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

Nineteenth Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC

Teana proves interested in joining you and Dany in your excursion to speak with the Githzerai, half from genuine interest and half from frustration at some minor mishap at the Scholarum, you suspect. While the school has not suffered any truly perilous mishaps since the lurking thing Joran found in the walls a school where novice mages are still testing the limits of how and why to use magic is rarely quiet. By contrast Sandor only asks Dany if she is going. At her nod he makes his way out of the tavern you had found him in, his half-drunk ale forgotten on the table. Your sister gives you a worried look. Perhaps you have been pushing him too hard into the strange wide world, but you know he would take it very badly indeed were you to change your mind for his sake and so you set off after him.

Dany holds aloft the sphere of glass that holds within a wisp of primordial fog and speaks aloud the words by which the gate may be opened. The world melts around you and another rises in its place.


You had expected grey nothingness like the void between the worlds, or perhaps some chaotic mingling of the elements as can be found at the edges of the Inne Planes. You find neither. Instead a forest of leafless trees cut in unnatural geometric shapes rises towards a sky lost in a colorless haze. The farther you look through it the less real it looks, hurried brushstrokes of an unfinished painting. Are those carvings in the trees, or tiny pale beasts with too many limbs or too few rushing along them, merging and dividing as you watch? Delicate luminous mushrooms shine upon the forest floor, one more odd inversion of the natural world, though easily overlooked besides the deer drawn in lines of light that approaches with uncertain steps to nuzzle Teana's hand.


"Better than a fight..." the sorceress begins to say as the deer shatters like glass under her hand, the shards cutting into her flesh.

Instinctively you shroud the shards in arcane fire before they can strike the ground, to burn away the blood. Soft ash drifts down once the flame dies, Glass cannot burn to ash, the part of your mind that clings most strongly to logic and common sense as they are in your world notes. That could very well be sugar instead of ash and you would not know without tasting it, you realizing. It is only now, looking upon it with your own eyes, that you begin to understand the serene maelstrom of Limbo.

"So which way do we have to go?" the Hound breaks the silence that had fallen over your small group.

"Whichever way we choose to, whichever way feels right..." Dany says looking and sounding giddy

You lead the others in flight, more from habit than necessity, after all, who is to say that one cannot walk as swiftly as fly or part the trees before you as the fisherman parts reeds?

"Like a shadow, but nothing casts it," Teana said fascinated.

"Like the Dream, but there is no dreamer," Dany adds.

The three of you lock gazes and understanding comes to all at once in a flash, but you are the one to speak it. "We are the dreamers, it is the shadow of our thoughts."

How long you fly you could not say, nor even if it matters, but eventually the sky and the trees grow more distinct and firm, not real as the world of flesh and blood is real, but as though the skein of things is a hairsbreadth thicker here, enforced perhaps by the tread of many feet, the touch of many minds. Pale stones align themselves into a path like a river spun from a thousand streams winding on among the trees.

"Did you hear that?" you ask aloud as snatches of unfamiliar words drift between the branches only to fall silent. The sound drifts ever at the edge of your senses until the trees thin abruptly to nothing to reveal a clearing before pale walls that drift off into the sky, before which plays out a scene familiar in substance for all the strangeness of the details. A man with bright green skin accented by darker patches that accentuate his sharp-boned features stands before a group of youths of the same kindred, slowly demonstrating a range of arm and leg motions that remind you faintly of Ting's exercises while the youths watch with more or less atentiveness as is their nature.


"Peace be with you travelers, what do you seek?" the teacher asks calmly in the tongue of dragons, as though he had been expecting you while his students scramble to gawk at the strange travelers in a way that you suspect might earn them a reprimand later.

"We seek the Monastery of the Unbroken Circle, that we might speak to its masters of the troubles of the Spheres and the way by which peace may be found in the joining of hands," you reply, making no attempt to appear as something other than what you are. Those who dwell in a place as treacherous as Limbo would value truth more highly than coy courtesy, on that all tales agree. "A letter has preceded us..."

"Saruk," the teacher looks over at the boy who is doing his poor best at hiding his staring. "Escort these travelers to speak to Grandmaster Randar."

"Master, I am not worthy," the boy begins.

"Perhaps that is so," the elder Githzerai nods thoughtfully in what is clearely the beginning of some lesson though the boy cannot hear it, his shoulders slumping. "What then do you propose I do, go myself instead and leave all of you here for the mist stalkers to devour? Or perhaps we should all go back, two dozen to escort a gathering of four?"

Saruk stares at the ground like he would very much like for it to swallow him, which here might be a real peril come to think of it.

You catch sight of Dany whispering a petty spell under her breath than sending a few words into his ear.

"Master, that is not for me to say for I know yet little of myself, and would not presume knowledge of others. I thought it wiser to err on too little daring than too much given my youth."

The instructor nods, satisfied with his response, or rather Dany's response. As you pass under the arch of the monastery the young student gives Dany a grateful smile before asking. "Do you wish to see the Grandmaster at once or refresh yourselves from your journey?"

What do you do?

[] Speak to the Grandmaster
-[] Write in

[] Visit more of the monastery learn more of its makers

[] Write in

OOC: I looked at the standard D&D representation of Limbo and it just looked sort of... boring. So I went with a more surreal interpretation. Hope it works.