They had swarmed as soon as Nireesa had relaxed, her ghostly wings spread over them. It didn't stop the spiders and scorpions that fell from the branches and crawled from beneath the ground. They were not small things, creeping inside of pools of blood or sap as they had tried to make the warrior believe. These were large, with legs that would easily span Lydros' arm or Kalthor's leg. Dark in color, their carapaces glimmered eerily with the emerald light that filtered through the canopy, and Triadae had to suppress a scream of terror as one nearly as tall as she was came barreling for her like a mad dog.
Instinct took over for all of those who still walked, backing away so that they could shield each other without fail, and as the first wave fell upon them, they fought as comrades, guarding Nireesa and the worgen woman. Death wails filled their ears, the scent of charred flesh and hair assailing their sense of smell as Kalthor wrought doom upon them from above. Skies of fire threw down blazing comets, hammering into the midst of the vermin and scattering them. The few who remained doubled back, vanishing up into the trees to recoup.
So it continued, and minutes passed in groups, and in the time that they could manage to catch their breath they spent each moment bandaging wounds and offering food or drink. Time blurred for them, and they knew only that it had become night and then morning again by the brightness of the green around them. Still, Nireesa had not moved, and the meaning of such a thing made Lydros' strength falter just slightly as doubt gnawed at his heart.
"Did it take so long for us?" Kalthor watched the last of the attackers filter back into the trees, wavering on his feet before finally just falling down into the blood and ichor-soaked grass. "I want to see the girl awake as much as you do, my friend." His eyes went up towards Lydros, only seeing the back of the hunter and the ways his ears twitched as he listened. The beasts had scored many hits on all of them, yet none had been subject to the poisons they worried about. "Do you believe she'll come through?"
Lydros had no answer ready for the man. Guilt was a painful thing to feel, but it was there all the same, following behind doubt in a painful battle against his own heart. "Brin's strong. Foolish, but strong. They go for the weakest point, and drive everything they have into making their prey believe." He choked on his own voice, his hand gripping his bow tightly. "I was lost for longer than she, and I made it out alive. Maybe not sane, but certainly alive." Lydros managed a wan smile back at the warlock. "We can do nothing more than hope. How are you holding up?" He looked to the other, his ears flicking slightly.
Triadae glanced up from Nireesa, looking back over her shoulder before offering a single shrug. "I ache. I wish they would stop sending themselves in bits and pieces for us to toy with." Her eyes flicked to the forest, narrowing on the slight figures of what looked to be elves. Elves with things more than wrong with their bodies. The focus she had on them made both men follow her gaze, and Lydros growled under his breath.
"You may have just gotten your wish."
They slipped from the cover of shadow and mist, jeering smiles on pale faces. Six of them, Kaldorei in looks from what could be told right off. Four of them were female, and that was the most that could be told for similarities. Their hair was dark, hanging in clumps from their head as if they had newly risen from a bath, but it had no ends. The strands grew from their head, and then fed back into their skin along their backs, and from there sprang anomalies.
Two of them were small, perhaps just over what a Kaldorei might consider a child. Slight of frame, they looked half-starved, ribs poking through paper thin skin and eyes that would normally shine were dark, sunken into their faces. Triadae shuddered as they turned on her, and she heard laughter in her mind. A soft wind caught their bangs, lifting them up and revealing two more pairs of eyes upon the foreheads of each.
"That normal?" Kalthor backed up a step as the two males turned their gazes on him, crazed and wicked looking all at once. Like the children, they were half-starved, but they had something else that made his blood run cold. Barbs ran the lengths of their arms, fanning out along the backs and making a deadly line. As they stepped closer, he caught a shimmer of light across their skin and realized that they had gained the scales that would be found along the wing of a moth, decorating their skin.
Lydros alone held his ground, but he swallowed. "You're in the wrong place for normal, friend." The final two had set eyes on him, but they had made no move from where they had first appeared. They were watching him, as eagerly as he watched them, curious as to why he did not back away as the others did. They were beautiful, or may have once been. Of the six, they were clearly the oldest; time had granted them anomalies much like the men, additions to their bodies that served no other purpose than disfigurement. One wore thick scales along her naked body, unlike the moth-like ones the men sported. These were dark and rough, reminding him of the scorpids that lingered in the sands of tanaris. Black scales that were struck through with red, they suited the woman who swayed on her feet as she watched him, as if listening to some melody that he couldn't hear.
The other was pale in comparison, and she was the only who could have passed among normal people with mild trouble. Like the one she swayed with, she was completely nude, and it was only because of it that Lydros was able to see how far advanced her corruption and severance from nature was. If someone had stripped the legs from one of the spiders that was commonly referred to as a Bone Spider and had slid them beneath the flesh of a person to distort the shape of the skin around it, then they would have come close to the effect that was present on the woman's body.
The bone growths followed the path of her ribs below her breasts, the tips of the top row touching at the middle of her sternum. On her arms, there was only one that followed the length of them. Midway down her upper arm on both sides, the protrusions had pulled from the skin, and Lydros could see something crawling between skin and growth, creating a web that shimmered in the dim light. The same was present on her hips, though these pointed downwards. They framed her hips and joined beneath her navel, they ran along her legs as jointed as her own bones to curl beneath her knees and end only inches beneath.
Neither of them moved, save for the sway of their bodies, and this unnerved the hunter more than the look of them.
The child-like ones closed the distance far quicker than she could have believed possible. The first was parried only by luck, the second taking her chance to score long nails along a mangled bit of Triadae's armor. The resulting scratch burned far worse than fire, whiskey, or pure fel. At once, she felt her leg go numb and she toppled to the ground with a hiss of pain. Again the one struck, this time grabbing Triadae's bound hair and tugging it back while her companion made quick work of disarming the stricken warrior. Whispers flooded Tria's mind, beating at the walls of her defenses in mocking voices and wheedling tones, attempting to find her weakest point while they toyed with her physical body.
"Tria!" Kalthor saw his friend fall from the corner of his eyes, backing away as the second of his opponents approached. The first had fallen easily, both to the shadow that Kalthor summoned and to the devilish imp that lay phased around the corpse.
Piznap waited quietly, eyes burning holes in the back of the more cautious of the two males. Their sneaky attack would not work twice, nor was the Master paying nearly enough attention to keep him in check. A sorry thing, for Piznap was prone to bouts of what one might call stupidity. The scamp knew quite well the bond between the warlock who chained him, and the woman who had taken up a scream that threatened to deafen him. How many times had that same woman inflicted pain on poor little Piznap? The demon pondered the thought for a moment, heard the cry of his Master again, and made his choice. The grass parted around him as he skipped through it, dodging flailing limbs that kicked at him without realizing it, and took aim.
The whispers diminished, one of the creatures letting out a keening shriek that nearly matched her own. Before her eyes, it began to shift into something else, legs sprouting from skin in a grotesque manner that had Triadae choking on both a scream and bile. Poison-coated mandibles loomed in her vision, and she risked the pain of having her hair pulled just so she wouldn't have to look at the spider-shaped druid, tears of fear in her eyes.
And then the weight of it was gone, a keening death wail mingled with the mad cackling of someone half crazed. Triadae thought it was herself, thought she had finally snapped and just wouldn't stop laughing, and then the sound began to move around her, accompanied by the noise of something large being dragged through the grass. Amidst all the rest of the sounds of battle, it was an odd one to focus on, but even her remaining opponent had gone still to watch whatever it was. With her hand jammed against the scrawny neck, Triadae could feel the girlish creature move.
Blood – Light, she hoped it was blood! - trickled into her eyes and set them stinging, bringing her back to some odd form of clarity and she found the strength to grip the neck she held tighter, strangling the thing as it squirmed and tried to shift again. Triadae caught the sight of spindly legs and shut her eyes tight, whimpering beneath her breath while grabbing that quickly morphing neck with her other hand and – snap!
It stopped moving, curling half-formed legs against it's torso and simply remaining as dead weight that Triadae flung aside with shaking hands. No matter how she knew they had changed, no matter how she felt about the paths they had just taken, she could not stop thinking of how they had looked as no more than children. The blood of children, the blood of children, the blood of...
Piznap stopped his gallivanting, though his cackles didn't cease. He found it highly amusing that the little child-thing became something he'd never seen a shifty-shaper become, and was even more amused to find that it squished just as easily as any other eight-legged thing that he had been made to squish. That this one was easily just a bit bigger than himself really held no weight on his tiny shoulders; while the big ones dodged and bled, he bit and killed! So happy was he!
Until he spotted the terrified look of the one his Master cared for. The same look he had seen a hundred times – no, a thousand! - before. The look of someone who had just cast their first spell and killed something precious, the look of a person who couldn't believe what they had just done. Oh, yes. Piznap knew the look well, and found it such a silly thing to be wearing. No, the ugly redhead should be bowing before him, for helping her. Yes! That was it! Clearly, he would have to slap some sense into her!
So he did.
Kalthor wasn't sure what his imp was doing. He was certain that it was the stupid thing cavorting with the corpse, and he found some mild ability to thank the imp privately for rescuing his friend. That the woman had been forced up against her deepest fears in the form of spindly spiders was a cruelty he'd never have pressed on her, but his worry would have to wait for another time. His own opponent was proving to be resilient, not falling to fire as the first had done.
He dodged a blind strike, flinching when a flash of red and glinting steel went past him. For a moment, he questioned why Piznap was impaled on the broadsword that his friend wielded with ease, and then decided that he truly didn't want to know and that the answer likely had something to do with the demon's own doing. The nether claimed the tiny demon just as Tria's blade tore through skin and bone, felling the second male and – for the time being – their final enemy.
The bloodlust that had overtaken her began to dissipate, leaving her weak and numb. Her skin burned and crawled as if covered in insects, and she couldn't see out of one eye completely, a gash above her brow bleeding freely and taking time to clot. The sword she could handle with such ease was now deadweight in her hands, and she longed to drop it and herself, longed to curl up on the blood-soaked grass and steal just a few hours of sleep.
Arms surrounded her, gentle words whispered in her ear that she had trouble making out amidst the buzz of adrenaline filtering from her. Her sword was tugged from her grip, dropped to the ground, and she moved an arm to throw it over the broad shoulders of the one who helped her. She barely questioned why she seemed so tired, why the world seemed to be fading, why her strength ebbed, only clinging to that lone support.
"She's been poisoned." Kalthor looked to Lydros, who still stood in an uneasy staring match with the two remaining druids. "I have nothing for something like this. Why haven't they come forward?"
"Waiting. They hoped to pick us off. We just succeeded in picking them off first."
But they weren't going to wait forever, and he shifted into a more defensive position as the women finally moved. The one with the scales of a scorpid fell back, leaving the other to approach in a graceful, if slightly listless, manner. "A shame, a shame. You killed our friends, and woke from your dreams. Weren't they pleasant dreams?" Her voice was like velvet, coaxing all of them to pay attention.
All except one.
No one expected the attack as it came. Her shift had come, as if her body knew what would be needed and simply became it. After all of the insects and people that they had just fought, the sight of a shaggy bear charging the slender woman disoriented them all. Especially when the beast was batted aside as if it were nothing more than an annoying gnat.
"You should have stayed asleep, asleep." The woman repeated the words in that same tone, and Lydros found even his own eyelids begin to feel heavy beyond measure. "Pretty thing, was your dream not enough for you? We can fix that, yes. We can fix that for good..."
Brinella groaned from where she lay, the force and pain of the strike she suffered having driven her out of even her worgen body. Her control was still not complete after the depth of the dream she had been victim to, and now she was slow in returning to a form that was safe. Nature wouldn't tell her what she needed to be, clogged and scared in this corrupted grove.
"Let us touch you, yes. Touch you, touch you. Touch you and let you become one of us. Yes, your dreams are like music to our ears. Become one of us, little pupling. One of us, yes. We want that..." Dreamwarper knelt beside Brinella, reaching out her fingers to caress the skin along the left side of her neck, and the druid screamed.
The sound alone broke all of those from their stupor, severing the spell that had nearly been cast upon them. Even Triadae roused herself enough to stumble forward a few steps and then collapse to her knees with a moan. But none of them knew what to do, and so Brinella's scream only strengthened beyond the point of even being able to be heard.
It would have snapped her sanity completely. It could have, with how the whispers became screams of mocking laughter in her head, with every nightmare turned against her a thousand fold in vivid detail and feeling. She knew only pain and grief in such enormous waves that even the area around her faded in and out of her view. It would be so easy to just give in, and let everything else take over...
If Nireesa hadn't intervened, striking the warped druid when her back was turned and setting its anger completely on her. If Lydros hadn't broken from his confusion and pulled his bow taut to let fly arrows that struck between the spider-bone ribs of the woman. If Kalthor hadn't summoned fire that licked at pale skin, sending their opponent into screams that could have rivaled Brinella's own.
For all the power of the Nightmare druid, it was still nothing against a full fledged, and highly angered, Dragonsworn. The battle lasted only minutes, but they were long minutes to the two who had been incapacitated in their own ways. There was no great victory in the defeat of the corrupt woman, no joy taken when her form finally fell still. All breathed heavy at the end of it, wary of the woman rising again. Too many times had such a thing happened in Northrend. When it became clear she would not, Nireesa took a deep breath and exhaled a swirling mist over the body of Dreamwarper. It dissolved, and she repeated the same with the other bodies that littered the glade.
Care was given to Triadae, sealing her wounds and giving her some protection against the poison that raged in her system. For all of her gifts, Nireesa could not remove that. One could, but a simple look at her made it clear she would have a hard time doing anything at all. An angry mark seemed to have been burned into her skin along her neck and behind her ear, pulsing a dark green and purple as if she had been badly bruised. Brinella's breathing was rapid, soft moans of terror filling the air around her.
They stopped when Lydros gathered her up into his arms, easily lifting the girl. Her arms went around his neck, and it enabled Nireesa to attempt healing the corruption that had been started, to no avail. "This is deeper than even I can attempt to mend. It is not a poison or disease... it is something more. We will need someone better than I to see to it. For now, we must retreat from here."
"I thought the one you just killed was the leader." Lydros' brow raised as he stepped aside.
"No," Nireesa sighed softly, almost sadly. "I thought so as well. I feel that I was wrong... while she was the most dangerous in the area at this moment, I fear there is far worse lurking in the shadows, and we are in no condition to fight right now. You are all weary, and in need of sleep. My magicks can only do so much. Come."
Winnie breathed a sigh of relief as the group appeared again. Three days had passed since Lydros had left the dwarf and the others, and the air had been tense indeed with the three savagekin within arm's reach of the goblin. Mixie, to her credit, had been on the best behavior. Winnie... had not made any friends.
All of her questions were silenced with a look from Lydros, who came close to the fire to lay the quivering form of the worgen down. That action alone seemed to stir the middle of the three savagekin, a soft growl rumbling in her chest even when she shifted. "Corrupt."
"Yes." Nireesa stepped through last, her closed eyes focused on Rylien. "I did not expect to see you here, Dreamer." Though her words were gentle, there was an edge of distaste to them, akin to an elder looking upon a foolish child. It was not missed by the group, but was ignored by Rylien.
Her eyes were focused on Brinella, and she made careful steps toward the druid as if expecting to be set upon at any moment. "Touched."
"Can you get rid of it?" Kalthor eyed the druid before kneeling beside Brinella.
"No, I cannot. While my kind are quite adept with working with a curse such as this, my skills are far more attuned to combat than they are healing." Her long ears flicked at the hiss of breath quickly taken in by more than one person. "I do know someone who may be able to, however. It has been a long time since I have seen her wander these woods, and I have no doubts that I know where to find her.
The difficulty lies in getting your companion to her before such a thing become irreversible. You will not be able to take a hippogryph. No animal alive would be willing to touch her with the taint that now lingers. Animals are very sensitive to these things, which is why she does not already have a riding mount. Even your own, well trusted and loved beasts would balk. As her condition worsens, it will be more and more difficult to control her. Her sense of sanity will be skewed."
"Ye make this impossible. She is capable o' walkin'."
"Is she, dwarf? If she sees something that is not there and bolts into the woods, how fast can you catch her? If she refuses to eat, do you dare brave her fangs?" Rylien's eyes narrowed. "No. I speak with personal experience in this matter, far more than you could ever understand."
"Jus' where do we need ta take her? Northren'!"
"No. Stormwind. There's a shamanka who helps at the orphanage there by the name of Eaxoa. She has proven skilled in mending the greatest wounds and healing the most grievous of damage to the mind. If she cannot help you, then no one can."
"Jus' how are ye expectin' us ta get her there without ridin', walkin', swimmin', flippin', or eatin'?"
Rylien looked about to respond when another voice cut in.
"You said you needed speed, and she basically needs to be watched, right?" The druid nodded, her eyes narrowing on the goblin. "Well, I've got an idea, but you ain't gonna like it very much."