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

Ninth Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC

Chains rattle, Adamantine strains against Adamantine as the impossible strength of the Efreeti Engine of War tests the bonds that had been set upon it, relentlessly obeying the directive it had been given over ten days ago. Were you to wait ten-thousand years and more still it would do the same, never knowing the difference. Or at least so it would be if things remained the same...

"Alright, I think this is everything," Lya says, looking out over the stone table filled with the instruments prescribed for the task. As the magic of the ritual will be drawn not from you but from the scroll you had bought, they serve merely as symbols, not channels, for the magic that is to be woven—diamonds replaced with glittering quartz, Mithral strings substituted with common silver, inks precious enough to hold pride of place in a dragon's hoard set aside in favor of bright colors. Yet the time that must be spent in the making is just as long, the steps one must enact just as exacting.

In the first hour, white light fractures into a thousand colors flickering across the dome of stone, in each ray another lie that men tell and each truth of being revealed.

"See!" you command in the Tongue of Fire that had sung it into being in the forges of the City of Brass, and so it does. Eyes are drawn to the growing shapes, though its metal sinews never falter in its task.

Upon the second hour, you set your fingers to the strings of silver and sing a song that seems at first little more than gears grinding upon gears, but then a pattern can be heard within, a language in such perfect synchronicity with the construct's own design, a tongue spoken only once from this day and ever after. "Hear!"

As the third hour passes, strange miasmas waft into the chamber, at times repulsing at others attracting. They smell of home, they smell of blood, they smell of tears bitter and thick, they smell of the perfumes bewitching as a lover's embrace and a thousand other things you cannot remember. "Smell!"

It seems to you the magic grows faster, though you know each command falls on the hour, every hour. Soft silk wraps around the Golem seemingly too fragile to last even a moment, yet they seem to quiet it more than the chains ever could. Thorns scrape upon Adamant. "Feel!"

The next gesture seems absurd. The ritual proscribes a piece of food, any food, be it sublime or revolting. At Dany's suggestion you reach out carefully to smear chocolate around the Golem's mouth. It shivers more like flesh than metal beneath your hands. "Taste!"

At last upon the sixth hour you speak the word that needs no reagent, only will: "Know!"

It seems to you as though you touch something in your mind, not as you had so long ago felt Velen's fiery presence, the first working of magic not your own to act upon you, not as you had heard the whispers of the dead or the dreams of lost gods. You feel the whole of a mind born in an instant, sharp and clear, but above all else deep, as a still pond reflects the starry heavens.


"Who am I?" a deep voice of steam and fire speaks, to your surprise not in Ignan, but in the Common Tongue of Westeros taken from your own thoughts. "Why am I?"

"If your makers gave you a name then I do not know it," you reply honestly. "Though I do not think any such name would suit you now regardless, for they had made you merely as a weapon without your own will, but now you are far more."

"I think, I feel, I am," the Golem proclaims with an almost childlike wonder. The mind within is not truly that of a child, having borrowed something of your own experiences as much as the nature of Adamantine, of which it is wrought. "Before I was a dangerous weapon, and that is why I am awake."

The words are not truly a question, but you treat them as one regardless. "So you were, but now you can be far more." One by one, you release the chains, allowing the newly awakened mind to be as free in form as it is now in spirit.

"Yet you wish me to be a weapon still, only in your service," the Golem replies, not in accusation, merely sounding curious as it had in every word it had spoken so far.

"I wish you to be a warrior in my service, and as such you would be honored and given payment commensurate to your great strength, but if you wish to leave now and never look back, I will not stop you," you reply simply, truthfully. However much the scroll had cost, and however difficult the capture of the Golem had been, you have no desire to be a slave master.

"I would be skilled in the making of war..." Wheels whir and black smoke bellows. "But I desire above all else to follow the last blessing you have given me, to know myself and the world. Is there such a path for a warrior to tread?"

"In my realm there is a great library, ever expanding, a land even now growing into itself and not quite knowing what it will become. I would be honored to welcome you into it."

"Then I accept." The blazing furnace gaze dips ever so slightly in a bow. "For a beginning, may I read some of those books?"

Gained Awakened Adamantine Golem


As you walk back into the city to the offices of Astral Currents, you are greeted with news both welcome and less so. On the one hand, your bounty for shape-shifter ashes in the Pendulum had been taken twelve times, giving you the chance to craft ethereal spies, but on the other all the attempts of your agents to contact the Amethyst Wyrm 'She Who Brings Enlightenment' have been met with failure. If you wish to speak with her you will simply have to go to her lair in person unannounced.

Gained 12 Shape-Shifter Corpses

Lost 6000 IM

What do you do next?

[] Attempt to seek out 'She Who Brings Enlightenment'

[] Reconvene with your most trusted allies and subjects on the matter of Heaven's Fate—and how much of it should be known to general populace

[] Summon the independent artificer Uniila that has acted against you on many an occasion in revenge for taking her sister captive and bound by powerful magics

[] Visit your uncle again. You have things to talk about, and people to scheme against

[] Begin the expedition to the Southlands

[] Write in

OOC: It seems like my dice liked the joke about the Monk Golem, since it got almost max roll on wisdom.