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

Twentieth Day of the Fourth Month 294 AC

Richard Lonmouth breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the king say they were going down not up. Granted, most sworn shields would not feel entirely at ease at knowing their charge was marching after a tamed horror into the bowels of... well, not hell, that would be less strange and easier to deal with, but something akin to it. Richard had learned to take his victories where he could find them, like not walking into the obvious trap.

Never leave a live enemy behind you, he heard Oathkeeper chastise him, but only shot back, What's behind and what's in front here? To that the sword had no answers, as much a stranger to these tunnels of Richard himself. The only one familiar with them was the flesh-smith currently making a puppet of the boiling mass of eyes and teeth in tar-black flesh now shot through with blood red veins that pulled it this way and that. There were also a lot more claws growing at impossible angles from the mass of flesh, some made for tearing through stone and earth, others dripping with what was probably poison.

The tunnel was large enough that the king could pass through it in dragon's shape so Richard chose to fly himself at about head level, the reasoning that anyone planning to kill a dragon would probably try to hit the eyes, mouth, or nostrils. It also gave him the chance to keep his shield hovering near lady Lya, near enough his queen as to make no difference.

It was only that reflexive care that allowed him to see the flicker of movement ahead just as quickly as the King with his dragon's eyes. Howling darkness in the shape of a blade... As they had done a thousand times before, pearly wings stretched out to guard their whole company. It wouldn't work at this time, Richard knew as surely as he knew his own name. Valyrian steel arched up to meet the screaming emptiness of some realm even darker than this, and for a moment Richard tasted salt and iron in his mouth and heard the song of+ distant cries that might once have been human. Oathkeeper holds, and a moment later the herald of the ferryman calls out a spell to banish the black blade.


Beside him the king cursed, as much in worry as anger, Richard knew. "How the hells are they setting traps for us? We're the ones making this tunnel." His head snapped around, first to the wall to his right, then to the ceiling. "Not a trap, an ambush... Rats in the walls." With a slash of his left claw he banished something unseen to Richard, most likely diviner's eye.

As though to give lie to any sense of safety his gesture might have brought, another shard of darkness, sharper than any blade, came whistling out of the dark this time aiming for the king himself, swiftly banished but not without cost. For the first time in months, Richard considered what it would be like for the mages to expend all their power down here. They didn't know how far the tunnel went nor what foes they might meet at the end.

"I don't think this is just the work of some distant sorcerer," Aife interjected softly. "Ser Knight what did you feel when you met the blow?"

"Salt, iron, and screams," he replied. "Sounded desperate."

The sea cat nodded as if that made some kind of sense, which being a cat maybe it did. Unlike most cats Richard knew, she was at least inclined to explain herself after the fact. "They have set the dead of the Iron Islands upon us, those souls which wished to enter the halls of the Drowned God, but by their own understanding fell short of admission. So now they are trying to kill us in defense of the doom of their kin."

What do you do?

[] Try to reason with the dead
-[] Write in how

[] Run the gauntlet
-[] Write in how

[] Return to the upper path

[] Write in

OOC: I know that's a ninth level spell, but we're talking about an underworld's worth of souls. They're going to have a lot of power to throw around. Not yet edited.