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

Ninth Day of the Second Month 294 AC

Away from the walls wrought with sorcery and black stone, away from their horrid greeting, you might almost think Qohor was as any other place under the sun, any other city where the worst excesses one was likely to find was in the slave markets or perhaps the hearths of sorcerer-priests who were said to feed slaves 'too weak to be good at much else' into the flames. Alas, that was not so. Years of hunting hidden cults, servants of demons, devils and darker things had made Garin Drekelis quite adept in finding signs of otherworldly malice in the crowded streets. In Qohor he barely had to look.

Someone was selling infants in the Turnstreet Market, a lot of infants, enough to crash the market in what was already a limited niche of the slave trade. Most buyers expected a slave trained in a craft or skill, or at least old enough to do work. Only the most 'exacting' bought children to train themselves and practically no one bought infants, they were as likely to catch some nameless fever and die as grow up and make up for the price, yet he had never heard of a 'Turnstreet Babe' getting ill or dying, not one hint of a displeased customer coming back for their silver.

The only complaints had been from other slave traders and the priests of the New Faith, who now ruled Qohor with a rod of iron, had summarily dismissed the concerns according to what Mia had been able to discover from the city's churning rumor mill down by Hangman's Hill. The fact that she and Nuri had been attacked by surprisingly determined and well-armed 'footpads' on their way back to the inn yesterday did not bode well. The thugs, sellswords more like, recalled being paid silver for the attack, but they didn't have any recollection of the one who paid them besides the dark cloak and the strange bitter smell that hung around it, 'like almonds and old fish'.

Had they tripped some minor alarm asking about the odd merchants and their seemingly endless supply of very young slaves? Garin wondered. There was only one way to be sure.


Eleventh Day of the Second Month 294 AC

The baby in his arms looked like a baby, round pudgy features wrapped in a rough grey cloth that was little more than a rag, a little tuft of dark hair peeking out from his head. He was oddly quiet. But then, Garin thought darkly, slaves likely learn to be quiet young. He walked quickly down the first alley he could find to get out of sight.

Truth be told he felt a touch nauseous in the guise he had taken up to justify his purchase. There was a certain sort of Pillow House owner across what was left of Essos' slaver cities with aspirations of filling the void left by Lys, of raising slaves that 'knew their place as well as Unsullied'. Though he would not have thought it possible half a year ago, learning just how Unsullied were trained had made that phrase sound even more horrifying.

At least this poor mite is spared that fate, whatever the hells is wrong with him, Garin thought while looking down at the child. His gaze was transfixed in horror as the child's eyes seemed to be gone, replaced with holes of utter blackness, but not empty, not still, something squirmed there, in the fetid darkness of some unknowable womb.

An image of madness seared itself into his mind, a many-limned goat with hooves, claws and writhing tentacles. In the center of its chest was a gasping maw ringed with razor sharp teeth, its head a skull crowned with six curling horns and surrounded by a floating circlet. It towered over the woods around it, over the city, over the world entire...


Garin bit back a scream and tasted blood in his mouth, the instinct to feed breaking the trance the way merely mortal horror could not. When he came back to himself he was holding not an infant, but a knot of blackened tentacles that faded like wisps of shadow in his grasp. He went home not by any common path, but over the roofs shrouded in glamor.

The memory of that hollow mocking skull stayed with him.


He had never seen Xor look so somber before. Frightened, sad, even angry, yes, but never so grim. "The being you held was not merely marked by the Far Realm, but of it. Begotten by flesh but strange to it, a scion, perhaps a herald, meant to open the doors wider."

"Why sell them? Why spread them out like that?" Mia asked looking shaken, though doing her best to hide it as any inquisitor was trained to do. "Do they need to... er... feed to get to the next stage of their life cycle?"

"I do not think so," the many-eyed scholar replied. "We of the Far Realm are strangers here, and the greater the being who would pull itself through the more doors it must pass through. I believe these scions need to be taken in, accepted by those of this reality, a second time."

"Second time?" Garin asked, not sure he wanted to have his suspicions confirmed.

"Their begetting must have involved some sort of pact, once for birth and twice for buying, what is the next key?" It was clear Xor was thinking to himself as much as them. "Two does not rhyme, three maybe, five... seven. I hope it is seven."

"Couldn't they just resell them?" Nuri asked practically.

"No... no... it has to be qualitatively different," Xor shook from side to side slightly, the gesture still oddly slow for his floating form, though by now subconscious from all the years he had been dealing with mortals, often in their own shape. "I think the reason Garin did not keep the one he acquired was that he was not intending to retain it as a slave so the agreement fell apart."

"I think we should try to infiltrate these slavers," Mia started. "Or capture one of them at least..."

"Why not the church of the Green God?" Nuri interjected. "They want converts unlike the weird slavers, should be easier to slip in, or slip one of them out for interrogation."

What do your agents do?

[] Approach the eldritch slavers
-[] Infiltration
-[] Capture

[] Approach the New Faith
-[] Infiltration
-[] Capture

[] Write in

OOC: Nothing quite like writing cosmic horror to wake one up.