Heda: The Neurotic Necromancer Appears!

The party woke to a cold gust of wind. Thalia was the first to wake, feeling something unnatural about the wind. Next Yotaro woke up with his hackles raised. Thalia was surprised to see Alara’s emerald eyes shoot open as well. Normal humans did not have the ability to sense mana the way that Alara did. Maybe she wasn’t fully human after all. They would have to investigate that later because right now they were about to be attacked. Thalia quietly slung her robe over her shoulders. The three looked at each other and began counting down the zero on their fingers. At zero, Thalia flung the walls of their shelter in all directions.

A dozen skeleton soldiers laid crushed in the path of the walls. They were not normal soldiers, but those that were infected with corruption. With strange clicking noises the soldiers put themselves back together.

“Shit this is worse than I thought. Alara, save your mana, no fire magic yet. Let’s clear this area before we head into the tunnels. Can you handle this princess?”

Alara’s hair floated up as she started using lightning magic. She flashed her yellow eyes that had suddenly become grave at Thalia and smirked. “What do you think, priestess?”

She took off in a flash of light bouncing from soldier to soldier, stabbing the tumors with a blade of lightning. As Alara felled skeleton soldiers to the left, Thalia formed a thick blade of ice and attacked those to the right, flash stepping between the many soldiers. Yotaro as the Black Dire wolf finished off those that didn’t die right away. Within a few minutes the team had cleared the platform in front of the entrance to the tunnels.

“Come on, we better run before more show up. If we stay here we will waste all of our energy fighting these low level foes.” The three made a dash for the tunnel entrance, a wall of rock began to rise, sealing the passage as it went. The team jumped through just as the wall closed with a thud.

The team was out of breath but continued to move quickly through the tunnel as the walls bubbled with the same black sludge that covered the floors of the dungeon when Alara was attacked the first time. Corrupt goblins and other low level creatures began to pull themselves out of the sludge.

“Screw it. Keep running. There is no way we can take on so many enemies at once in such a confined space. Once we get through the tunnel, I’m going to collapse it on the poor bastards. Hurry.”

Avoiding hands grabbing at them from the floors and ceilings, somehow all three made it out without being caught. Thalia slid to a stop before her face contorted and she wrung her hands, causing the entire tunnel to collapse on itself. To make sure that nothing could leak out, Thalia made a squishing motion which caused all the rocks of the tunnel to fuse into solid stone with only a few drops of sludge leaking from the place where the tunnel fused.

Before the group could catch their breath, a blade flew towards Alara’s face. Before it could hit, she deflected it with a hand wrapped in ice. From a perch above where the group stood was a petite and youthful woman with a wide and ugly scar running across her face. Without that scar Alara thought she would have been quite gorgeous. She was wearing a sinister smile and a black robe that matched Thalia’s.

Alara muttered to herself, “Heda.”

Heda let out a laugh that lasted an awkwardly long time. It was totally unhinged.

“Hello big sis. How did you get yourself a blue-eyed Elding? What a rare little pet!”

“Hello Heda,” Thalia was shaking. She hurriedly bowed her head. “Heda, before you do anything you are going to regret, know this. I’m so sorry that I broke your heart all those years ago. I’m sorry for all the pain I caused. Please forgive me, if we can put this past us there is no reason to fight!”

Tears rolled from Heda’s uncovered eye. “You think a pitiful excuse of an apology is enough to stop us from fighting?! Even if I still loved you, something pathetic like that would never be enough to warrant my forgiveness!”

While Heda gave her reply, the two women did their best to hide their mate marks from her prying eyes. Heda was far more intuitive than either one of them realized. She looked back and forth between the two women. In mere moments she realized what was going on. Heda let out an even more deranged laugh than before.

Clawing at her face, she began to scream in a shrill voice, “No no no! This has got to be a joke. You! You turned me down to wind up true mates with a human! No no no, it can’t be true! I’ll definitely never forgive you for this SISTER!”

Heda held her head and let out a loud groan followed by an ear-splitting scream.

Thalia turned to Alara, “Something is not right here. Heda is a psychopath, but this doesn’t seem like her. Watch out for any surprises.”

Suddenly Heda was quiet again. She stood up silently, a cloud of negative energy surrounding her and dropped her robe. Her body was covered in dozens of red pulsating tumors. She raised her hands and dozens of undead began to dig their way out of the dirt beneath the party’s feet.

Thalia lit a fire in her hand and passed it to Alara without looking at her. “Take care of these undead. I’m going after Heda. If she has fallen to such corruption there is no choice but to kill her now. I’m sorry Alara, but if I look at you I will start crying. Will you squeeze my hand one time before I go after her?”

With her free hand, Alara gave Thalia’s hand a hard squeeze. “It’s going to be ok Thalia.”

Thalia let out a shaky sigh and ran in the direction of Heda. Meanwhile, Yotari transformed himself into a dog-like creature with foot long fangs and a flaming mane. A hellhound. He looked at Alara and nodded his head as if to say, “Let’s go!”

The undead army that stood before them was full of all kinds of creatures in various stages of decay. Some mostly bones with small scraps of flesh hanging to them, others were completely barren of all flesh or clothing. One thing was common among all of them though, the pulsating tumors. It was like staring at a walking cemetery infected with those bizarre plant-like tumors. Luckily for those two, undead didn’t move very fast which gave Alara time to build a large fireball. She sent it into an area that was concentrated with a large amount of undead. With the explosion dozens of undead were fried to a crisp, but still hundreds remained.

Yotaro in this form could release a flaming breath that was doing quite a bit of damage, but hadn’t managed to put much of a dent in the hoard either. Since Yotaro could produce fire, not all hope was lost. Alara yelled at the mimic, “Give me some fire over here, I can build more fireballs!”

Yotaro spit some fire towards Alara which she skillfully caught. And began to cast smaller fireballs all around the battlefield. To herself, Alara thought’ “ This is endless. We have to stop the caster in order for us to prevail. Thalia, good luck defeating your sister. We will be holding on for as long as we can.”