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

Seventh Day of the Second Month 294 AC

For once you do not take on the guise of a Braavosi merchant, since Kasath and its hinterlands are rather far from salt water. Instead you play the part of a Myrish Venturer grown bold from his travels and taking to the roads of Essos in search of 'the famed treasures of Vaes Dothrak'. Ser Richard and Waymar play guards while Vee is your supposed guide who has 'a way with beasts', and Teana and Dany are your companions and business partners. Your sister grumbles a bit about being in an older body, but even the sort of gambler you make out Vaeros of Myr to be wouldn't have brought a child on this trip.

As though to prove your point your first encounter with the inhabitants of 'Tall Pines', as the newly worn Sarnori milestone proclaims it, is a pair of feral unliving hounds that certainly are not as old as Sarnor, trying to maul you. Thus it is that the first one to try to sell your lie is Ser Richard as he has to pretend to struggle a few moments with the beasts rather than dispatching them in moments as he normally would have done.

"Hail to the latifundiari of this place, we mean no disrespect or trespass and are only traders looking to play our trade on the wide road," you call out in a Myrish accent you had practiced a few moments before with Tyene. Small odds that anyone here would know what a Myrman should sound like, but small odds are not none and that is the sort of carelessness that too often gets an agent, or to call it what it is, a conman caught.

Crows grown sickly and slow feasting on ever-rotting flesh fly from the tall grasses, then silence for a long while until you begin to wonder if only the feral dead care for your presence one way or another and you should try another settlement. Then a dead lord wrapped in funerary bandages that mark him as older than the doom of Sarnor, for there were none left to give rites at the end, emerges down the rutted path flanked by an honor guard of skeletons bearing not tomb treasures, but the discarded ill-used blades of fallen Dothraki. A few have bows, but you would not trust those strings to hold for too much longer from the looks of things. Perhaps an opportunity.


"Tell me, merchant," the Sarnori lord says between rotted teeth. "What do you have to offer those who have lost all? What wealth do you seek to make in this accursed realm?"

"Bah, dead you say, but you are surely not gone are you, honorable one?" You reply with the sort of habitual good cheer one such as Vaeros would use to hide nervousness. "You still have need of tools, weapons, news from far realms, books of lore, ink and paper with which to write your own accounts of great deeds. All these we carry with us and more of which I would not speak of in the open lest the fickle wind snatch them and carry them to the ear of one I mean not to know."

The dead man laughs, a hollow sound of bone scraping against bone. "Thou thinks that rivals in trade abound in this land? Few there are so daring or so foolish. These," he motions to his guards, "Need no better tools for they are tools, hollow things returned with only enough shreds of spirit in them to follow my commands." Had another spoken these words they might have been prideful or challenging, but you can hear an edge of sorrow to them. "Bring me back my people, bring me back my life, these things I would pay for with all I possess and more, otherwise I have no use for your baubles and your charms, man of the Western Shore."

Certainly a request you could make much of, the trouble of course is that the 'you' in question is Viserys Targaryen not Vaeros of Myr, and you dare not unveil yourself on such brief acquiescence, knowing nothing of the oaths that may bind the one before to the master of Kasath. What might a merchant have to trade that he would buy then?

[] Tales of life and the changing of the world and the magic within them

[] Books of distant lands

[] Sorceries that may give one a glimpse of life (may cause a negative reaction due to their temporary nature)

[] Write in

OOC: I thought about rolling through this but the DCs are high enough that a personal touch from you guys would really help to ensure you get through.