Transmutations of the Flesh
Second Day of the Twelfth Month 293 AC
Grim looks are shared and more than that around the spell-forged circle of minds. If the thing is alive chances are it can commune with other Deep One creations, perhaps even the Deep Ones themselves. It had reacted to the broken ritual at Volmark after all. Vee's suggestion and your first inclination is to use spells one after another, one to purge the thing and the next to med whatever harm it had done to the boy. But the Deep Ones are cruel as they are wise in the ways of flesh-craft, you can imagine all too easily a means by which in seeking to cure young Maron you would instead slay him before he can be healed. Gogossos would be safest for the boy if you could get him there, but you are worried that moving him might trigger some trap of its own.
"Flesh-shaping needs flesh, doesn't it?" Ser Richard asks, never shifting his gaze from his sweep of the room wall to wall and floor to ceiling.
The point is well made, though persuading Lady Joana to allow her son to be transmuted to stone and carried off half-way across the world proves as difficult as one might expect. In the end she asks not only to accompany Maron but unexpectedly to bring another with her, the pyromancer Henrik.
You watch with some interest to see what manner of man could have persuaded the lady of not only his wisdom but also his good intentions in the span of little more than a fortnight. The man still wears the crimson robes of the fallen order, grown perhaps a touch frayed at the cuffs though that might perhaps be owed to the various pilthers and and powders hung from his belt. Upon his brow he wears a diadem enchanted to sharpen the mind, though you suspect he does not need its aid in this instance to guess your identity once he spots Nizuss.
"I am your humble servant, Your Grace," the pyromancer proclaims and part of you wonders if he had once said those same words to your father, but thankfully for your peace of mind he does not seem quite old enough for that. If pyromancers trained their apprentices roughtly in the same manner as other trades, and before the Awakening you have little reason to believe they did not, then he would have been a senior apprentice or perhaps a very young journeyman when your father's patronage of the guild almost ended in the doom of all King's Landing. Likelier than not he had never laid eyes on your father and would have died to the wildfire just as anyone else in the city that day had it not been for good fortune and the Kingslayer's blade falling at the last moment.
You nod in acknowledgement before casting the spell to turn he boy whom you had already sent back into slumber to the dreamless stone. Thankfully with the aid of a subtle enchantment you can lift him easily even in human form, you would rather not startle the lady by taking on wings or scales.
For secrecy's sake you translocate the whole company directly into the Forge deep bellow Gogossos, where the mage-lights kindled by the flesh-smiths of old still burn and the seekers stand in silent unwavering vigil. With a mental command to keep the more inhuman guardians far away and summon the Qyburn and Elaheh you make your way to one of the examination chambers. There you carefully set the petrified child in the center of what almost seems like a flesh-wrought flower with a stem of bone, though you can feel by the heavy presence of the Forge spirits that it is more akin to an eye, an ear or some altogether more refined sensory organ. From her sharply in-drawn breath you suspect Jeyne feels them too.
A few moments later the flesh-smiths make their way into the room, Elaheh looking a touch uncomfortable under the illusion of humanity, but making use of it just the same.
What follows is a suite of complex arcane procedures using the tools the Valyrians had left behind and at times even growing others to suite the needs of the moment. More than once Vee has to travel to Sorcerer's Deep in search of some tome or scroll until at last all three are agreed on both the nature of the threat and what must be done to remove it.
"The 'creature' is in fact nothing so complex, nothing self-willed," Qyburn explains. "They are hollow shells meant simply to amplify and strengthen mental control alongside other powers of the mind used at a distance. What makes this instance of parasitism unique is that consent of a sort had to be obtained, albeit under false pretenses, later buried by trauma..."
"The given sacrifice is the strongest?" the pyromancer half-asks, with the air of a man invoking a quote.
"Something like that, adjacent to the concept let us say," Elaheh replies, looking at the previously silent Henrik with some interest. "The strongest geas is the one willingly undertaken, and a
lie is not the same as a compulsion."
"Can you get rid of it or not?" Lady Joana suddenly asks, struggling to keep her voice even. Unlike the pyromancer she had walked through the Forge hardly seeming to look left or right.
"Oh yes, having identified it as a neogi, we can synthesize..." Qyburn begins enthusiastically.
You clear your throat. "The details matter less at the moment," you say aloud to avoid any disturbing revelations, though you ask for him to continue silently through Varys.
Truth be told you are quite impressed at the solution the three flesh-smiths had conceived between them, crafting a subtly different form of neogi poison that would be lethal to the parasite without triggering its stress reaction before making use of magic to purge the remains.
Shifted back from stone to flesh behind the wards of the Forge, the boy convulses once, twice as the poison is administered, but a few moments later under the touch of healing light it is all over.
"Thank you... thank you...." From his expression Qyburn is rather unaccustomed to heartfelt thanks like Lady Joana's, though Elaheh is not.
You return to Pyke with a bottle of 'not quite glass' extruded from the Forge carrying the poison and one by one you see to the other twelve children. The Deep Ones' handy-work has been undone, but you still don't know what exactly they were trying to accomplish. It will take time for the flesh-smiths to make an in depth report of what they observed of the larva and unfortunately the remaining children cannot shed anymore light on what had happened, in each case they were approached and embraced by a supossed loved one and infected, though unlike with Maron it had simply been the shape-shifters at Volmark.
What made him special, you wonder.
What do you do next?
[] Speak to the pyromancer about what he had observed and why he had come to the Iron Islands
[] Speak to Ser Harras Harlaw, though his skill and bravery played no small part in unmaking this particular plot he was struggling under the weight of dark thoughts
[] Visit Volmark Keep to see the ritual chamber with your own eyes
OOC: Since I know this is going to be asked, the pyromancer is wearing the sorts of minor items one would expect of a low level PC, stat booster, healing belt, some artisan gloves and of course his alchemist bombs and extracts. 
