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

Twenty Fourth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC

Though you suspect that Eddard Stark would not begrudge another visit from your companions after what had transpired at Barrowtown there are perhaps other tales that magic and other stranger powers can tell of the broken sword. From your cloak you draw forth a pair of gloves seemingly woven of black silk with patterns spun in silver thread upon them, though the 'silk' was not spun of any earthly creature but the mists of Limbo and the crystalline thread drawn from the mind of a githzerai mystic set in patterns of knowledge and remembrance. Slipping them on in place of your own enchanted gloves you speak the word of command, and though you feel no magic to it answers begin floating into mind.

The One who bore it last had been mortal doomed to die
The One who bore it last had been a man, a warrior of some renown
The One who bore it last had been ambitious and by than ambition betrayed his liege
The One who bore it last had earned it as a favor from an aged king and seen it shattered before him with eyes not his own

"Well that was a common enough tale until the last," you say, dismissing the power of the gloves with a second command. You begin to recount what you had sensed, then as you reach the end the words freeze on your lips, a piece long expected falling into place.

'Eyes not his own', a warg. Had some ancient warg from the Age of Heroes cheated death as the last of the Warg Kings had for a time?

"Give that here, you might as well spare your magic if there is some ancient sorcerer to face before the dawn," Dany offers. She takes the blade and carefully sinks it into the dirt, and with eyes closed against the distractions of the world she speaks what was once a prayer for knowledge to Syrax fourteen times times fourteen. Though it is the Dragon Dream that answers her, not the dead goddess, answers she clearly finds.

Her eyes snap open. "Whatever happened here started with the Blackw..." she stops herself looking around suspiciously. "With the House of the dead weirwood tree," she corrects herself, obviously not wishing to chance the name so close to the pool, or perhaps the sword. She starts speaking Draconic for good measure to Rina's slight confusion. "This sword was given to Morvin Blackwood by an aged Stark King, perhaps Snowbeard, and for more than two decades that Blackwood was the master of the hunt and master-at-arms of Winterfell, by the end he was regent in all but name, for the old king could barely move much less speak or order his realm. But inevitably time took its toll, the old king breathed his last..."

"But Morvin would not abandon his power?" your mother's words are barely a question. This was a tale told time and again.

"No, that he would not, he pledged that he would master the old king's eldest grandson Rickard as he had Snowbeard. Morvin was a warg of twelve skins and so he thought to take the young body for his own, to rule as a Blackwood in Stark's skin," your sister continues the grim tale to silence scarce broken by a single breath. "He almost succeeded, but Rickard was a warg too, if far less skilled in those arts, and so rather than being destroyed he fled into the body of his direwolf and from there warned his brother Edwyn by certain means they had devised between them as children. Just as the usurper king celebrated his wedding the lords of the North, forwarned of his treachery, set upon him and through some guile or sorcery revealed him."

Perhaps it is a trick of the wind through the branches, but it seems to you one can almost hear the screams and shouts of that ill fated feast, the hiss of bronze blades unsheathed.

"They made the Blackwood lord watch as they shattered the blade which 'Rickard' had taken for his own, supposedly in honor of his Grandfather's favored friend... then to the horror of the true Rickard watching from the shadows as a direwolf, they killed him. The lords of the North would not have a warg as their king after what they had seen that day, even if his name was Stark. The broken blade was passed to the Blackwoods who were henceforth exiled from the Wolfswood and I image fled south, though that I did not see."

"They were too wealthy and too strong to take apart entirely with no strong king on the throne and nothing but allegations of magic to back the charge of treason," your mother guesses.

"And Rickard, the king twice betrayed, followed them as one or another beast, the victim turned thief indeed," you finish, remembering the words of the divination you had worked a few hours ago.

"So we're looking for a millennia old warg with a grudge, and if practice begets skill in the stealing of bodies he could be... anyone," Dany finishes somberly.

What do you do next?

[] Return to settling the political conflict, speak to the two heirs and then their fathers
-[] Write in

[] Try to find the ancient warg somehow
-[] Write in

-[] Write in

OOC: I hope this works for a reveal, I thought about spacing it out some more, but that just felt like padding, figuring out these sorts of things is what legend lore is for after all.