a rush of triumph, but then the air was filled with the blaring of the dhvaras’ war trumpets. She turned and saw more of their tall, armored forms spilling from some of the openings, and the retreating group rushed to regroup with their allies.
“Crows,” she cursed, “why were those ones hiding? Or were we not important enough?” She looked over her sisters and her body chilled when she saw a growing pool of blood.
The horn blared again and Bel’s pulse jolted with horror. She looked back and forth between the dhvaras and her dying or dead sisters and grit her teath. They couldn’t turn back, but she also couldn’t imagine them surviving another round with the bloodthirsty demons from the fire layer.
Then horn blared a third time, but choked off like a dying bird.
Bel looked into the distance, pushing eye of the huntress to see what had happened. She could see small blobs of green spilling out of some of the entrances on the far side of the cavern. They swarmed over the armored dhvaras in a way that she found familiar.
“Scrattes?” she wondered aloud. “I guess that’s what the other dhvaras were doing.”
Whatever the details of their fight were, Bel didn’t care. The scrattes’ arrival gave her a chance to check on the other gorgons. She rushed to the fallen members of her tribe, and felt bile rise in her throat when she saw that one of them – Papilloun, an outgoing gorgon with tattoos of flying creatures up and down her arms – was already dead. Fortuit emerged from hiding and began walking over. When she pulled a small knife from her belt, Bel looked away to the second gorgon who lay on the ground.
The second one was Oculaire’s friend Crapaudine, and she was still alive. She was bleeding out from a gaping would through her torso though, and Bel didn’t think that a body could spare as much as she was spilling.
Orseis stood to the side, her tentacles twitching helplessly and her skin a terrified white as she stared with apprehension at the corpse. Bel rushed to her side, patting the cuttle-girl as she quickly checked for injuries.
“I’m fine,” Orseis said hoarsely. “Go help the gorgon.”
Bel nodded and hurried to Crapaudine’s side. She put her hands against the other gorgons wound and attempted to staunch the flow of blood with her coagulation abilities. The hot liquid continued to seep between her fingers, the flow too fast and heavy for her abilities to staunch.
With a flutter of wings, Cress and Oculaire landed next to them. Oculaire cried out in dismay and her snakes shook their tails with emotion as she rushed to her friend’s side. Cress looked desperately at Bel, and Bel could see the frustration of a helpless leader in her eyes.
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Bel grimaced. Her own abilities weren’t working – the blood was leaving the injured gorgon too quickly. Didn’t we have another healer? Bel thought frantically, before remembering that it was Crapaudine herself who had some healing abilities. The gorgon had gone deathly pale, and she barely responded to Oculaire’s entreaties as the winged gorgon desperately squeezed her hand.
As Bel clenched the two sides of the gorgon’s wound together, she saw the other gorgons tense in her peripheral vision. She felt a group of hearts approaching and whipped her head around. Her eyes widened in surprise – and then relief.
“It’s you!” she cried out, stupidly. The scratte didn’t understand her, and she didn’t understand him, but they recognized one another. It was the same shaman who had communed with Bel’s mother, the one who had lead her and Orseis through the fire layer during their descent.
Cress and the other gorgons looked between the two of them warily, ready to fight but not certain that this was a foe.
The scratte waved his arms in the air, proclaimed something grand in his shrill voice, and lifted a familiar, multi-limbed totem from his neck.
Bel held out her hand, motioning for him to drop the totem. “Whoah, hold on to the drugs for a minute, I’ve got to save my friend.”
Bel gestured at the injured gorgon. The scratte squinted and tilted his head, seemingly confused by what Bel was doing. A scratte who had accompanied him leaned in close to his leader and screeched something into his ear. The shaman made a surprised snarl and rubbed his chin, apparently considering the problem. Then he nodded decisively, waved to a couple of his followers, and trotted to Bel’s side.
The other gorgons stepped forward protectively, but Bel waved them back.
The scratte ran his fingers along the side of his body, where a long, thick scar ran from his armpit down past his waist.
Bel glanced back at the suffering Crapaudine. “You’ve recovered from a bad wound like this before? You have an ability that can help?”
The scratte patted his scar proudly.
Bel turned to the other gorgons. “He’s going to help, I think, maybe,” she explained. She tried to put some confidence into the tone of her voice since she and most of the gorgons still didn’t speak the same language.
Cress understood her intent and waved the other gorgons back, although she gave Bel a skeptical look. Bel could only shrug in response – she couldn’t say for sure that the scrattes weren’t going to try putting their eggs in the injured gorgon, she just knew that her own abilities weren’t enough to save her.
The shaman and two of his helpers arrived at their side and he squatted next to Bel. She recoiled slightly at the feeling of his thick, root-like hairs rubbing against her skin, but she didn’t want to let go of Crapaudine’s wound. One of his helpers reached into a sack and pulled out a few round, puffy fish, handing a pair to the shaman and keeping a couple for himself.
“What–” Bel began, but she had barely begun asking the question when the scrattes squeezed the fish until their jaws gaped and jabbed them, teeth first, at the gorgon’s side. Their teeth clamped shut as the scrattes loosed their grips.
“What!?” Bel screamed.
The helper added another fish to the side of the wound, and the gaping hole was pulled closed with the combined jawpower of the fish. Bel tentatively let it go. The wound was closed, but it had not bee sealed, and blood still oozed from between the flesh.
Then the shaman pulled a small knife from his side and cut off everything below the heads of the fish. Blood and ooze gushed from a small organ in their middles, pouring forth with what looked to Bel like an unrealistic volume. The ooze bubbled and inflated as it contacted the air, quickly transforming into a thick foam that hardened as Bel watched. Soon the large wound was hidden beneath a flattened puff of material that looked like bloody snot, and the bleeding had been stopped.
“I didn’t know scrattes could use tools,” Crecerelle remarked with a mixture of fascination and disgust. She still regarded the small, green creatures and their hairy, sagging skin with distrust, but she had relaxed considerably once they had treated the injured gorgon.
Bel shrugged. “These ones are weird.”
The shaman shoved his hands deep into his helper’s sack and pulled out a bladder that sloshed with some liquid. Bel did her best to avoid thinking about where the bladder had come from, and especially not the way the color of it seemed to match the skin of the dhvaras.
The shaman shook it and nodded with approval at the sloshing sound from within. Then he put it to Crapaudine’s mouth and tilted it, spilling a large amount of a blood-red potion into and around her mouth.
No, wait, that’s just blood, isn’t it? Normal blood doesn’t smoke though, does it?
Craupadine’s eyes shot open as she spluttered frantically. The shaman nodded with satisfaction at a job well done – the gorgon didn’t look good, but she was no longer bleeding out, and after a coughing fit that left her exhausted, her breathing returned to a regular rhythm.
The shaman didn’t waste any time, quickly lifting his multi-limbed totem while one of his helpers began striking a fire onto it from a pair of stones.
Bel sighed at the sight, remembering the headache that had followed her last encounter with a totem. “Orseis,” she commanded, “let Cress know about these guys while I’m out.”
“There are better ways to talk with Lempo, you know,” she grumbled. “Actually, we could just–”
The scratte shoved the totem in Bel’s face and her world exploded into darkness.