By Time's Cruel Waves
Twentieth Day of the Fourth Month 294 AC
Three bright star-shaped pendants are hidden beneath steel plate and silken robes, one each for you, Lya and Ser Richard, lest their light give away your presence. Then by all your arts you weave spell to
ward against the living dead and yet another
subtle enchantment that might ensnare
living man as much as spirits of old. At last you bequeath onto Qyburn's dread puppet that most precious of gifts,
speed.
Through twisting stone and uncanny angles, through ways that flow like water on the storm tossed sea, you pass unknown, unseen, shadows of life in dead men's halls. No more swords fall from above, no more foes show themselves. It was almost worse for it. The ceiling flowed and parted, cracks transmuting into shadows deeper than even a dragon's eyes could see, and shadows in turn seemed as clouds on some long forgotten night.
As the shoggoth leading you passes like an omen of doom over an alien sea, where ships long sunk flounder in death's grip, Lya asks, "Are we digging or flying?"
"Yes," Qyburn whispers, almost too soft to be heard. "What is has been, what was will be..."
The passage is silent with no time to see the men on the ships below, no chance to know who is praying so fervently to the powers beneath the waves, though you can guess what became of them, reapers on the fields of blood. Dead ships rise from the waves, tattered sails waving in the poisoned wind, an image of a sea onto which no man has ever sailed, onto which no man
could ever sail.
That witch is dead may never die, but rises again harder, stronger.
It takes you moment to realize the bitter laughter is coming from your own throat. This should have been a battle, one where the shades of those deceived by the lie the Drowned God and drowned
long ere they had taken their last breath would fight and die again so that their descendants might in turn drown with the death of Old Wyk. But you cannot fight what you cannot see.
Aife looks down upon the scenes with a pitying eye, then to your surprise reaches out with one paw, silver claws extended and utters... a
benediction, sight beyond mortal reckoning.
"Was that...?" You shake your head, the implications are heavier than the weight of stone you know to be above you though you cannot see it.
"Only a nudge, a glimpse of truth where their fellows were blinded," the herald replies, her voice filled with an uncanny admixture of sorrow and triumph. "The Gold Price had to have started somewhere, mortals so love their lucky coins..." With that she drops the single imperial mark to fall upon the bloody decks below.
Would you be able to find it again if you looked in some ancient Ironborn's treasury? you wonder. Or does it lie corroded at the bottom of the sunset sea, the mark of ancient treachery after another captain under the thrall of the Drowned god wished to take it by the Iron Price.
Alas, whatever the fortunes of his kindred, you see the captain Aife had chosen again before the vision ends, if vision it can be called and his end is not a kind one. You see his withered husk drawn between two posts in a cruel mockery flight. His executioners had drawn his lungs out of his body like bloodied wings, long since left to dry out. Little more than bone and salt-weathered skin remained, yet the corpse's head turns to look upon his one time savior and through the bag that had been drawn over his head he rasps,
"Why?"
In Aife's cold answer you are reminded that she serves a god of death. "Because it was not yet time."
The bag tears away to reveal an almost fleshless skull. It opens its mouth wide, the scream fit to fill the world.
It grows and grows, or maybe you are shrinking...
"This way!" Qyburn calls as all of you pass into the mouth of the first Ironborn heretic betrayed by his own kin, to find yourselves tumbling into what you hope is the final darkness of this place.
When you are aware again, it is to the sound of the shoggoth tearing through stone once more, but it is subtly changed.
Worked stone not natural basalt, you realize at once.
"There is some kind of rune circle above us, I can feel the magic," Lya says, after catching her breath. "If I could get a bit closer I might be able to tell what they are without breaking through." Alas, it does not seem as though this place is minded to give you the luxury of careful scouting. From above the sounds of battle ring out, muffled by what sounds like a mere hundred feet of stone.
What do you do?
[] Send Lya to have a look at the runes
[] Burrow upwards into the battle
[] Write in
OOC: Hopefully this doesn't feel too trippy, you guys failed a knowledge check, so it's a little less understandable in character than it might have been. Not yet edited. 
