Memories and Markers
Twenty-Fourth Day of the First Month 293 AC
Four mismatched figures sat around a fire amidst broken weed covered stones that must have once been Dragonmount's castle. There side by side stood a woman who had never been born into the world but gifted breath of life from the air itself by sorcery, a sellsword carefully polishing a sword that was worth more than a small town to the right buyer, a hulking minotaur humming off-key as he ate a fish fried right off the coals, and a young scion of House Velaryon carefully jotting down notes of the day.
"You know, I've done this before," Valaena Velaryon noted idly while closing the notebook.
"What, made camp on a deserted island in the Stepstones in the company of ne'er-do-wells?" the sellsword Bronn asked with a grin. "It seems highborn ladies lead more venturesome lives than I thought."
The young woman threw him what she hoped was faintly scornful look, of the kind her mother was so skilled in using. "It really is a pity the dead seems to have no sense of humor, else you could surely distract them with your japes while the rest of us used
mere steel and spells."
Argo gave a deep rumbling laugh, one that Valaena suspected was meant to be discrete, the trouble of course being that when a nine-foot-tall bull man did that it was still loud enough to be heard twenty peaces away.
"Cut me to the quick why don't you?" Bronn shook his head sadly. "What
did you mean, then?"
"I er... went looking for ghosts with some friends in the less-used wing of High Tide." One could more properly call it 'the half-ruined wing', though Valaena was hardly going to speak about her family's seat thus. Hopefully her work here would help to restoring her House's wealth and prestige to what it had once been.
"And did you find anything?" Mercy asked brightly.
"Plenty," the young Velaryon replied, ticking the answers off her fingers when she spoke them. "Drafts, some bats that were probably as scared of us as we were of them, and I personally found a cold that kept me drinking the maester's vile concoctions for a week."
"Oh... well at least it's not cold out here," Mercy announced through a fit of giggles.
"I'd almost take the cold over the bugs," Valaena groused, swatting away some kind of probably stinging, biting or otherwise nasty thing drawn to the heat and light of the fire. "Anyway, I did not mention it so that you could marvel at the cleverness of my younger self. You see, one of my cousins had this idea that might be of use... or at least it shouldn't hurt to try."
"Well, what notion was it?" Bronn asked. Oddly enough he sounded perfectly serious, not as though he were humoring her, which she had more than half-expected. Say what you will about the man, he was willing to at least
listen to most suggestions. Life by his wits and his blade must have bequeathed him with that sort of practicality.
"Well, Daella had a carpenter make a polished smooth board broken up into squares and then she carved all the letters into them. Then there was a token like a little arrow polished too so it slid along very easy, in case the spirits would have trouble moving things..."
"Ghosts not weak, hit
hard," Argo said rubbing his head for emphasis. Valaena imagined that most men would not be as cheerful about having a chunk of ruble the size of a toddler hurled at him by an enraged apparition, if that is said man would even have lived to tell the tale.
"Yes... the angry ones are strong," Valaena laid out her plan. "Rage, hate fear, they make the living dead strong, but they also make them less likely to express their woes in a way we can make sense of."
Mercy's eyes flashed with understanding, which in her case meant they truly glowed sky-blue for a moment. "You mean to see if there are weaker shades about. Ones that might prefer talking to fighting, and... well, I suppose all the cursing does technically count as talking, but it's not very helpful."
The night passed quickly and in the morning Valaena delivered her request to the ship's carpenter. The old man hardly batted an eye, which was only to be expected she supposed, given in whose service he was.
OOC: There is intentionally no fight here. It's too easy for fights to dominate a character's POVs in interludes since unlike with the main cast you guys only catch glimpses of them. So instead here's a bit more backstory and characterization.
