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

Sometime in the Age of Heroes, Before the Rise of Valyria

The hill was familiar but the name was not; Kings' Rest they called the place shrouded in the sickly sweet smell of charred wood and death. There had been weirwoods holding the stony soil together, drinking of the thin patina of fresh water at the edge of the sea. Nagga's Hill they had called it when you left your own time. Here it was just another place of desecration. A Heart Tree had died here, and more than one.

A part of you rebels almost instinctively against the blasphemy... No, at the murder. Though you do not hold the Old Gods in the reverence their faithful do, you still feel something of a kinship to them, powers of a time long past through all the perils of the world enduring. They have been helpful to you, not just your ambition, not just your realm, but they had kept alive one of your few living kin. To be in this place sickens you, and you are not the only one. Under the guise of a young boy in clothes even more ragged than the rest of you, Lya pales and shivers in disgust, though it might have been mistaken for fear by those attending.

All here are armed, for all here in their way are traitors, transgressors of norms and breakers of taboos. All here know to watch their own backs form men who have passed through the same desperate times and crucible of woe. You spot perhaps four or five women, at first you guess them to be the most loyal of the attendants, permitted the honor of attending, then you realize they are anything but willing. They are meant to be born again in salt water and the 'blessing' of this new power. They aren't alone. Looking more carefully, you can spot those who have grown desperate, jumping from one corner to the next like caged beasts.

"Sacrifices?" Ser Richard wonders silently, disgust clear in his words.

"No, that would rather deny the point," Qyburn replies. "They are supposed to go forth from this place, raid and pillage, loot and slay others, not each other. The reluctant as much as the eager are to take to salt water." It is only as you glance towards him that you realize the flesh-smith is throwing surreptitious looks at the sky. He meets your eyes. "Brace yourself before looking..."

You know enough about him to take the warning very seriously indeed as you whisper the spell of true sight. It is fortunate you did. At first the starry sky seems no different then you might have expected, the luminaries might be placed differently upon the firmament, but they are still just stars, points of light, and flickers of color.

Then you realize they are moving strangely... almost with a rhythm...

Like breathing....

It is the holes between the points of light that draw your eyes then, circular, regular, there is a pattern there just out of reach. Threads of darkness, threads of flesh.

You SEE.

As your spell finally makes sense of the horror above, you see skies not empty but threaded with pulsating flesh and eyes... too many eyes... Looking for treachery, looking for sin in the eyes of the newborn god. It does not see you and yours. Just another Ironborn driven to desperation, just another sheep feeding itself to the wolves.


The priests are moving among the assembled company now, offering words of solace and encouragement, lies and half-truths both. The Twins are marking which are infested and which are filled with zeal and power. It hardly matters to you. For a long time now, in days yet unborn, a silvered tongue has been your gift and you put it to use now. You speak with your own false zeal, you speak with passion and with a will of the sort that only desperation can bring and make pledges grand and terrible... To the true architects of ruin you offer a poisoned lure. Would this ritual not be all the more binding if the words came from one of the very mortals who aught to be so ensnared?

You mark well which one of the priests seems to be carefully nudging the others to agree with you, and though you see nothing strange of him and neither does Qyburn, you know him to be the one to watch. One schemer knows another, a conman knows his like. You have to bite back a laugh when you realize you've fallen back on the same arts that Corlys Waters once used to con marks from thugs and whoremongers on the streets of Braavos, though infinitely more refined.

The chant begins, from ragged throats and desperate lips, from men left godless and adrift. The thing above you all drinks it in like incense.


The age of iron has come and with it the doom of men on these islands, past and present both. Sweet lies pretending to be hard truths. A man drowns on his own blood as he speaks false...


They move in patterns too precise to have been rehearsed... Something moves them. They call out and the sea answers, or Those in the sea at last. The horror above is slowly sinking into the sea like a poisoned moon setting.


Something is moving in the surf below the hill, bloated corpses washed up on shore, too far from the light of the weirwood fires to be seen clearly by mortal eyes, but not by your own. Dead puppets filled with poison to the brim. You know the things that ride them as the drowned dead mimic the supplications of the living.


The final vow is almost upon you, the one that might see the enemies try to strike against you without damaging the ritual. The threads of time are fraying...


The sky shakes and groans like a wounded beast, the air thunders without sound in our ears. Time roils. Before the last words can be spoken, your ritual sealed by arts of will and hidden rune, all is still.

All save the 'Drowned Man' you had marked before, he explodes into a fountain of gore to reveal a night-black horror wreathed in the crimson light of its three staring eyes: Unlike the last time you had met its kin, there is something almost like respect in its mind voice, its threat all the more chilling for it. "Even the unborn may end."


In a twist of time strange energies dance before it, and battle is joined as the Ironborn of old stand mute and unseeing around you.


What do you do?

[] Write in plan

OOC: I hope you guys don't mind the list of buffs it just felt excessive to fluff every one of them. You are slightly out of synch with the Ironborn, but you should probably avoid throwing around AoEs unless you want to accidentally kill them. Not yet edited.