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

Eighteenth Day of the Twelfth Month 292 AC

As you walk in silence past the weirwood trees standing sentinel to the final gate and into the long and winding tunnels filled with the stray echoes of lost songs, you struggle with yourself. A part of you wishes to call, nay command the man who was once Brynden Rivers to fulfill his promise as soon as you lay eyes on him. Yet you are not the boy who cried himself to sleep aboard the galley bound from Dragonstone, nor yet the one who hoped for this day since the first faint stirrings of magic. A king men call you, and not in cruel jest or honeyed flattery but sincerely. From alcoves in the tunnel skulls, uncounted, of men, of giants, of the Children, and other stranger things seem to stare you in judgement...

"Dany," you find your voice at last. "Would you mind if we spoke with lord Bloodraven before..." You don't know how to finish the phrase. To speak of bringing your mother back as certainty bespeaks hubris, yet you do not want to admit that she might not wish to return.

"Viserys," she sighs. "I want to see our mother alive, but I see no reason to rush if you do not. We have plenty of questions to ask here without adding hers in at the same time. I mean look at me... I have wings." Her smile is a trifle forced.

"So you do, and beautiful wings they are," you offer in encouragement. Truth be told you had almost forgotten that such a thing should be counted strange. Dany is herself to you, whether by sorcery she garbs herself as a silver-scaled wyrm, an angel bearing wings of gold, or a lithe creature of faerie. Soft Strider had certainly not made much of it...

It is a struggle to keep back a laugh as the implications of the last thought catch up to you, the sheer absurdity of measuring anyone's expectations by that of a Child of the Forest, and one of Bloodraven's attendants besides.

To distract yourself you turn your gaze outwards once again into the world of twisting roots, like fingers of bone through the dark earth. Curious, you mutter a small spell under your breath to open your eyes to the unseen. Magic runs through these halls like water through a river's bed, swirling in patterns and whorls that defy description, changing with every moment. Were you to sit here for a century you might begin to guess its nature but not before. Was this what the old sorcerer had been doing here under the hill and forgotten by the world when he did not spy through the eyes of heart-trees and move pawns upon the board?

"Come," your guide says, giving you a knowing look. "It is easy to dream here, perhaps too easy."


At last you come upon the great hall that you had seen twice before in dreams and look upon now a third time in the flesh. The gods do not speak, save perhaps for a whisper at the edge of hearing that might be the crackling of the roots, but here at last you see more than bones gleaming white, and of the Children you look upon a full score rushing to Soft Strider's side, their voices as soft music only slightly out of tune. You now know that even the briefest greeting in their tongue will take minutes, perhaps as long as half-an-hour, and so you look to the man you came here to see, if man indeed he be.

Like and unlike how he had appeared you in a dream he is: enthroned upon a tangled weirwood roots, his garments black and rotting upon a withered frame almost as white as the wood around it, save a blotch upon his neck and face, the one he had borne since birth. You know from the Maester's lessons that it was said to have given the last of the Great Bastards the name he was so feared by, but your mother claimed it was only a veil over their fear of him.

Yet strangest and most uncanny were the eyes, not pale lilac as you had seen them, as a clue to his nature perhaps or some remnant of vanity. The left is an empty socket with a root growing through it, the right blood-red and staring. "Hail Viserys, Third of his name, Dragon Reborn. Hail Daenerys Stormborn and Traitor Priestess of the Wyrm Mother, and to you also Ser Lonmouth who bear with honor arms of ancient dread."

Dany starts when she hears the name of Tiamat, but rather than speak she looks around at the chamber then nods in understanding to the ancient sorcerer upon his throne.

"Hail Brynden Rivers, Hand to three kings and leal to the last. An honor it is to walk in these halls and meet you in the flesh," you answer.

"Strange to hear an heir of Aegon speak those words... and welcome the honesty in the speaking," the Bloodraven answers, and you suspect he does not meant the Conqueror, but instead your great-grandfather, the king who sent Brynden to the Watch for securing his throne by oathbreaking. Seeing your surprise he adds, "When I came first came to this place many years ago I would never have admitted such weakness, but as you have learned the power to dream true does much to wear away deceptions, even those by one's self woven." Something that might be a smile plays upon his withered lips "But come you did not trek this far to hear an old man's regrets. Take up that which is yours by right... and that which seals the pact with the Gods."

No sooner had he finished speaking that one of the Children of the Forest, whose eyes are flecked gold and green, comes forth somehow able to hold a staff of pale weirwood in one hand and in the other a blade of dragon-steel, most famed of all the heirlooms of your House save one.

"Careful which of you takes it," Brynden warns.

"Why?" You eye Dark Sister warily, not for its sharpness but for whatever power it may hold. Many were the poisoned gifts you have seen in your travels, and while you do not believe the ancient sorcerer has any reason to betray you with a purpose you know enough about the black arts that went into the forging of Dragonsteel.

"The blade has not been wielded in earnest for more than sixty years. The world was a different place then. I thought I heard it wake in the years that passed, since magic began to return to the world, though steel is not the loudest of things. If any blade of House Targaryen should hold some hidden power it would be this one. Carried by Visenya herself, who was named a witch by many, from then on it passed from hand to hand, drinking blood common, noble, aye even royal on nigh a hundred battle grounds." A laugh that sounds like the cawing of ravens. "A woman's sword was this in the beginning, perhaps like a woman it might prove jealous of its bearer."

What do you do?

[] Take up Dark Sister

[] Let Dany take up Dark Sister

[] Write in

OOC: Explanations on the staff next update as well as the information on what is going on North of the Wall.