A Promise of Dawn
Twenty First Day of the Fourth Month 294 AC
One must admit, looking at Asha in the gathering dawn light, that while she will never be a great orator without the corona of swirling sorcery, she is surely a skilled one. You could well imagine her on the deck of a longboat, motioning to the shores of the Reach or the Riverlands with axe and flaming torch for plunder and glory. Thankfully, that day will never come, her father's mad dreams stillborn, the Ironborn set upon a new course.
The whisper-thin magic of illusion dances around you, allowing you to seemingly appear out of the light of the rising sun, borne aloft on a spell of levitation. It feels strange after all this time flying upon the power of your own wings, leashed wind beneath it or no, but that is rather the point of this. After all this talk of monsters plotting their doom, coming to the Ironborn lords and captains as a man will surely ease their minds.
As you step deftly upon the rocky soil, you proclaim, "Long has the yoke of the Deep Ones, the illithid to give the secret name they have hidden from you alongside their foul nature, rested upon the Ironborn's shoulders. Long you were forced to live like beasts. Like cattle, to date their appetites for the flesh of man. But no longer. The time has come to end this. The time has come for
them to bleed. To make their halls tremble in fear before our might."
"I'm sure that they are trembling in fear at the thought of men with axes," Varys snickers in your mind. She finds the Ironborn and their ambitions somehow even more absurd than the other lords of Westeros, by reason of their insistence of crippling themselves in a deluded attempt to show strength.
You shush her, as much as one can do that without sound. These captains are not to blame for the traditions that had been foisted upon their ancestors so long ago, no more than one could say the Freefolk or the clansman of the Vale are wholly responsible for the traditions of raiding that mark them.
"The nightmare is no longer," you call out with confidence as much as with arcane grace. "A new dawn has broken for the Iron Isles and it's people. Swear to me, and at long last the Ironborn shall have their vengeance. What say you?"
At that, a roar of approval rises from the crowed of lords briefly silenced by your entrance. As you hear it, an old Myrish saying comes to mind:
Hope is sweeter than honey, but the promise of vengeance is the spice of life.
Aife lands softly between you and Asha with appropriately cat-like grace as the lords of the Iron Islands step forward to give their oaths, first to you and then to their future duchess. Not entirely the most coherent arrangement, but these are not a formal people and the only ritual you truly care about is one wrought long ago.
No matter what you had said to the crowd, the Deep Ones are probably still not afraid and are unlikely to become so anytime soon, though perhaps a shiver of unease passes through the alien mind at the heart of their dominion when they realize just where the power of those first oaths is destined to flow.
Once oaths are sworn and feasts are rightly partaken, what do you leave the Iron Islands with now that your rule over them is no longer shrouded in shadow and secrecy?
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OOC: Well it looks like roughly 1,500 words (75-150 Written) is about what I can manage per day comfortably. I think if I tried to push it past that I would start getting twinges in my hands.
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