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

Getting the Gang back together II

As Leafdancer let herself glide in the winds of Nirvana, she was glad once more that the sky and the wind had always been closer to her than earth and forest, as usual among her kin.
The land below was torn, not merely physically shattered, but deeply altered against itself. Some places merely held the taste of war and industry, profane but hardly unusual, some remembered the tranquility and peace they were supposed to spread.

Yet other places were twisted by those who held them too long, who had created permanent portals, secure that no so-called Inevitable could gather the forces needed to stop such practices. These places became as their owner's homes, dead plains of Abbadon, unreal constructs of Limbo and at times stranger still, below the Silver Seas where the Deep Ones ruled.

Each place individually was bearable, particularly to one who had seen worse things done by the powers of the Void, but all together it was a screaming cacophony from the earth that might deafen the sensitive ear, more disturbing by far than the utter Silence reigning in the Farthest North or even the suffering soil of Broken Heaven.

The winds were calmer, in a way, less affected by the magic of the earth-and water-dwelling factions, though she knew their voice was far from the harmonical song it had once been under the Angels' guidance. Still, it was calm enough to listen to and search for hints to Amaura's presence. She would be guarded against far-sight, of course, but once there was a sliver of the Void in your soul, the ways to truly hide from it were few indeed.

There it was, a whisper of her bringing death, scattering simple souls among the planes of afterlifes and sending a few others, strange and strong, to places beyond the usual cycle. Deep Ones then, most likely, few enough other souls were rejected from the great cycle, even broken as it was, most mortals could at least try to find their god or other fate.

She ceased her drifting and focussed to let the wind blow her to the source of the echoes instead and she quickly found a forest by the edge of the Silver Sea. It seemed surprisingly normal for this plane, appearantly just descecrated enough not to feel particularly blessed, yet not twisted either, resulting in a balance not far from any grove on the Material.

Within the forest Leafdancer quickly found a camp, though not remotly what she had expected. It was too large for once, for someone who vastly prefered to work solo or in small groups like Amaura and certainly too primitive to be of her making. A dozen hide-tents, three ash-filled fireplaces, and most noticably a number of wooden stakes holding the heads of Sahuagin and in the middle of the camp, before the largest tent, a Mindflayer.

What could have happened here? Some particularly primitive band of mercenaries, or a tribe of the Deep One's slaves turned against them?

Still, even while she looked over the camp from above with her second sight and found no magic, she did notice other incongruities. There were few footprints on the ground, too few to fit with the number of tents and in the fireplaces there were no remnants of burned wood, just perfect heaps of ashes.
And besides all that, she still knew that something void-touched was close by.
Deciding to go with her best guess she called out:

"Come out, unless you want me to let a few bears run through your make-believe camp here."

Within a moment an iron chain had wrapped itself around her ankle, dragging her down to the eyelevel of an obviously irate daemon.
The woman was utterly grey, her skin the grey of dull iron, her eyes the grey-blue of steel reflecting the sky, her hair, if it was hair at all, a brighter tone than her skin but still polished steel. Her hands held chains, that led into deep wounds in her wrists on the one side, the other sides ending in wicked curved blades, and Leafdancer was rather glad that she had only wrapped a middle section of the chain around her ankle, rather than piercing it the end.

"You will certainly not ruin my work here. The Gith pay well for dead Squids in this region, and those always come to reclaim the heads of their own, so I expect to be able to use this camp at least once before they wise up to it. Stay silent or I'll just ensure it by cutting your throat."

Leafdancer nodded and followed the daemon in silence, until they reached a much better hidden encampment a few minutes in fast flight away. This one was much more what she had expected from Amaura, a small underground room, clad in thick lead and likely brought here by magic rather than actually build in the middle of nowhere. It held only workbenches with tools and halfbuild contraptions of wires, metalsheets, spikes and vials of alchemical fire and acid, no bed and just a single chair, strangely enough with tiny wheels attached to its legs.

Finally Leafdancer looked directly at Amaura:
"So this is what you do now? Building traps that'll get the Deep One's slaves at best and now and then bag a bounty if you are lucky enough to catch an actual Squid?"

Amaura only shrugged. "Times have been lean since you people got yourself locked up in the North and the Void's other puppets managed the same in the East, only with more of them burned. Szuriel would propably rather skin me alive than take me back in her service after I joined the wrong group for universal destruction and with her against me and no other Horsemen as master to protect me I couldn't return to Abbadon. Who else would trust a daemon, even in this broken world?
So I fetch heads for people whom like the Gith, I tinker with my limited material and I wait for that long-promised 'End of Days' to finally get going."

"Then it might lift your spirits to hear that we are actually back to working on it. Alaric is awake and the rest of your old team survived as well. If you want to get back to real work, kill people worth your blades, you only have to take my hand."

She barely hesitated. "I've joined you once with less reason and certainly less boredom to drive me, I'm in again. Though I hate to leave my current work unfinished. Say, with your magic I could propably get into an actually fortress and take some heads of real value, rather than hoping there's something of worth among the people send to retrieve heads from obvious traps. Care to join me first, before I follow you?"

"Why not? Alaric will propably take longer in the Feywild anyway."

As she shook hands with the metal woman looming over her Leafdancer felt a twist in her gut, being under water, under stone and in the presence of Farspawn would be hell on her stomach, but it was certainly worth it for dead Mindflayers.

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Doesn't really feel right, but the story moves on. I'll try for actual combat next part.

Part I
Part III