Accursed Fate
Ninth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
If someone had asked Rina Cox a few days ago what the least magical place in the world was, she likely would have answered 'my father's study' before the question was half done. Yet here she was, listening to a tale of woe and witchery from a time before she was born, when the world was smaller, and the flame of magic dimmer. She did not for a moment doubt that They would still have been watching. They always were.
"Alren became stronger after drinking the potion," he father continued his tale, his gaze growing distant and sad all at once. "He was never strong, you understand, but the cough stopped from that day on, and the chills. Come to think of it, he would feel sicker in summer. There were days his stomach was so upset that he didn't touch food..."
The young sorceress felt a lurch in her own stomach at the words, growing sick when it was warm, rejecting food that all living things need to survive.
Had the witch cured her uncle, or simply laid an unseen shroud over him?
"Though he won his spurs squiring under old Lord Hawick, and fought bravely in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, he came back from the war ill at ease. He said the war didn't feel
real to him. All the blood, shouting, and the madness, and for what? The great wars had already been fought and the great kings buried. What worth was it then to decide whose ass would sit upon the Iron throne, what color the cloth they would set above it?"
Rina had never heard her father speak thus. She could not imagine him doing so, but then these were not his words, but those of the long dead Alren Cox. "He wanted to be a hero like in the days of old," she said slowly. Remembering her own shade-filled nights, she added almost unwillingly. "He dreamed of it, didn't he?"
"How... how did you know?" her father asked, snapping back to the present. Thankfully, there was no fear in his eyes, but bewilderment aplenty.
"Magic often comes to us in dreams, Princess Daenerys, Lord Justice Vanor, even the King. I've spoken to one who walked the path of magic in those days and they said that was as true then as it is now," she went on to explain, though holding Lady Melisandre's name back for now, not being entirely sure what words to use in the telling. "It is as though in dreams we become unstuck in time, we see what is, what was..."
"What is to come?" The question was spoken so softly as to be barely heard over the sound of branches scratching at the window outside.
"Not often, not with any certainty, but many things that are not friends to mankind might show the illusion of an unchanging path before one's feet to to make you walk it." Rina replied gently. "What did he see, father?"
"Alren would not tell me. He would not tell anyone, really." He swallowed dryly, then reached for the pitcher of herbal tea, long since gone cold, but he did not seem to care. "After the war, Alren spent less time in the training yard or in father's solar, and more time with his books. We didn't have a maester, so he just took over the tower and the library. No one gainsaid it. 'War changes folk', they reasoned, but it was a strange sort of change just the same. He would spend hours writing things so quick you would swear the parchment would tear, then the he would burn it. Other things, too, it was never warm in the tower, the windows were always open and his window... well come on, I'll show you."
Rina got up and followed her lord father, down the steps of the tower and through the familiar corridors of the keep, past faded tapestries she used to hide behind as a girl and shields emblazoned with half-forgotten heraldry. She warded herself in a glamour against the eyes of passing servants, though wondering all the while if any of them would even know her now. Up the stairs they went, following the swaying lantern 'round and 'round. Oil sloshed on the stone.
"I can use magic," Rina offered somewhat hesitantly. She'd never cast a spell in her father's presence. It was one thing to hear of the unknown of sorcery, another entirely to see it in person. He had not been untouched by its darker side.
"Yes, yes, of course," he waved her to do something. After a moment of staring at the pale light that kindled from her palm, he continued up the stairs.
"Maester Vyman is away," her father explained, perhaps to fill the silence. She had assumed as much.
The door creaked open into a narrow dark room. The windows needing a good cleaning and the air was slightly musty, though more with the smell of old onions than books and ink. As Rina moved to the shelves, looking for any clue that may have been left over from her uncle's tenure, her father stood by the window and motioned outside. In the clear morning light one could easily see past bustling Saltpans and its walls of stone, to a hill shaded blue in the distance. Rina could just make out the shapes of dead, leafless trees upon it.
"There is the hill your uncle wanted to be buried on," her father said, his voice strangely hollow. Turning around, he pointed to a girder above Rina's head. "And there is the place he hung himself, looking out the window."
OOC: Still more characterization and buildup, it flowed reasonably well but the next one will be action.
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