Canon Omake: Beneath Dread Banners III
- Location
- Germany
Beneath Dread Banners III
Lonely Hills, border area between the fiefdoms of Last Hearth and the Dreadlands
South of the Neck, they often mocked the summer-born, taking their circumstances as simile to never having faced hardship. In the North though, it was just as common to brag about how harsh a winter you've had to endure, every bit of summer snow being turned into the Long Night come again after a few retellings. They would speak of biting wind that chilled you to the bone, driving snow so thick that you could not see the hand before your face. Unsurprisingly, most were mocked for their tall tales.
In recent years though, such talk became scarcer. In recent years, sometimes the wind did freeze your flesh solid to the bone, leaving you only a stump where once an arm was and the snow could become much that you would choke on it. Sometimes those who survived these events later claimed to that the shine of blue eyes was the only other thing then white that they had seen. Nobody dared to mock them for these tales. Because in the cold nights, when the fireplace struggled to stay lit and cold winds tore at the shingles, you could taste it in the very air that they were true.
For most it was just a sense of dread that they felt, a vague unease caused by the unknown. Others spoke of the air tasting like wilted onions and rancid fat while they heard the creaking of bones and the rustling of parchment in the distance. For Roose Bolton, he could feel it in his veins as his blood began to heat and flow with great vigor. As it began to hunger for that which it could feel around it. His father had once said to him that the blood of the Red Kings was old indeed. That while the Boltons bowed to the Starks, their blood would always remember the times they ruled as true kings. It remembered the glory of those days and craved it, it's strength a gift and burden in equal measure.
In those days, it felt like just the kind of hollow words a lord would speak to his heir to raise pride in their house. Now though, as elder evils rose from shallow graves and men grasped for the powers of the gods? Now he truly understood. Now he knew the truth behind those words, lost to time in endless retelling and only found again in the remnants of faded parchments that endured more then one attempt to destroy them. He knew not what his ancestors had done, if they had lain with the living dead or drank from their tainted blood in darkest ritual, but he understood the hunger and the urges that had troubled him since his youth.
What it craved was not the joys of flesh and blood, it was certainly no abstract thing such as honor or glory, but something far simpler and yet far more precious. Maybe that was also why he was rather fond of Qyburns creatures of cold flesh and calcified bone. In a sense they were more kin to him then anyone except his own flesh and blood. They too hungered and they too saw that hunger buried behind tight control, locked away but never truly gone for the cold hunger was their nature just as much as the warm breath was that of mortal men.
It was thus with a keen feeling for the irony that Roose Bolton stepped onward to the forest clearing to face an enemy he felt more kinship to then miller he had dangled from a heart tree just half a day ago. To his right eye, there was a beautiful young maiden sitting in the middle of the clearing, shivering pitifully in the biting cold despite the small fire she had lit. She was just old enough to be called a proper woman, looking oh so very helpless and vulnerable when she fearfully raised her eyes to the approaching party. With the essosi mage at his side and the four Black Knights flanking them, it was tempting indeed to dismiss the thing before him as no threat at all.
Yet to his left eye, the one he personally tore from a treacherous devils skull, the view was quiet different. There was no fire, just cold ashes, and beside them sat something that had little resemblance to a woman. A statue-like thing carved from deep blue ice, though in the center of it one could barely glimpse bones shrouded in frozen blood. Maybe there was once a woman beneath the ice, now though it was without a doubt the servant of the great enemy they had been looking for, the illusions explaining why it was so hard to find despite speaking with so many.
The thing slowly rose to it's feet, the illusion taking pains to make her look ill or wounded by the way her knees wavered ever so slightly while the real creature was long beyond such matters. In one hand it held what appeared to have once been a staff of pale wood, but now a scythe like blade of deep blue ice springs from the top. As the figment reached a stand, even though leaning on the shepherds crook it carried instead of the weapon, it pretended to make an ever so slight curtsy, looking almost frightened at the Leech Lord. "My lord. Never would I have expected to meet a noble in these parts."
She paused for a moment, the figment glancing to the tiny fire while the real creature looked to the other side where a few crows were perched on a tree. "Please. Warm yourself at my fire if you please. I can not offer more then my companionship my lord, so I must hope you will find me pleasant company." The glamour moved into a warm smile as it spoke, the featureless sheet of bloody ice beneath betraying not a single emotion all the while.
"I will most certainly," the Leech Lord said in turn, his blood eagerly singing in his ears and his hand shifting towards his heavy axe. Then he smiled back with all the warmth of a true winter.
AN: Breaking here since that battle will be complicated. The thing has far more up it's sleeve then just illusions.
