Of Blood and Monsters
Eleventh Day of the First Month 294 AC
There was something almost overwhelming about seeing so many giants and their herds marching south, like an avalanche of flesh and bone, fur and ivory, bearing down from the north at a rumbling run under
enchanted banners, Rina thought. Tireless and
wreathed in golden light that was the
bane of devils and dead things, the clubs of the guards marked with
sorcerous seals fit to slay even the greatest beasts of the North, they looked like what she imagined the nightmares of lords who still opposed the Dragon must. Yet the king had little interest in making them warriors, just getting them out of the hands of the Enemy. Of course their strength would profit the realm no matter what they did, so the wheels of trade and craft turned, the clink of coin changing hands, but that was simply the nature of things. More than gold or silver, people of all sorts were the land's wealth.
For now her task, alongside all the others, was to ensure that they all got to Castle Black alive. Strange at first to think herself their guardian, these folk of which she had heard little all her life but whispered fireside tales, some more ghoulish than others, but even had she not known other giants in the Deep, it would have taken one look at a babe sleeping peacefully in its mothers arms, rocked by the stride of the mammoth, to forget all the silly stories of 'bloodthirsty brutes'.
Rina knew the world had monsters in it, for all she
had been one of them. She knew that there were far more beings in the wide world that men counted monsters from nothing but fear, spite, or greed.
As the king swept great banks of earth from their way and thinned the tangled trees to allow the caravan to pass by swifter straighter paths, they descended down into a vale filled with dark green pines and wreathed in poisonous ivy.
They wouldn't be stopping here to let the beasts graze and the giants eat their noonday meal, that Rina was sure of.
No sooner had the thought passed through her mind than a howl echoed under the trees, like wolf or dog it was but not, long and mournful, too long to have passed the lips of any living beast. Then another... and another.
Princess Daenerys dove from the sky, a spark of silver against the blue sky, but Rina heard her in her mind before her feet had even touched the ground.
"There's a pack of the dead hunting a girl southeast of here. She can't be older than ten, but she's running a lot faster than her feet aught to carry her by some spell. There are more wights hidden ahead of her waiting in ambush."
"The girl is... a servant of a the Old Gods, a new made one," the king's voice resounded in Rina's mind along the same link, the pause making her think he was talking to someone else in his mind. Surely not the gods themselves, King Viserys was no kind of priest.
"I think we owe her a rescue, she just spilled the blood of one high in the favor of the Enemy in sacrifice."
"Who?" Rina asked, wondering what would so young a child to not only killing but sacrifice with forethought.
"Her father and would be 'husband'," the king answered grimly.
Rina cursed aloud without meaning to, cold rage blowing through her. For the first time since she had woken to her new life she thought of what it would be like to raise the dead, just so she could kill the bastard more painfully.
Who is sent to save the girl?
[] Write in
OOC: Dany only glimpsed the dead from on high, so all she can say about the ones waiting in ambush is that they are corporeal, which is to say wights and humanoid. Not yet edited.
