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

Second Day of the Fourth Month 294 AC

"Your Grace, you are not seriously considering..." It is rare for Zherys to take that tone, even where none can hear, but to be honest you do sympathize with not wanting to bring back to light some of Valyria's stranger experiments. Barred from forging armies beyond what they needed to protect their forges, flesh-smiths at the height of the flesh-forge fell to mostly cosmetic alterations, for purposes the proprietors of Lysene pillow houses would find familiar.

"The template is more magically potent than baseline humanity, more than capable to preserving the fading magic of our new citizens when you factor in standard mental and physical enhancements," you reply as the largest of the fey spirits, a vaguely simian being with the head of an eyeless lizard lion, sets off brushing aside a thorn thicket.

"You could have allowed them to remain beasts," the governor of Volantis replies, his single malformed wing fluttering in frustration as your company continues along the path.

"A lack of thumbs makes for rather citizens ill-equipped to deal with most of the tools and conveniences of civilization," you counter reasonably.

Zherys does not reply, but you get the distinct impression that the quality of life of strange fey spirits who asked to be incarnated for their services weighs very little upon him.


Three hours more, or perhaps a little longer, you continue along the path, wary and watchful of every swaying branch and every shadow parting. The farther you walk the more the light around you fades, not into black midnight, but a soft melancholy twilight one might more often see in an artist's paints than in the flesh. Blue light, as though from a cloud-shrouded moon, falls in ethereal shafts among aged oak and beech while the stars themselves seem to have fallen to earth, flaking the wide path ahead of you, so unlike the thorn-studded wilderlands you found the lost fey in.


"Hemlock, wormwood, and wolfsbane," Vee mutters under her breath, looking at the plants the fey lights reveal. "All poisonous, but not the obvious sort. Walk carefully."

"I don't think any of us are in danger of bloody posion," Maelor replies from above. He had taken to flying with the erinyes, who had not objected to his presence so far.

The girl shakes her head. "It's a sign, a mark, sort of a warning. The fey like to play fair, by their lights at least. Walk on poisoned ways meet a poisoned way, that sort of thing."

"We cannot go further," your guide calls out, echoing her words. "Upon our honor you shall find the ones you seek at the path's end and that end shall come neither too soon nor too late as men count such things. Moments like leaves upon the branches fall." Time flows as in the mortal realm or near enough as to make no difference, you translate mentally.

"Merry parting and merry may we meet again then," you wave off the spirit as it fades into the underbrush. Rather than some foe or peril, what next you meet is a riddle of sorts, a call from one of the Myrdreki whose eye had been drawn off the path and decided to investigate, with a proper escort of erinyes and its kin besides of course, a stone marked in ethereal writing, that to the dragon's eye holds familiar magic.

What messages might be inscribed in the stone of this place, if stone it could indeed be said to be? A boundary marker perhaps, a warning or a beckoning. Aught you read it you wonder, or chasing in the wake of illusionists and glamor-weavers leave well enough alone. In the end curiosity wins out. You have faced in your mind far more terrible things than hurried arcane scribbling and when you were less well protected besides.

"Allow me to do it, my lord," Mereth offers as you step up to read, but you shake your head. You are better protected. The lines etched into the stone are a somber poem written in the runic scrip of the First Men, though there is no intrinsic power to them.

As you read the underbrush clears almost as though the roots and tendrils scuttled out of the way and you find yourself on a path far wider and straighter than the one you had been originally upon. In the distance you see the fey twilight give way to mortal night and upon the winds catch what might be words of the Common.

It is only the sharpness of your hearing that catches the merest syllables in a familiar voice "...I will, father."

The voice is yours but far younger, the words the last you have spoken to your father on the evening before you headed off for Dragonstone. For one terrible moment you wonder if this is indeed a way to return to that day and that hour, if you could unmake all the follies of the past few decades. Even with less magic to your name, you are certain you could overturn a king as hated as Aerys the Mad, prepare the realm for the trials ahead all the sooner. Then reality crashes over you like a wave of cold water. What was more likely to find in the abode of illusionists, a way back in time, or a glamor so potent as to twist even your mind for a moment?

"Maelor," you ask softly. "Could you read that please and tell me what you see or hear."

The boy does and then replies in a strangled voice. "The day I was caught by the Listener's hands."

"Right, sorry about that. I had to check," you reply before shattering the stone to dust with a wave of your hand. The illusion before your eyes does not fade. Of course not, that would be too kind.

"It's alright," the boy shrugs, turning his back on the lie of his own past. "Could've been worse." He glances between Mereth and Amrelath, whose darkest turning points were bleaker by far.

Back along the original path, you come at last to a wall of white marble unbroken by any gate that seems to drink on the twilight. Halting a good two hundred feet from it, you take on dragon's shape and call out, your name and the names of your companions. Of your purpose, you say this, "You who have fled my wrath, come and look me in the eye."

For a long moment the air is still as before a thunderstorm, then the wall which had been solid to all your senses, even the erinyes' gaze, fades away to nothing and forth walks a small company of fey, no more than twenty strong riding upon one-horned beings that are unto the unicorns of Skagos as a half-remembered dream is to morning's cold reality.

The rider in front is familiar to you, though her manner has little of the uncanny poise you last saw upon her features. "What more do you seek of us, Dragon Lord?" she who had once been Lady Dusk Dancer asks. "Have you not had your glut of blood, or do you claim even this land of lost memories and forgotten things as part of your domain?"

What do you reply?

[] Write in

OOC: I was tempted to stop when you found the stone, but I decided to roll through it so we would have a decent sized update and a solid vote. Not yet edited.