She'd pushed things and touched things with her unreal hands. Why not her unreal blade? Why not do more than move them; why not cut them? She had to try to use her sword to affect the waking world. Should she try to imagine the dream blade steel hard and capable of cutting more than phantasms? Would that even work? She didn't know.
No, she decided, I'll imagine the sword as ethereal as my hand and body, an extension of it. Her dream form could pass through anything, including living creatures, but as she'd learned down in the hold, she also adversely affected anything living through which she passed. Dream flesh and real obviously did not get on too well.
Anusha advanced a final few steps and brought the sword down in an awkward slash. At the last instant, the sea witch's eyes flickered, somehow sensing Anusha's presence. The hag jerked to the side, but not enough to completely avoid the blow.
Anusha's dream blade grazed the hag's forehead. A burst of dark blue flame briefly illuminated both witch and armored girl. The hag loosed a surprised howl of agony. The red swirl growing overhead instantly collapsed into so much disturbed cloud-stuff.
When Anusha had touched the pirate down in the hold, he immediately collapsed into a quivering, unconscious heap.
The witch quivered, yes, and was obviously hurt, but she did not fall. Instead she screeched, "Protect your mother!"
The hulking sea monster glanced back, the gnawed boot of an unlucky privateer protruding from its mouth, the battered body of the coxswain in one hand. The monster had been using the screaming coxswain as an improvised club.
Nyrotha took instant advantage of the creature's distraction, making a deep cut across the creature's stomach. The monster staggered and ichor spurted. It dropped the coxswain. It returned its full attention to the first mate, forgetting its "mother's" command. For the first time, Anusha thought the pirates might just defeat the creature from the sea. If the sea witch was dealt with, anyhow.
The water witch continued to back away from Anusha, her haggard eyes darting this way and that, squinting. She held her hands out in a warding gesture. She screamed out into the fog, "Sisters, I am assailed by a ghost! Gather near, that we may banish it to the Shadowfell from which it strays!"
It wasn't the first time Anusha had been mistaken for an empty spirit. Too bad the witch couldn't see her new armored splendor. Then she'd know she faced more than a wandering apparition. Then again, when the hag looked at Roger, he'd flopped dead.
"Sisters! Return! I am beset!"
Anusha followed the retreating witch step for step. Yet she continued to hold her swing. She just couldn't bring herself to strike down the hag. Anusha intellectually knew the woman was a monster, something that would kill and eat her… but now that she was at the cusp, she couldn't follow through. If she struck down the hag, would it be an assassination? Would the hag scream and die, kicking? She lowered her sword, indecision growing into anguish.
Instead of striking, Anusha said, "If you promise to leave the ship and depart forever, I won't hurt you?" Irresolution made her ultimatum a question.
The wandering eye of the water witch tracked Anusha's words. The witch muttered, "Gethshemeth can do worse than kill me. Look into my eyes, and I'll show you!"
Anusha's gaze unthinkingly darted to the witch's.
The hag's red eyes flashed the color of fresh-spilled blood. Anusha recognized death itself in that bloody gaze. It grasped her.
A wave of nausea visually distorted her dream form, sending cracks and shivers through her. Hopes, memories, and hates dropped from her like dead leaves from a tree in winter.
Wake! she commanded herself. Wake up, wake up!
She did not wake up. The sea hag's blazing eye held her rooted in place… or was it Japheth's drug? He'd told her only to use it when she had a long time to sleep. She wouldn't escape this peril so easily. Her choice was to kill or die.
With dream armor unraveling like funerary linens, Anusha raised her shivering, splintering dream blade and plunged it into the sea hag's stomach. Real blood spurted from the wound.
The witch's scream possessed a keening, yearning quality that nearly made Anusha pull back. But she persevered. She held her wavering sword so it transfixed the creature from the sea, willing it real and as sharp as a razor for this moment. She plunged the blade deeper, concentrating on its keen solidity.
The witch's final, sorrowful plea for her sisters' aid trilled out into the fog. Then the hag collapsed and lay without movement or breath. In death she had the guise of a sleeping grandmother, placid and hardly a threat to anyone. Blood trickled from her wound, red as any human's.
The only response the sea hag's entreaty elicited was the appearance of a swarm of darting bats, which rotated and swirled across the Green Siren from stem to stern. Even as the mist around the ship began to break up, the investigating bats twirled back out over the sea, toward the tower island.
"The Green Siren weathered the fog," reported Japheth, his breath still coming in gasps between his sentences in the fight's aftermath. "I knew I saw three hags! The one that didn't attack us tried to scuttle the ship."
"What? What about my ship?"
The warlock continued, "Your crew beat the hag." His eyes remained closed as his servitor bats relayed the image of the wrinkled form crumpled along the ship's railing, and something dark and large stroking away from the ship toward open water. "A… sea troll? Nyrotha drove some sort of sea monster back into the water. Good thing you left him aboard."
"An accident," mused Captain Thoster. "The lout was so drunk on grog I couldn't wake him."
Japheth's winged servants swarmed through the open balcony window and into his bottomless cloak.
Seren, her voice ragged from too many spells, commented, "Nice shawl you got there, Japheth."
He simply nodded. The woman didn't need to know his cloak's provenance.
Seren stood near Thoster. Not far away, Nogah leaned against a wall, and the two surviving crew members watched the entrance. The unmoving forms of defeated kuo-toa littered the floor and choked the stairs beyond. Among them lay the charred and still smoldering sea witches who were finally downed with Seren's last impressive spell volley.
"We persevered," said Nogah in her gurgling way.
Seren whirled, pointed an accusing finger. "Because of you, we've gained the enmity of a great kraken! We did not agree to your ludicrous scheme, but already it sends servitors to eliminate us. I say we kill you now, and show this Gethshemeth we're not its foes." The woman looked to the pirate captain for support.
Thoster put a hand on the war wizard's shoulder, "Seren, mayhap we'll do exactly that, but let's talk a bit first, eh?" Japheth noticed that, despite the man's solicitous air, the hand not on Seren's shoulder rested on the pommel of his venomous sword.
Seren huffed, visibly battling her desire to launch a particularly nasty attack on the whip from her armamentarium of spells. Finally, she spat, "So talk."
Captain Thoster nodded and said, "First, I want to know what sub-breed of kuo-toa we just faced? I've never seen their like before now."
The whip gave a slow nod, her eyes large compared to those of the many dead creatures lying around them. She said, "Gethshemeth's doing, using the Dreamheart. It has corrupted their forms. It is a potential I sensed in the Dreamheart, but not one I ever called upon."
The captain frowned, seemed about to ask something else, then thought better of it. Instead he grinned and said, "Consider, all of you. This unprovoked attack is a message. Gethshemeth revealed its hand, so to speak. The great kraken's afraid! It tried to scare us off, make us let fear drive us the direction Seren suggests we take. It hopes well run with sails at full mast from Nogah. Well, here's how I see it: the great beast must think we have some chance of succeeding to go to such trouble!"