The Hydra's Curse - Arc 2 - Part 1

The town of Salutem wasn’t really a town per say, more of a community. A town implied that there were buildings, roads, and all the other things that would tell a traveler this would be a hospitable place to stay for the night. Salutem had none of those things. It was a cave in the mountainside, obscured by jungle and completely uninviting. Some who ventured too near even said it was haunted, with malevolent spirits and demons hiding within.

Those people weren’t entirely wrong. Salutem’s location had been chosen based on the fact that no human in any reasonable state of mind would even go there. It was a foul place, and it took a special type of person to live there.

A cursed person.

Salutem was a community of the curse. Innocent people caught at the wrong time, burned by the fires of hell in one shape or another. It tainted them and filled their bodies with unholy magic, but it also gave them power. So it made sense to establish a community by the firegate, the cursed were already immune to its damning magic, and no rational human would ever dare venture close to it. The night terrors inflicted on the mind simply weren’t worth it, even if one did survive.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of irrational people in the world.

Sasha had pinned one, harmlessly as ever of course. It wasn’t particularly difficult, she knew the jungle like the back of her hand, and the trespasser never would have stood a chance against her even if he could fight back. This was the fifth one to try and find Salutem now, and as usual she was interrogating him. After two years, the place was drawing attention to itself and she didn’t like that. The jungle and the caves were good for deterring lone wanderers, but not an army.

She had him wrapped in her coils, for she was a hydramorph. Her serpentine body was long and powerful, morphing into a human form at the hips with four arms and two heads. Sasha had him wrapped up snugly, not wanting to use her hypnosis on him since she was eventually going to let him go. Instead, she was playing in the intimidation game, and carrying on a conversation between her two heads. She was one person with two connected streams of consciousness, and the conversations she could act out could be quite unnerving, especially when the victim thought they were listening in on something intimate, and true.

“We could kill him,” Sasha said with her left head, regarding him like he was a lame horse and deciding if he was worth the effort. “It would be the easiest thing.”

“It would be,” her right head agreed in faux conversation, “but that would cause such a hassle. Look, he brought a sword. He knew was he was doing, other’s probably do to.”

Her left head nodded slowly, the hairsnakes writhing a little more actively as she leaned in closer. “But how many would come? You think it would bring more? Or keep them away longer?”  These were of course all thoughts Sasha was having, but she didn’t need to orate to reconcile them between her two heads. But it was much more intimidating if she did.

She pursed her lips on her right face, making one of the many snakes atop her head brush against her captive’s ear, flicking its tongue over it then nibbling on the lobe gently. The boy, no older than twenty whimpered weakly. As far as he was concerned, this monster could crush him within her coils at any moment. “One kill with keep them away for a while, but if we keep it up more will come. How long until someone gets the jump on us?” Then came the crucial part, the part she was counting on to keep more from coming as long as possible.

“And then we become what they think we are right?” her right head continued, almost in a resigned tone. “If we kill every dumb kid that walks by, we give them the right to try.” Sasha leaned back and put her lower hands on her hips, putting her upper right hand underneath the kid’s chin and lifting it up slightly.

“Why you here boy?” It was a demand, emphasized by squeezing her coils around him a little and making his joints crack under the pressure. “Do you want to kill us?” Sasha reduced the pressure as quickly as it had come and waited for his answer, staring at him intently with both sets of eyes. It was kind of funny watching him try to pick a head to look at; a problem even people who knew her still seemed to have.

“You took my sister!” he wheezed, prompting Sasha to take a little more pressure off. “You turned her into one of…you things!”

Sasha shook both her heads sadly, then had them look at one another.

“It wasn’t us,” Sasha said with her left head, now trying to look understanding. “Any of us,” she said almost as a side note, gesturing to the caves behind her with both left hands. “How do you think we came to be?”

Her right head took over. Hopefully she could squeeze some understanding into this kid before letting him go. “It’s the demons you want to kill, not us morphs. We’re just victims like her. Burned, bit, whatever it was. Turned into…” her right head looked down at herself while the left looked away almost shamefully, “…this.”

She loosened her grip so he could wriggle, but didn’t let him go quite yet. “Go home. Protect your town, don’t waste your life coming here.”

Sasha plucked his sword off the ground and examined it curiously. It had a golden gemstone mounted in the hilt, but was otherwise a simple weapon. “I can’t give you this back though, and risk you trying to kill me when I let you go.”

The serpentine body she had in place of legs was nearly forty feet long, and incredibly heavy. If she wanted, Sasha could pin him simply with the weight of her body. So she moved him about twenty feet away from her and readied her magic in case he tried something.

But he didn’t. The moment she released him, he scampered away in the opposite direction, ecstatic to escape even with his life. Crisis averted and pleased with her performance, Sasha turned back to the towards the opening in the mountain. Hopefully that would be the last they’d see of him.