The Future and Real Life...

The drak-hounds arrived first.

They were basically wolves with Mire Dragon blood, so they preferred swamps. Cunning but stupid, barely sapient, but clever pack hunters, and much stronger and more dangerous than normal wolves. They weren’t exactly quiet, but the terrain didn’t lend itself to such. Their nails were also harder and sharper than those of natural wolves, so clacking wasn’t out of order.

I watched them come racing up, pause and sniff the air and the death it was telling them about. More cautiously, they slunk forwards, and quickly came to the chopped-up corpse of the shrine guardian. The way their spinal crests rose showed that they were suddenly a lot warier, and they didn’t take the opportunity to head into the shrine.

Maybe they knew about the bone golem?

The swamp ogres were next, stumping out of the mist with an energy that belied their swollen guts and massive stature. They were wearing crude hides and pieces of armor roughly held together with leather thongs, not bothering with sandals that would rot in this environment. The nail-studded greatclubs they were using were not something they had made themselves, and the leader was using a hefty Halberd like an axe without any problem. I took note of the slight glow to it, and sniffed in anticipation.

They had moss growing in places, bunches of warts, and strange bone structures and proportions that hinted at inbreeding, but I wasn’t going to dwell on the fact one looked pinheaded and another had a vestigial arm coming out his left side. I was just going to kill them all, I didn’t care about how mutated they were.

The troll was something of a surprise. Slouched over, it was still as big as the ogres, but more pot-bellied, with skinny arms that hid steely tendons, and claws half again as big as the ogres’ hands. And that nose, always that damn nose.

Trolls in groups usually meant a troll Hag. Was she one of the Coven?

Or, hmm. Just how big was this Coven? This… might get interesting.

Couldn’t have muscle without a brain. There had to be a Hag or a Hag Servant here, probably being sneaky like me.

Yes, there was something invisible moving over there. It was quiet, but not quiet enough to fool the Hair of Sama. I just sat and watched as the fog swirled in, obviously unnatural, and limited everyone’s vision. The droplets swirled and outlined an image in the fog as the ogres stood there dumbly over the dead minotaur, obviously not willing to go inside.

Eventually the Hag got tired of waiting to see if anything would blow apart her minions, and stepped out. Her low laugh caused more movement, and two swamp giants loomed out of the mist down the trail.

The icthyoid faces of the Jotuns and their bulbous, greasy bodies didn’t hide the fact that they towered over the trolls and ogres, and had the same kind of thematic spiked greatclubs gripped in hands that seemed to bear vestigial scales.

Not sure how the Hags lured them here... traded favors with a Sea Hag, maybe? The swamp was probably homey, if small, but as long as they got enough to eat, they probably didn’t care. They would be routinely Charmed and treated well, regardless.

The Hag was a greenhag, obvious via her skin color and the stringy, mossy hair. There was not a hint of grace or beauty in her, but she moved with strength and energy belying her rickety, wrinkled limbs and flopping, obese main body. The Hag Nose was in full force, and her teeth were more like iron spikes than anything else. I noted the dangling Charms about her with professional interest, little surprises for the recalcitrant, and the twisted oak of her Staff held Sigils and Runes on it that weren’t there for show.

She headed into the Shrine, ordering the drak-hounds ahead of her, and they complied without hesitation. The troll followed, the ogres trailed after her, and the swamp giants hung around the shrine entry.

Mmmm, tempting, but I didn’t think I could take out the two Jotuns fast enough right now to avoid the others from racing back to help.

Taking great care, as Jotun ears are large and their eyes are big and able to see great detail at a distance, I withdrew from the area and continued on my circuit, giving neither of them a further look. I left no scent behind nor tracks to be followed as I moved two inches above the ground as I withdrew into the too-warm fog that smelled of decaying corpses.

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There was an area of desecrated ground where withered trees either swayed and threatened to fall down, or had succumbed to rot and turned the ground into a fungi and spore-ridden glade, getting thicker and more broken as I slid through it.

The needleman shivered as I drew closer, responding to movements from the spores in the air that I could not conceal. It looked like an emaciated humanoid, but was actually a semi-sapient plant form animated by Fey energies, with something of an overt obsession for the blood of elves. Unseelie creature, generally a minion of more powerful Fey creatures.

It wasn’t very tough, but they always came in groups. That wasn’t much of an issue, as I didn’t intend to sit still and be impaled by a zillion bloodsucking needles fired off by them, and I was sooo much faster than they were, even if they could flow through the dead forest without hindrance.

Tremble whispered out, and split its skull and spine with only a faint crack. It shuddered and dropped stiffly as its fibrous body instantly locked up. I slid into the shadow of a mushroom-strewn tree, and waited politely.

Three more needlemen arrived within seconds, scattered around the cracked and moldering branches of fallen pines, looking down at their fallen kin and running around wondering what to do in their starchy brains.

Chok chok chok. It sounded like no more than polite rapping on wood, and the three of them died as I moved past them. Tremble chewed through them without effort, and they stiffened and fell, the needles poking out of their skin beginning to wilt almost instantly, crinkling as they hit the ground.

A trembling went through the dead trees around me, and I calmly removed myself from that area. I could feel corrupted nature magic weaving through the dead trees around me, and while I didn’t fear it per se, I didn’t want to test it quite yet. I wanted to be a little more durable if possible.

After all, this was just a scouting mission. But Unseelie Fey and Nature Magic were pointing at one thing only, and didn’t an Unseelie Nymph just work perfectly here, sucking the beauty out of everything?

Still, her power had to be constrained, because it radiated out from her for basically a mile in all directions. So, the Hag’s Valley had to be limiting it… possibly a reason why nobody bugged them here.

In other words, I’d have to kill her first. Mmm. I wasn’t worried about her supernatural beauty, as Nulls were rather tough on such things.

She might be aware there was an intruder here, or maybe not. She was at the fringe of the swamp, not in it… and an Unseelie Nymph, although a true bringer of corruption, was not a Hag, even if she might be a witch.

Sure, let’s see what happens. I was a sneaky bitch, very hard to track, and her magic was not a threat to me. As I recalled, corrupted human males devolved into fanatically loyal minotaur guards for her.

She was a Nymph. She’d have a pool. Wait until midnight tomorrow, Final Rest would kick in, and deal with her while I surveyed the rest of the area.

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Well, this is how they do landscaping on the Nasty Evil Bitches side of things.

There was a massive pile of corpses planted square in the middle of the small river coming down from the mountain. The corpses were basically undead fonts, leaking negative energy into the river, drastically changing the nature of the water.

They’d raised up the bottom of the river by digging stone out of the walls, driving the flow over its banks as mounds of stones redirected the waters right and left in every direction, diluting its momentum, slowing it down, and turning a fast-moving small river into a slow-moving morass filled with energies of death and rot.

It was a lot of earth-moving, but definitely something that Summoned Elementals and servant Jotuns could do, along with geomancy. Still, probably took them a while, but terrascaping to terrorscaping was a thing with Hags.

The original trees in the valley had long fallen to rot, forming more heaps to slow the waters down, and helping stew in more moss, mushrooms, vines, and creepers.

The negative energy hadn’t been so thick at the way out. The wards and illusions about this place probably drew on the power here… and if this much necroic energy was allowed to leak out, the attention directed here would have increased greatly. So, they’d basically built themselves a battery of negative energy, contained it here, and nobody powerful enough to deal with them really cared what they did in their own hellhole.

So typical of the mighty. After all, they had lots of time on their hands, and it wasn’t like they were going to be rewarded for such a valorous thing as risking the death-Curses of Hags in order to kill them!

The real world wasn’t like a D&D game, after all. I was here because of a personal grudge. I certainly wasn’t going to be compensated for my time to the degree such a risky thing demanded. Nobody wanted to pay someone to kill Hags, who would happily Curse the fuck out of them in return, and all their descendants, too. Hags were good at dissuading people from attacking them, and making examples out of those who killed others of their kind.

So, I would be silently cheered by the mighty and powerful, and then ignored, possibly even marginalized for doing this by those concerned some Hag might choose to punish them for being friendly with me.

Those more cynical might even try to get rid of me and earn a favor from the Hags. Wouldn’t that be just like things?

Didn’t matter, I was still going to kill them. But, I at least had a literal harvest moving through this place.

A lot of the plants here were mutated, especially the fungi. Mutated shit was magical shit, and I could work with magic shit. I’d been gathering stuff in the forest, but the crazy crap in here was far more potent and plentiful, all things considered.

As I had Knowledge: Nature Ranks, I could tell that many things had been planted around here just for those reasons, mostly things needed for Alchemy: mandrakes, various semi-animate plants, deathwort, several dozen types of fungi, at least sixteen different varieties of poison, and so forth.

Rune Chemistry used plants somewhat differently, and so different plants were more important to me than to a Caster. I was gathering stuff they were probably ignoring: more traditional flowers, reeds, and mosses, and yes, mushrooms and toadstools in all their varieties… but not the ones they would be prizing the most.

After being in the dreamscape so long, I could finally start practicing some real alchemy, and they were going to be the first beneficiaries of my downtime productivity.

Now, I could Make Things. Mwahahahaha!…

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The key to Rune Chemistry was an Energizing Stone, an E-stone. These jewels were the things that Energized the various Runes used in Forsaken Runechemistry and Runesmithing. Without use of E-stones, no more than Cantrip-level spell effect items were possible.

E-stones had to be bigger and stronger if you wanted to make bigger and better stuff. A 0-level E-stone could be a fairly cheap 10 gp crystal, and was enough to scribe the Runes to make an E1-stone, which had to be valued at 100 gp to be effective. That could make an E2 Stone, and so on and so forth. 250 gp for an E2, 500 for an E3, 1,000 for an E4, and 5,000 gp, 10 goldweight, for an E5 Stone.

There might and probably did exist E-stones beyond 5, but I had no current knowledge of them.

Finding gems that valuable wasn’t all that easy, either, generally requiring paying over-inflated prices to gem dealers.

But the Hags should have some, in jewelry for their disguises, if nothing else. Just getting to an E3 would be good. Healink Potionz!

But for now, I clambered up and around the mass of corpses blocking the river coming down, aiming to get a little privacy and see if I couldn’t do some brewing and mix up some surprises for the Hags. I was sure they’d scour the place for me, and I wasn’t afraid of them finding me for a short time. If they wanted to chase me, that would be awesome…

Hell, there might be something up this river canyon, I thought, sitting atop a boulder that had fallen from the side of the canyon and watching the ice-cold water run by below.

A crude mortar and pestle, using my Vajra to separate and mix, cut and gather. Pure water below. Would’ve liked a syringe or glass bottle, but really, intestine pouches worked if properly cleaned. Could just eat them or bite them, as you liked.

I should be able to get around the rest of the perimeter, unless they were lying in wait for me… which would be its own set of funsies. I’d have to see.

Dead Hags in the near future!

And I had my eyes on those ogres and swamp giants, too…