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

Twenty-First Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC

Jezhene Pahl had learned early and learned well the lessons of discretion, a girl-child was to be seen but not heard in the presence of those who held the reigns of power, so her father hand taught her. A woman was to meekly nod in the face of her lord father or husband, but keep her own counsel on how she might turn their will to her advantage for harpies had sharp claws and entrancing voices, so her mother had taught her. Yet no one had taught her to hide from her future betrothed, or speak to strange foreigners and definitely not jump into magic bags so she supposed it made sense in an upside-down sort of way that her life had stopped making sense that day. She had been possessed by a devil, Freewoman Kira insisted, not a demon but a devil, she was very insistent about that. Jezhene did not remember being possessed, she did not remember anything but blackness for a little bit and then she was in bed being looked over by healers.

When she realized one of her healers was the False Angel of Mantarys it had been all she could do not to weep in fear and dishonor for her blood for she had heard may tales of that one's cruelty as he drove the slaves on to tear apart their betters and feast upon their flesh to empower his witchcraft. Only the False Angel had not been so false, she had come to realize the more she spent in his company. It had occurred to her once or twice that maybe he had bespelled her and he really was as wicked as her elder brother told, but then how could she doubt the enchantment? That way lay madness and her wits were the last thing the heiress of House Pahl possessed, thus she concluded to trust her eyes and ears, to watch and listen, the better to learn of these strange folk upon which her life now depended.

The more she learned the more confused Jezhene became. "Why do you care so much about what the Unsullied believe?" the girl asked one day when the normally calm Lord Malarys zo Vanor fumed over 'another dead priest'. "They are loyal." She said the last with the utter confidence of her eleven years.

"Strange confidence in ones not bound by the simplest of enchantments," Morwyn scoffed, with that strange cat-smile of his, the one he wore whenever he knew something the one he was talking to did not. Unlike the sorcerer lord the singer or even the angel Jezhene did not really know what to call him so she used the name he had given her, at least in her head, even though it sounded dreadfully familiar.

"'An arch of a thousand years bears many burdens'," the girl replied quoting proverb.

"Whether it lasts a thousand years or ten times that long everything breaks," the strange man said and for a moment Jezhene thought she heard something like sadness in his voice, but his next words distracted as much as any could. "If it had not been for us devils would have wrapped this city up as a spider wraps his prey, ready to drink."

"Should you be telling her that?" Freewoman Kira said, peeking through the crumbling arch of the door.

"Are you planning to let her loose on the streets where she can inform on us?" Morwyn added his own question.

"That's not..." the woman shook her head. "Nevermind, I have to hurry, just try not to give her anymore nightmares then she doubtless already has."

"Do you have nightmares?" Crimson eyes fell on her as though he suspected a patch of mold hiding in a corner.

"No," Jezhene lied instantly. "Never saw the point."

"Good, that is the most absurd of all mortal weaknesses, not being able to control even the inside of your own heads," he replied. "As I was saying, we managed to remove a great many of the lesser devils either captured or banished, but they practice good compartmentalization..."

Jezhene understood what all the parts of that word meant, but not the way they came together. She rather suspected Morwyn had made it up on the spot the way foreigners sometimes did when thinking in their own tongue so of course she said so.

She learned a great deal about how to deceive and trick then, more than her father or mother ever had.

OOC: Well here we are, the world through the eyes of a young Ghiscari noblewoman forging an unlikely friendship with a drow who finds her entertaining. This is not as informative as I would like it. I'll probably turn to an on screen report in an update, but the gist of it is that while your party was able to seriously disrupt the low to mid levels of diabolic control in Meereen, the higher devils remain in the shadows. On the other hand the realization of just how much of the Harpies' influence remains leads Malarys to believe that action here is not as urgent as in many other hot spots.