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

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Horde Thief Interlude IV - A Lady's Knight
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    Horde Thief
    Interlude 4 - A Lady's Knight​

    Standing there in the parking lot outside McAnally's, I didn't really feel any different. Of course, I hadn't put on the ring that Viserys had given me yet, I needed to make sure it would be ok. Living among the Winter Fae makes trust hard, even for the Winter Lady. And though I'd been there as man who called himself Viserys Targaryen had worked to unravel the deeper truths of the Mantle I bore, I didn't know if I really trusted him.

    No, that was a lie. A Soulgaze wasn't a truthteller, but it gave you the truth of who the other member of it was. If Viserys said that the loop of thrumming metal in my hand would cut away the influence of Winter upon me, in as much as that was even possible, then that was what it would do. He was that sort of man. No stranger to twisting words, but if he gave his, then it was good. He was like Harry, that way, but a little more insane. I'd wondered sometimes if that was even possible.

    What was holding me back was, I thought, a year and more of living as the Winter Lady. As one of the Queens of Winter, accepting a gift carried obligation, or it was supposed to. And yet I was just standing here, looking down at what I was certain should have incurred a debt, and finding nothing. He'd called me Lady Carpenter, not the Winter Lady, had that mattered? My mind skittered away from the thought, and before I could catch it, it was buried in the steady flow of icy power that suffused my bones. That was…normal, wasn't it? Something in me seemed to disagree, but I couldn't quite hear it.

    A wild, fey mood rose in me for a moment, urging me to hurl the gift away, to leave it here and never look back, never return for it. To live without regret, as a Queen of Winter. Maybe that would be easier? But I had to wonder. The Mantle in me didn't want me to wear the ring. Why not? I'd accepted the warding that Viserys had used to shield Harry from supernatural detection when striking the Fomor more than once in the course of our experiments. How was this different?

    Only one way to find out, really. Unless I was going to let the Mantle drive me, and if you'd had Michael Carpenter as a father, and Harry Dresden as a mentor, you'd know better than to accept that sort of fate. First though, don't do this just standing here on the street. Winter Lady or no, and maybe especially so, it might not be wise to do this in the middle of a parking lot, in the early Chicago noon.

    So, wasting no time, I got into my car and locked it from the inside. Then, before anything could come to mind as a reason against what I was about to do, I shifted the ring to the fingers of my right hand and slammed it down onto one of the fingers of my left hand so hard it probably should have hurt. If it did, I…didn't notice.

    The moment the ring touched my skin in full, the Winter in me went mad. It lasted only a fraction of a second, as the power of the artefact wrestled with the vast well of energy that was the right of every Winter Lady. But it wasn't just that power that made me that. The Mantle was more than just power, it was knowledge and law and…obligations. I hissed as the metal burned against my skin for a moment, the odd sigils in something more than silver glowing with power. It was almost enough to make me remove it, but I realised the moment before I did so that the ring's power wasn't trying to do what Winter screamed it was. It wasn't trying to sunder the Mantle from me. It was pushing Winter away, and giving Molly, giving me, space to breathe.

    The first few second of silence in my thoughts were like the first gasp of fresh air from a cavern diver; bliss in a way that I'd rarely imagined. But the problem of Winter, and why that peace didn't last as the Mantle was driven back more fully than it had ever been, is that it's icy and painful to touch, but it also stops you from feeling anything inside of it. And I'd been having to use that power for almost a year and a half, rarely if ever stopping.

    The immediate aftermath of that is a blur for me. I think that's probably a good thing. Eighteen months and change of emotional feedback, that had been buried by my Mantle's power. My horror at the duties of necessity forced upon me by it, the tests and constant duties, Mab always pushing me on to the next task and the next challenge, running through the docket left to linger for centuries by Maeve. Everything I'd done, flashing through me in a seemingly endless slideshow of every emotion that Mab hadn't wanted me to feel as I became what she needed me to be.

    At some point, I'd started the car and headed out onto the streets of Chicago. The important thing hadn't been going anywhere in particular, it had been just going. Moving, instead of staying still, I couldn't deal with the landslide of thawing emotional responses that I'd forced myself to swallow. I hadn't even…

    Some pains were too sharp to acknowledge, even then, but I found myself making my way down a street that I'd known since I was a child. There was a house at the end of it, a colonial style affair that I knew as well as my own hand. The picket fence had been repaired after last year's unpleasant interaction with a particularly nasty group of supernatural monsters, and a fresh coat of white paint reflected the amber streetlights. I'd been driving for hours, and I had no idea exactly where I'd gone getting here.

    I pulled to a stop and sat in the car for a moment, staring at the ring glinting in the light on the hand still on the steering wheel. I wondered for a moment if I should just tear it off, throw it out the window, and drive away. Instead I found myself walking up the path to the front door. At some point I'd opened and closed the gate.

    Light flooded out through the windows, but it was blurry for some reason. I only realised when I got to the door that it was because I was crying. I didn't even know when I'd started doing so, but my throat was choked enough that I had to have been doing so for a long time. I wiped at my eyes fitfully, god I was going to look like a mess, then knocked hard.

    The door opened maybe fifteen seconds later, and my heart wrenched as my father's face flickered into a smile a moment before my appearance properly registered. I'd not been wearing any makeup when I went to the meeting, which was a small mercy, but even so crying is rarely pretty.

    "Mol-" Michael's eyes widened, though only one of them was really seeing me, and the pleasantly surprised greeting died on his lips. A moment later, the hand free of his walking cane had reached out and pulled me inside, and into a hug that came within a hairsbreadth of breaking me. No, not physically, not like that. It was just the care. He didn't ask anything, not at first. He didn't need to. I was his daughter, and I was hurting. He did the only thing a good father would.


    I lost more time there, too. I have a vague memory of my mother, Charity, coming through to check on Michael and finding us there. What felt like a few moments later, but if the clock was to believed was much longer, I was in the living room of the house with my parents on either side of me, tangibly there, but not intrusive. There was a cup of something hot and, I sipped carefully, sweet in my hands. Hot chocolate, I realised on my next sip. The way only my mother made it.

    "Molly?" My mother asked me, and I blinked my eyes a few times, shaking my head to try and clear it. All the emotion that the shackling of Winter had released wasn't gone, but it had been bled a little, like a draining abscess. The empty box of tissues on the table in front of the sofa spoke to how most of that draining had been achieved. I nodded soundlessly at the question, taking another gulp from the mug in my hands.

    "I'm not going to ask if you're alright," my mother told me firmly. "What I want to know is who did this to you." Her quietly murderous tone in the intensely emotional situation prompted a watery laugh, but it died quickly as I realised who was at fault.

    "I'm sorry, momma," I half-whispered, shaking my head. "It wasn't anyone, not really. I was just in the wrong place, and it all happened so fast. And I've been hiding it," the guilt surged up in me, writhing up through my emotions, locked in combat with my bottomless need to protect the people I loved.

    "If this is about what Dresden was talking about last time here was here," my mother began, no doubt about to produce a verbal list of inventive punishments.

    "It's not," despite how raw my voice was, Charity stopped the instant the faint words let my lips. Her blue eyes looked down at me, full of care, and I had to work not to turn my face away from it. I'd kept so much. "Mom, dad, I'm the Winter Lady." The words came out in a rush, far faster than they had any right to. And it was like something just shattered inside of me, a wall giving way.

    "I have been since the Halloween before last, when Harry came back. I never meant to, but it just all went wrong, and then I was stuck like this and how could I even begin to explain?" I spoke in fits and starts, my sentences incomplete and difficult to make sense of. "And everything since then, whenever I saw you, it just made it harder. How could I tell you what I'd become, after not telling you at first? And it's," my voice cracked, "necessary work, I'm helping, I am." Who was I trying to convince?

    Charity was staring at me as if I'd suddenly grown an extra set of limbs, but when I chanced a glance at my father, he was simply sat there on my other side, quite calm. "But it's ok, it's ok," I scrambled on, "because I have this now," I held up my left hand, to show the ring. "It's why I'm here." I only realised later that the stunned silence was due to more than just what I'd said.

    "Um," my mother paused, and even in my emotionally-drained state I knew that was unusual. "Molly, what are you," she cut off as my father cleared his throat, and I looked over, not fearful, not even slightly, really, but…there wasn't a word I could find for it.

    "Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter," he said, and I shuddered in place as he pronounced every syllable right. And yet, he did so with the same bone-deep caring that had characterised every word he'd ever spoken to me and my siblings for as long as I could remember. He wasn't trying to bind me. Just make me listen.

    "Yes?" I did not stutter, but when he reached out and took one of my hands in his, I still had to fight the sudden urge to pull away. From my own father? What had Winter done to me?

    "You're our daughter, Molly," my father told me, his voice steady and firm. I almost didn't notice Charity taking my other hand in hers, carefully transferring the mug of hot chocolate from my free hand to the table. "No matter what you do, we will always be your parents. And we will always, always," the air seemed to vibrate with the strength of implacable faith in the word, "love you."

    I can only remember one other thing about the evening after that. When I finally did fall asleep, in the guest bedroom that had belonged to Maggie not so long ago, no dreams stalked me into the night.

    Not a single one.
     
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    • Don't even ask me where all this came from. I don't know. I just sat down and it happened. I'm not even sure if it really gets the proper point across. And yet it's what I've created, and I can't really do anything more than use it. Those who know the Dresdenverse should be able to see the Skin Game analogue I ripped off in creating this, but it goes deeper than that. Cold Days gives us perhaps the best example of what Winter does to a person, and Molly is far more deeply connected to Winter than Harry. This result might come a bit out of the left field, but it's what my simulation of the character told me was most likely. If I'm wrong, well, that's not for me to decide.

    With this, however, Arc 2 has come to a close. In the interim period there will be two Interludes, the first of which I'd like to make up to those reading – the second one is already locked in. Current choices are:

    Sword Sister - Takes place between HT 28 and HT 29
    Great Stakes - Takes place directly after HT 30

    I really hope you've all enjoyed this, even those moments of heavy emotion like this one.

    Edit: Oh yeah, @Crake? You know that thing about giving you time to catch me? Eat your fucking heart out :V
     
    Last edited:
    Snowfire said:
    << Previous
    Horde Thief
    Interlude 4 - A Lady's Knight​

    Standing there in the parking lot outside McAnally's, I didn't really feel any different. Of course, I hadn't put on the ring that Viserys had given me yet, I needed to make sure it would be ok. Living among the Winter Fae makes trust hard, even for the Winter Lady. And though I'd been there as man who called himself Viserys Targaryen had worked to unravel the deeper truths of the Mantle I bore, I didn't know if I really trusted him.

    No, that was a lie. A Soulgaze wasn't a truthteller, but it gave you the truth of who the other member of it was. If Viserys said that the loop of thrumming metal in my hand would cut away the influence of Winter upon me, in as much as that was even possible, then that was what it would do. He was that sort of man. No stranger to twisting words, but if he gave his, then it was good. He was like Harry, that way, but a little more insane. I'd wondered sometimes if that was even possible.

    What was holding me back was, I thought, a year and more of living as the Winter Lady. As one of the Queens of Winter, accepting a gift carried obligation, or it was supposed to. And yet I was just standing here, looking down at what I was certain should have incurred a debt, and finding nothing. He'd called me Lady Carpenter, not the Winter Lady, had that mattered? My mind skittered away from the thought, and before I could catch it, it was buried in the steady flow of icy power that suffused my bones. That was…normal, wasn't it? Something in me seemed to disagree, but I couldn't quite hear it.

    A wild, fey mood rose in me for a moment, urging me to hurl the gift away, to leave it here and never look back, never return for it. To live without regret, as a Queen of Winter. Maybe that would be easier? But I had to wonder. The Mantle in me didn't want me to wear the ring. Why not? I'd accepted the warding that Viserys had used to shield Harry from supernatural detection when striking the Fomor more than once in the course of our experiments. How was this different?

    Only one way to find out, really. Unless I was going to let the Mantle drive me, and if you'd had Michael Carpenter as a father, and Harry Dresden as a mentor, you'd know better than to accept that sort of fate. First though, don't do this just standing here on the street. Winter Lady or no, and maybe especially so, it might not be wise to do this in the middle of a parking lot, in the early Chicago noon.

    So, wasting no time, I got into my car and locked it from the inside. Then, before anything could come to mind as a reason against what I was about to do, I shifted the ring to the fingers of my right hand and slammed it down onto one of the fingers of my left hand so hard it probably should have hurt. If it did, I…didn't notice.

    The moment the ring touched my skin in full, the Winter in me went mad. It lasted only a fraction of a second, as the power of the artefact wrestled with the vast well of energy that was the right of every Winter Lady. But it wasn't just that power that made me that. The Mantle was more than just power, it was knowledge and law and…obligations. I hissed as the metal burned against my skin for a moment, the odd sigils in something more than silver glowing with power. It was almost enough to make me remove it, but I realised the moment before I did so that the ring's power wasn't trying to do what Winter screamed it was. It wasn't trying to sunder the Mantle from me. It was pushing Winter away, and giving Molly, giving me, space to breathe.

    The first few second of silence in my thoughts were like the first gasp of fresh air from a cavern diver; bliss in a way that I'd rarely imagined. But the problem of Winter, and why that peace didn't last as the Mantle was driven back more fully than it had ever been, is that it's icy and painful to touch, but it also stops you from feeling anything inside of it. And I'd been having to use that power for almost a year and a half, rarely if ever stopping.

    The immediate aftermath of that is a blur for me. I think that's probably a good thing. Eighteen months and change of emotional feedback, that had been buried by my Mantle's power. My horror at the duties of necessity forced upon me by it, the tests and constant duties, Mab always pushing me on to the next task and the next challenge, running through the docket left to linger for centuries by Maeve. Everything I'd done, flashing through me in a seemingly endless slideshow of every emotion that Mab hadn't wanted me to feel as I became what she needed me to be.

    At some point, I'd started the car and headed out onto the streets of Chicago. The important thing hadn't been going anywhere in particular, it had been just going. Moving, instead of staying still, I couldn't deal with the landslide of thawing emotional responses that I'd forced myself to swallow. I hadn't even…

    Some pains were too sharp to acknowledge, even then, but I found myself making my way down a street that I'd known since I was a child. There was a house at the end of it, a colonial style affair that I knew as well as my own hand. The picket fence had been repaired after last year's unpleasant interaction with a particularly nasty group of supernatural monsters, and a fresh coat of white paint reflected the amber streetlights. I'd been driving for hours, and I had no idea exactly where I'd gone getting here.

    I pulled to a stop and sat in the car for a moment, staring at the ring glinting in the light on the hand still on the steering wheel. I wondered for a moment if I should just tear it off, throw it out the window, and drive away. Instead I found myself walking up the path to the front door. At some point I'd opened and closed the gate.

    Light flooded out through the windows, but it was blurry for some reason. I only realised when I got to the door that it was because I was crying. I didn't even know when I'd started doing so, but my throat was choked enough that I had to have been doing so for a long time. I wiped at my eyes fitfully, god I was going to look like a mess, then knocked hard.

    The door opened maybe fifteen seconds later, and my heart wrenched as my father's face flickered into a smile a moment before my appearance properly registered. I'd not been wearing any makeup when I went to the meeting, which was a small mercy, but even so crying is rarely pretty.

    "Mol-" Michael's eyes widened, though only one of them was really seeing me, and the pleasantly surprised greeting died on his lips. A moment later, the hand free of his walking cane had reached out and pulled me inside, and into a hug that came within a hairsbreadth of breaking me. No, not physically, not like that. It was just the care. He didn't ask anything, not at first. He didn't need to. I was his daughter, and I was hurting. He did the only thing a good father would.


    I lost more time there, too. I have a vague memory of my mother, Charity, coming through to check on Michael and finding us there. What felt like a few moments later, but if the clock was to believed was much longer, I was in the living room of the house with my parents on either side of me, tangibly there, but not intrusive. There was a cup of something hot and, I sipped carefully, sweet in my hands. Hot chocolate, I realised on my next sip. The way only my mother made it.

    "Molly?" My mother asked me, and I blinked my eyes a few times, shaking my head to try and clear it. All the emotion that the shackling of Winter had released wasn't gone, but it had been bled a little, like a draining abscess. The empty box of tissues on the table in front of the sofa spoke to how most of that draining had been achieved. I nodded soundlessly at the question, taking another gulp from the mug in my hands.

    "I'm not going to ask if you're alright," my mother told me firmly. "What I want to know is who did this to you." Her quietly murderous tone in the intensely emotional situation prompted a watery laugh, but it died quickly as I realised who was at fault.

    "I'm sorry, momma," I half-whispered, shaking my head. "It wasn't anyone, not really. I was just in the wrong place, and it all happened so fast. And I've been hiding it," the guilt surged up in me, writhing up through my emotions, locked in combat with my bottomless need to protect the people I loved.

    "If this is about what Dresden was talking about last time here was here," my mother began, no doubt about to produce a verbal list of inventive punishments.

    "It's not," despite how raw my voice was, Charity stopped the instant the faint words let my lips. Her blue eyes looked down at me, full of care, and I had to work not to turn my face away from it. I'd kept so much. "Mom, dad, I'm the Winter Lady." The words came out in a rush, far faster than they had any right to. And it was like something just shattered inside of me, a wall giving way.

    "I have been since the Halloween before last, when Harry came back. I never meant to, but it just all went wrong, and then I was stuck like this and how could I even begin to explain?" I spoke in fits and starts, my sentences incomplete and difficult to make sense of. "And everything since then, whenever I saw you, it just made it harder. How could I tell you what I'd become, after not telling you at first? And it's," my voice cracked, "necessary work, I'm helping, I am." Who was I trying to convince?

    Charity was staring at me as if I'd suddenly grown an extra set of limbs, but when I chanced a glance at my father, he was simply sat there on my other side, quite calm. "But it's ok, it's ok," I scrambled on, "because I have this now," I held up my left hand, to show the ring. "It's why I'm here." I only realised later that the stunned silence was due to more than just what I'd said.

    "Um," my mother paused, and even in my emotionally-drained state I knew that was unusual. "Molly, what are you," she cut off as my father cleared his throat, and I looked over, not fearful, not even slightly, really, but…there wasn't a word I could find for it.

    "Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter," he said, and I shuddered in place as he pronounced every syllable right. And yet, he did so with the same bone-deep caring that had characterised every word he'd ever spoken to me and my siblings for as long as I could remember. He wasn't trying to bind me. Just make me listen.

    "Yes?" I did not stutter, but when he reached out and took one of my hands in his, I still had to fight the sudden urge to pull away. From my own father? What had Winter done to me?

    "You're our daughter, Molly," my father told me, his voice steady and firm. I almost didn't notice Charity taking my other hand in hers, carefully transferring the mug of hot chocolate from my free hand to the table. "No matter what you do, we will always be your parents. And we will always, always," the air seemed to vibrate with the strength of implacable faith in the word, "love you."

    I can only remember one other thing about the evening after that. When I finally did fall asleep, in the guest bedroom that had belonged to Maggie not so long ago, no dreams stalked me into the night.

    Not a single one.
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    Beautiful... :cry:
     
    *Googles this shit happening in Europe*

    The fuck?

    Please tell me that they aren't going to do anything against this quest. Please.
     
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    So do we have a vote or we keep panicking over Europe?

    *Runs another torrent, ruminating on own government's madness
     
    Oops, totally forgot to vote. Looks like I'm not the only one.

    [X] Award the winners their prizes, but refrain from further offers of land until the conclusion of the Festival, after the results of the joust and team competitions have been revealed. We will have clearer idea of how many to give land, where to award it, and the size of such parcels.
     
    Last edited:
    [X] Award the winners their prizes, but refrain from further offers of land until the conclusion of the Festival, after the results of the house and team competition have been revealed. We will have cleared idea of how many to give land, where to award it, and the size of such parcels.
     
    ryuan said:
    [X] Award the winners their prizes, but refrain from further offers of land until the conclusion of the Festival, after the results of the house and team competition have been revealed. We will have cleared idea of how many to give land, where to award it, and the size of such parcels.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    One Autumn Leaf said:
    [X] Award the winners their prizes, but refrain from further offers of land until the conclusion of the Festival, after the results of the house and team competition have been revealed. We will have cleared idea of how many to give land, where to award it, and the size of such parcels.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I had to edit my plan slightly due to Kindle autocorrupt. Y'all might want to update yours as well, or just name vote me.
     
    Snowfire said:
    "But it's ok, it's ok," I scrambled on, "because I have this now," I held up my left hand, to show the ring. "It's why I'm here." I only realised later that the stunned silence was due to more than just what I'd said.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Michael, surreptitiously putting away his shotgun, secretly delighted: "When's the wedding?"

    Molly: :???:

    Molly: :o
     
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