“Find them! Kill Them! Let them not escape!” the Lich bellowed.
The distant words thundered inside her skull like a monsoon that had made landfall. So many times, his orders were insistent but resistable, for it was hard to force water into any shape that it did not choose. For example, the day before when, the voice had demanded that she crush that boat. He’d meant the one with the children, of course, but she had resisted, for she hated the slaughter of children and vented his bloodlust on the boat that had followed it instead.
Given time, the Lich would have ordered her to destroy the second skiff too and drown all those innocent lives, but it had more important matters to focus on and had left her to gather the mangled bodies of the drowned and bring them back to its lair.
Today, there was nothing to distract it from seeing its will done, and those commands built up with a tidal force that could not be denied. They were a lightning bolt into Oroza’s heart. They made her shackles burn with power that made it impossible to resist her own destructive impulse. At least for the moment, though, she could face off against warriors that probably deserved it.
The knight glowed with a light that no longer existed in the world that made her think of cool spring days after the snow melt had started in earnest, but the reminiscence wasn’t enough to give her the strength to resist the Lich. She would save that strength for the moment it forced her to indiscriminately murder the children who were huddled in fear nearby.
The knight led with a series of strikes as the white fire coruscating across his gilded armor burned even brighter. These weren’t strong enough to do real damage. He was simply testing her mettle and buying time for his friend.
At first, she thought the other man sought to escape. She hoped he did. Running him down would buy the children valuable time to flee. Some might yet escape with their lives.
He didn’t do that, though. He did something far stranger. He cast a spell, which was something she’d only seen a few times since she’d been chained to this corpse.
Instantly, blue lightning struck her hard. It cooked the flesh where it went up her arm and then down into one of her left legs. It did very little damage, though, and she roared in annoyance more than pain.
She charged him then, planning to deal with the mage before he could think of some more effective tactic. He responded with a burst of flames.
The body of the swamp dragon was impossibly strong, and though the flames was enough to make her shy away for a moment due to her aversion, it could do nothing to the tanned skin or thick scales of her artificial, necrotic prison.
As the wave of fire cleared, though, it was obvious that they’d provided just enough distraction for the paladin to charge through him. The man was clearly insane, but his burns healed even as he moved, and when his glowing sword struck, it glanced off one of her ribs and pierced the heart of the dragon's body, cutting all the way to where she was contained her in its chest.
It was a violent, terrible pain that represented more damage than anyone had done to the monstrosity since Oroza herself had savaged it. It wasn’t enough, though, and she batted him harmlessly away into the grass.
Her blow didn’t keep him down any more than his blow had kept her down, though. Neither did her tail. He dodged it entirely, though she did succeed in sending the mage sprawling. She doubted that one would rise again, which was just as well because she hated fire.
He was back like a flash, charging her again. This time, despite the man’s armor and his wounds, he danced around her next clawed swipe, though that was just a feint. He weaved around it, obviously intending to strike her again. He would probably even succeed in that before she managed to bite him in half. The man even used some of his holy magic to blind her, making her skin sizzle and smolder for a moment, but it was a foolish decision.
After all, he’d already jumped before his light had overwhelmed her dead eyes, and he couldn’t change his trajectory in midair, so she still snapped at him, catching him in her maw and shaking him like a rag doll as her giant metal teeth ground against his armor. Several actually punctured it and sank satisfyingly into the flesh beneath, letting her feast on his blood.
It was only while she tasted that warm, coppery draught that she finally felt the wound he’d made as she’d bitten him. With a powerful swipe, he’d severed her right foot just below the calf, and for the first time in a long time, she was no longer fully attached to her bindings. She spat the man free, leaving him a crumpled, bleeding wreck on the ground, as she suddenly explored her current state of being.
“The spell…” she murmured, “It’s incomplete.”
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And it was true. Each manacle had borne identical runes, and they'd been plated in gold when they’d been created so long ago. Time had done its work, though, and now all of them were pitted to the point that even their redundancy wasn't enough. So many had failed that there had only been a full set present if you combined all four manacles together, and one had just been opened in the grisliest way possible.
“Three circles is enough to hold a lesser goddess like you,” the darkness spat. “Finish them, and I will have you repaired when this is done.”
“No,” she said, trying the word on for size and finding that she liked it.
“No?!” The Lich roared. “Do as you are told, Oroza!”
She didn’t, though. The corpse couldn’t hold her now, and neither could the words that passed through it. Not with only three worn and pitted manacles. All these decades since the darkness had captured her and turned her into a mockery of her true self, she’d waited for the time and the tides to do their work.
What chance did the Lich’s efforts have against the forces that ground rocky promontories and breakwaters into nothing but fine beach sand? It was folly to assume that it could cage nature, no matter how much it poisoned her wellspring.
She smiled then, for the first time since her capture, and strained at her manacles, ripping first the left out of the socket where the chain held it and then the right. The swamp dragon roared in pain as it reared up, unable to strike the final blow as she ripped the still-beating heart out of it.
The mage was being dragged back toward the craft by some of the children and an old man, but the knight still lay there, just begging to be finished off. It couldn’t strike the final blow, though, because she wouldn’t let it. Any other opponent would already be dead, of course, but she watched the light pouring out of the bite marks decrease with every second as the flesh knitted shut again, but she didn’t care.
Even though she hated Siddrim’s sheep and would have gladly killed him for the slights they had heaped upon her followers, she knew how much more the Lich that had held her leash for so long hated and feared them. So, he would live, but only because of spite.
The swamp dragon roared to the skies, spasming as she leaned forward and ripped open the bars of the prison that had held her for so long, and then, with one last yank at the sole remaining manacle around her right leg, she was free.
The bars of the ribcage were coated in ugly, rusted iron, but at their core, they were still bone, and when she crushed them, they fell apart like rotten wood in her rubbery finger. As Oroza jumped to the ground, free of her cage for the first time in an eternity, she was sorely tempted to immediately drop the corpse she’d been bound to and flee into the water. She didn’t, though. Not yet. She still had things to do.
Standing there on one foot and one stump, she turned her attention to the straining corpse of the swamp dragon that loomed above her.
“You cannot escape me!” The Lich screamed in her mind, but she ignored it. Without the chains he’d held her with for so long, his orders and compulsions passed through her, leaving only a ripple in their wake.
“I am no longer yours to command,” she whispered as she engaged with it in a battle of wills over what the swamp dragon would do next.
Now that she was no longer attached to it, she’d lost some of her advantages over the darkness that was trying to make the hodgepodge of reptile bones strike her down, along with all the other living creatures currently sheltered in her wake.
They stood like that long enough for the knight to stagger to his feet and make his way toward the fragile boat that everyone else was already aboard. She ignored that, though. Instead, she forced the dragon to reach up and crush its own skull between its two monster paws while the Lich raged in her soul at what she was doing.
That didn’t stop her from forcing it to grab the structural clavicle that held her cage in place so long and rip it off of the rest of its body before it collapsed into pieces on the ground next to her.
“I shall rebuild my dragon and devour you once more, goddess!” the Lich bellowed, but she could hear its fear now.
“If you are foolish enough to enter my waters again, you shall be the one to pay the price,” she whispered. Already walking to the water.
The Lich started to respond, but she didn’t hear it. By the time it had started to scream again, her toes had touched the water of the river, of her river, and she immediately left the corpse, which collapsed into the shallows like a puppet with the strings cut.
It was an exhilarating feeling. She knew she would never truly feel clean again thanks to all of the horrific things that the Lich had done to her, to say nothing of the things it had forced her to do. She still allowed herself a moment to just experience the feeling of being one with the river once more. Her consciousness rippled along the length of her domain, from the still-tainted headwaters to the brackish delta she’d spent so much time in the last few years. Everything was where she had left it, more or less, and she could now begin again in the endless cycle of nature.
First, though, she had to finish dealing with the Lich. With a thought, the current rippled, snatching the corpse that had been her for far too long and dragging it down into the depths for the fish and the eels to devour. She had no idea what the darkness might be able to do with something so powerfully associated with her, but she would rather die than find out the hard way.
Once that was done, she blended in with the currents, finally unfurling the ghostly, sinuous nature that was a river dragon and using it to drag the boat back out into the channel and upstream against the current before the Lich could launch some new monster to slaughter all the children onboard the fragile vessel.