Role

Chapter 7

A whip of stinking blood lashed out from the pool and wrapped around the leg
of one of the mercenaries Yfetris had hired for this expedition. Rather than
pull him down and into the pool, it grew spikes into the man's flesh where he
stood, tearing the rough fabric of his pants. Hideous black channels snaked
from the puncture wounds, the putrid blood invading his body, and then the
flesh began to wither before everyone's eyes, the blood forcefully drained
from the leg as the tendril swelled in size.

As everyone else looked on in horror and bewilderment, one of the other
mercenaries acted quickly and cleaved the man's leg off at the knee. This one
had strong instincts. Attacking the creature would not have saved him, but
cutting off the infected leg might just do so. The severed limb was pulled
away, absorbed into the now swirling tides of blood. The blood that then
flowed from the wound seemed to take on a life of its own as well, flowing
almost eagerly towards the pool.

The swirling crimson tide rose up, the putrid odor becoming, somehow, more
powerful, causing the party to have to choke back bile. An orb of water
emerged from the blood, not quite pure, stopping to hover just above it, as if
considering the intruders to its domain. Yfetris fired a torrent of gel at
the orb, the standard response to water elementals, but it dove back into the
blood before it could reach.

Then the swirling blood coalesced, rising up as a single creature, the orb of
water moving around on the surface of the being, the relative purity a stark
contrast to the reeking mass. Yfetris realized she had read about a creature
like this before. A blood elemental, a combination of conjuration and
necromantic magic, creating an elemental from the water pulled from the lungs
of drowned corpses, and infused with necromantic energy. While the elemental
itself is water, it controls nearby blood, using it to drown, infect, and kill
as many creatures as it could to add their blood to its own mass.

This was bad. So many ritual killings had swelled this elemental to a
colossal size. They could only flee. Everyone seemed to have the same idea.
One of the mercenaries, the one with good instincts, she noticed, took the
opportunity to push his injured companion down the slope and towards the
elemental.

Then they ran.