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

Elsewhere Elsewhen

The time runs short, calming the Ironborn and conducting the ritual that had your 'past' selves divine the aboleth and failing required barely more than a dozen minutes after it fled the battle. If you do not hasten it might be that your own curiosity in lingering here will do what your foes failed to. "Back to Old Wyk, the island is safe and hopefully in due time the power of the Drowned God will pass into more worthy hands."

"All the more worthy for being lifeless," Qyburn notes. You can't tell if it is amusement, admiration or some strange admixture of both in his tone.

Lya weighs the bilestone crown in her hand, fascinated by the primordial runework that crawls along its arc. It takes her a moment to catch what you said. "Oh right, here..." she tosses the flesh-smith a set of three interconnected lenses meant for an aboleth's visage. "True sight, it will spare us a spell on the way back."

"Dashing," one of the myrkdreki quips as he dismisses the guise of mortality and rearranges his face to match, though drawing no reaction from Qyburn, focused no doubt on the trek ahead.

As you sink once more into the earth and the depths of time, you make a mental note to speak to the rebel mind eaters, the Communion of Minds.


Although it is Aife's scales that guide your way through the deep earth, Qyburn once more finds himself leading the way by senses none wholly tethered to the Spheres can name. If you did not trust the path of glittering silver, if you did not know your own mark upon them without doubt, then you would think yourself and your companions lost beyond hope of return.

No primal caverns filled with noxious fumes do you find beneath the island this time, no basalt unshaped by hand or will, but instead murky waters filled with swift and furtive shapes, and in these depths pillars carved with works of fantastical ruin, sharp arches and ornate columns, stained glass windows, their colors muted by a strange greenish film. You know these shapes, you know these carvings, you know the beasts true and whimsical did wind around the twisted pillars. "Valyrian..."

It is as though some mad god had taken a sunken city of the Freehold and shaken it together only to spin it out in long threads of stone and mortar like some monstrous arachnid. You do not share the image aloud nor even in the stillness of your communion. "Stay close," you say instead, perhaps unnecessarily.

A pale tentacle slithers miles below, stone heaves and groans... then another and another. They do not seem to be reaching for you nor offering any hostility, but you are glad indeed your fire can burn even beneath these briny waters.


"Friends of yours?" one of the twins snickers in Qyburn's general direction, but once again he is distracted.

Pushing himself along closer to one of the nearer pillars with the mass of sinuous tendrils he had spun out for swimming, Qyburn peers inside for a long moment in silence. You think he might be doing something by his mind arts. When you question what, he shakes his head, though you could just as easily say a quiver runs the length of his body, and exclaims. "This is more than Valyrian, it has the look of Amelys. I have seen sketches..."

The name jars loose in memory and it is not a comforting one. Amelys the Thrice Hallowed, oldest Flesh Forge of Valyria, allowed to exist by the Lords Freeholder only because of the proximity of the temple of Caraxes to slay anything that might pass through the frayed planar boundaries. Now, here the lord of the dead is himself long dead and you do not even know what this is. Some lost reflection, some flickering moment trapped like a fly in amber called forth by Qyburn's searching mind, or just a trap to lead you astray from the silvered path?

Aife is obviously of the latter opinion. "Keep to the path, we have meddled enough in the tapestry of time and profited much thereby already," the herald says, her sun-bright find dancing in agitation.

What do you do?

[] Try to explore and learn something of this place

[] Press on along the silver path

[] Write in

OOC: One of the advantages of writing slower is that there's a lot more time to find creepy pictures for various locales that might be rolled up in your trek through space, time and stranger things. For the record each of those tentacles is colossal.