A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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It doesn't take long to search the home of the woman you were forced to kill, but it's no less ghoulish a task. You find a few journals, written on the same fine paper you're becoming used to, and a few odd tools that Harry recognises as foci for the young wizard. Once that's done, and having confirmed that the woman had no remaining living family, you depart for home before any authorities arrive. The sounds of the conflict, you won't call it a battle, couldn't have been missed. You bring Kathy's body back with you, unwilling to leave her to what Harry called a State Burial. She deserves better than that. You're quite sure he was going to protest for a moment, but thought better of it. Though he hasn't known you for long, he's able to recognise the weary sorrow in your motions. He shares it.

You reappear in the same room of your house that you departed from, carrying Kathy gently in front of you, and with Harry grasping your shoulder. There's a long, long silence as you stare down at the woman, almost peaceful in death, and something hot roars to simply return her, here and now. Instead, you turn your face towards the Warden who led you into this, your expression flat. You know why he argued for what he did, you even sympathise with it, somewhere. But right now, you can only hear the words and see the actions that condemned the brilliant woman in your arms to death. He nods, ever so slightly, and you recognise something behind the motion. Acceptance of his actions, and an understanding that not all you are about to say is truly for him.

Absolution, in as much as he can give it, offered without strings. It's almost enough to make you scream at him, but you keep your voice level, and colder than the depths of Always Winter. "Go, Warden. Report to your Council that I've kept my word and that justice has been done. The White Council's demand of me is done. This woman has paid the price your laws demand of her for daring to fight back against the darkness."

It's unfair, in a way, but you simply don't care. You know that the woman you'd fought had been terribly broken, in ways you're not sure you could ever properly grasp. But you also know that the fate she suffered at your hands should not have been. Harry simply nods again, more deeply, offering a formal bow before doing as you'd commanded. You don't return it. He doesn't offer any words of solace or apology, though. He simply leaves, with the calm of a man who knows intimately the place from which your words spring.

Given what you saw of Harry Dresden in the Soulgaze you shared, you can believe it. He's been where you are right now, and so much worse.

After he's gone, you call up a slab of stone and lay Kathy down upon it, a minor touch of power restoring her clothing, but not wiping away the bloodstains. To do that would be like trying to wipe away your part in her death, and that you will not do. You stand there for a small eternity, the emotions of human and dragon in equal measure straining against the iron will that brought you so far in your home. To restore her to life could undo everything you've done to prevent future sacrifices, but the words ring somehow hollow in the moment. And would she even answer?

Back home, you would have found something to occupy yourself with. Not to escape this feeling, but to help you through it. Simply standing with it hung around you had never helped.

You can't face the complex work of materials testing or anything else to do with the defensive artefacts you plan to forge for Harry and Molly, you doubt you could focus on it even if you could. Maybe practice, your eyes drop to Dark Sister, but the sword's voice slips through your mind, telling you no.

"You do not wish to wield my edge right now." She tells you firmly, but not entirely without mercy. "Though I think Varys might have a suggestion that could do you good." A mental touch turns you toward your familiar, who is curled protectively around the three journals that you retrieved from Kathy's home. The sun, you realise, has moved. Varys looks up, as if sensing your gaze, and her voice now touches your thoughts.

"You took these for a reason." She tells you, lifting one of the thin books with a careless motion of her wing. "It would be a waste to simply leave them to linger."

In that moment, you feel a surge of affection for the little pseudodragon stronger than any you've had before. It's followed swiftly by another, no less powerful, for Dark Sister.

"Thank you," you tell them, stepping across to Varys and carefully extracting the journals from the protective curve of her body. She hisses lazily, and taps her snout against your hand. The motion appears half-hearted, but you know better. "I'll take them, then."

"Good." Dark Sister's voice is much stronger now than you remember it being, before you entered this world. But she's still just as taciturn about her words. Guardians are more than just protectors of the flesh, you remember, and here the blade and Varys have found something upon which they agree. It would be foolish to ignore that.


It's dark outside by the time you finish the first journal, a record of Kathy's first explorations into her magic. It's been hard reading, and the brilliance you saw in her is fully on display as she chatters down the page about what she thinks she understands, and then an entry later, how that entire theory was somehow flawed and what she thinks the new one is. She approached magic like a science, you realise, in a much deeper way than Dresden has ever explained it could be, and she got results.

Even before Katherine Aroa learnt to twist time to her will, she was possessed of a brilliance and creativity that allowed her to do some truly incredible things for one so young. Lya, you realise early on, would have loved her, and you find yourself blinking your eyes very quickly for a moment when you grasp that. You'd been wrong about some of the basis of your anger. It hadn't been yourself that Kathy had forced you to kill, in a way. It had been your wife.

The journals have no titles, but they do have dates, and that's enough to establish a chronology. The first one covers her time before the Night of Nightmares, as she called it, and that alone is hard to read knowing as you do what she eventually became. The brilliance never faded, but the lenses it shone through became cracked. Maybe you could have fixed those, maybe you still could, but at what cost? The question is like poison, and you're reaching for the second journal before you fully catch up with the motion.

That's also when you realise that you're not alone.

Naomi stands at the door, her eyes very wide below a haphazard fringe of pale blonde hair. Not silver, as it had been tinted in the light of the Fomor gunfire. How long she's been watching, you're not quite sure, but it can't have been long. You'd have noticed before now, you're sure of it.

"What are you reading?" She asks, concern in her young voice. "And why is it making you so sad?"

There lies a pair of questions you're not sure where to even being answering. But you try, nonetheless. "They're the diaries of someone who was very brave, and very clever, and didn't deserve what she got for it."

Naomi steps closer, looking at the slightly bent pages, and cocks her head curiously. "You read it all today, didn't you?" You nod, and she hums a little to herself, something you've gotten used to. "You missed dinner, you know."

"I'm sorry," you tell her, and mean it.

"It's alright," it's not really, you can tell, but it's enough for now. "She must mean a lot to you."

You laugh before you can do anything to stop yourself, and find the sound surprisingly free of bitterness. Not completely, but still. "I only met her today," you say in way of explanation, and the confusion on your ward's face clears. "But she could have been an ally, a friend, I think. And I let her down." You sigh heavily, looking down at your hands. Naomi hums in thought, biting her lip in childish consternation. She still doesn't understand, you think, but maybe that's a mercy.

Then she looks up, and her voice is very clear. "Did you do everything you could to help her?" She asks. Oh, what a question. And yet, it catches something, the words familiar but different when coming from someone else. Even if that someone was a child – maybe especially if. You look up, and thoughts spark and fly behind your eyes as Naomi continues. "I mean, if you did, then there's nothing to be sorry for, right?"

"No." You hadn't meant to say the word aloud, but it slips into reality anyway, turning in the air. Naomi blinks.

"Which no?" Yet something in the tone of the question is brighter, somehow sensing the change in you. You shake your head, you can't let her know what she's made you start to reconsider. It would put everything you've worked for at risk, but that was never the real point of what you'd done. You'd been trying to make things better, to help people.

"Thank you, Naomi," you say to the girl, as fervently as you've ever spoken those words, rising to your feet from the chair.

"What did I do?" She asks, and a smile catches your lips at the sheer innocence behind the question. "Did I help?"

"Yes," you cross the space between you in a pair of steps, kneel down, and hug her. "Yes, you did." She squeaks at the sudden contact, then hugs back as what you said penetrates. That…goes on for a little while, and she recognises the look on your face when you rise back to your feet.

"You have to go for a little, don't you?" It's not really a question, but you nod once, all the same. "But you're going to help her, right?"

"If I can," you say firmly in the manner of one swearing an oath. Not to Naomi, either.

"Alright." You're already pulling together the energy you need, a hand reaching into the cloak of enchanted and wrought Archdevil skin around your shoulders, and you're gone from the room so swiftly that you might have teleported. So quickly thay you almost miss what Naomi says afterwards. "I hope you can."

You spare a single moment as you pass the servitor you'd introduced to Naomi as Miss Kessa, and have the construct go and put your ward to bed, before she can start digging into the journals you'd left. You'd rather she not get…interested in them.

As quickly as you walk, it doesn't take long for you to reach the chamber where Kathy's body lies, and you draw out the lustrous gemstone needed for the spell as you reach into the deeps of your power and self to forge a miracle upon the dreams of the ancient memories of your kind. It still feels different to how it did back home, but you're used to it now.

For a moment, you pause one final time, on the cusp of bringing the spell together. Could you do this? Was it really your place to do so? "If not me," you answer yourself, "then who." Whatever the result, at least you will have tried.

High Valyrian flows from your lips, filling the air with light, spreading out across the lifeless form in front of you. You feel the spell coming together, dreamborn insight married to the power of the quasi-divine.

And the diamond shatters.