False Flame's Guile
Second Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
You try to work the spell of unbinding again to banish the spirit of the dead magister trapped inside the glamour before the summoning can be complete, but the wrathful spirit will not be so shackled. You feel its mind surging against yours, cold endless agony layered beneath the fires of ambition and greed stoked to a blazing radiance.
Where there was one now there are two, you realize, one forever reliving his final act of hubris and one that knows the truth of its ending, eternally gnawed at by shame and agony. Pinpricks of hateful crimson light flicker into being to look through the back of the mage's skull.
You expect curses, you expect threats, what you do not expect is a warning: "Save yourselves," the dead man rasps in a dry and failing whisper.
Besides you Rina's magic flares into being, cold unwavering white like sunlight on fresh fallen snow: "Be gone from my sight, Broken One!" she calls and though it is in the tongue of Winter that no other mortal knows yet, such is the truth of her words that all hear them for what they are.
The wraith retreats and thus you bend your full will to the creature emerging from the flames, thinking to seal it in amber as so many others had been. But just as the magic begins to take shape, a haze of light at the edge of perception, Benerro calls out, his voice more urgent than you have ever heard it. "The flame is a lie, be..."
The priest's voice cuts off abruptly as a curtain of rippling light passes over him, flesh and blood shifting to ethereal radiance
drawn inexorably upwards to some unseen snare.
Snapping your hands together the ring upon your finger flares, its magic kindled at once into being and the priest once more stands beside you unharmed, though shaken and little wonder. You cannot see through all the herald's glamours, not even with sight that
aught to pierce all glamours, but then the Nameless had taught you well that the fey can deceive even that that deepest of sights.
"Well well well... what have we here, the boy pretending to be a god, along with the cheat and the thief pretending to be king," a maleficent voice, like a golden-stringed harp ever so slightly out of tune ripples out through the chamber.
"You aught not have interrupted poor Tagar... he was so very close you see. He is always close." A high cackling laugh, like a malicious child pulling the legs off spiders, trails off into silence.
"Where did that come from?" you ask Varys, knowing her mind sight is deeper than any deception you have yet found.
"Everywhere. The entire mansion is alive with its will," The answer sends a chill down your spine.
As you replay the answer Rina looks daunted, Ser Richard starts eyeing the walls as though thinking to hack one apart and make the herald show itself in truth, but Zherys and Teana merely seem thoughtful, a look of understanding passing between them for once unshadowed by the wounds of the past.
"That would explain why the thing has not left the mansion, it cannot, it is bound even as it bound its summoner..." the headmistress of the Scholarum interjects.
"Ware!" Ser Richard shouts as the chandelier falls like a flaming claw to grasp her, tearing a piece of her robes as she dives aside.
"If you keep chattering like magpies you won't be able to listen to what you must do," the mad voice in your mind chastises you all.
"What then
must we do?" Zherys asks aloud, his voice cold and unyielding as spellsteel. "Bow down to your mistress' whims? Free you from the results of your foolish gambit? You presume much, creature, for one who is shackled and who has crafted its own foes." A telling strike if ever you have heard it. In scarce a score words he had turned the N'gath's proclamation of that his and Teana's magic were thieves, into a mark of the fey spirit's own folly.
"You are within me, mortals, the very passage of your heartbeats mine to decide," the thing proclaims and for the first time since it had began to speak a chill of true fear passes down your spine.
"What will your empire be, oh king, should a thousand years pass before you can cross the threshold of this house? Who will stand against the Cold Ones, the Lords of the Deep and the King of the Ninth?"
A window opens where once the fireplace had been and through it you can glimpse the sun racing over the sky like a startled bird in flight, day turning to night and night to day again.
"Free me and you shall yet return in time to save your pitiful empire, try to fight me and you will be less than legend when you emerge again among the time-worn ruins of Volantis."
You do not answer yea or nay, pretending shock far greater than you feel. You reach out with your mind, a spell
at the very edge of your strength reaching across the ether:
"Dany, what day is it?"
She hesitates only for a moment:
"The second day of the eleventh month of the year two hundred and ninety three..." After a moment's pause she adds impishly:
"Nine days before my birthday."
You struggle not to show your relief, the fey had not the power to send you all careening into the future, and by its love of theatrics the lie now stood revealed, but perhaps in pretending to play along you could make it reveal itself enough to capture.
What do you do?
[] Try to bluff N'Gath that you had been taken in by his threat that he may show himself in a form more convenient to capture than the whole house
-[] Write in
[] Try to attack him as he is
-[] Write in
[] Write in
OOC: I thought about having Viserys use just Sending first, but given how serious the threat of being displaced in time was I skipped straight to Miracle.
