Ice upon the Currents
Twenty Sixth Day of the Second Month 294 AC
She walked through swirling snow on paths that had no name and knew that she was lost, but somehow she could not muster up any worry for the fact. The path would have to lead her somewhere. It was what paths did, after all, like streams springing from your doorstep to form into a mighty river. That had the feel of poetry, though she could not name the bard, and that too mattered little. She walked on feet of ice in garb of snow, through frozen realms where the sky bled into the earth.
It was not earth that lay beneath the traveler's feet, but sea ice thick as hills were tall and forests deep. Yet it groaned like the voice of a dying man, not breaking nor calving, but growing and spreading, like a claw poised upon the face of the world.
What am I doing here, the young sorceress asked herself, and for that she had no answer. Fear began to grow like a weed in her heart. Was she being summoned, was she being called? Had she not escaped, after all? She turned, but could find nothing behind her except the winding path through fields of ice looking almost the same no matter which way she faced.
High above, a raven cawed and a shadow fell over her from behind... not that of a bird. She turned to face an aged man whose timeworn features did not match the warrior's bearing beneath the cloak of feathers, a familiar sight.
Forgive an old man a slip of vanity, the Last Greenseer had said when they had first met, though Rina did not for a moment believe that it was vanity that moved him so. Likely he did not wish her to see him in the heart of his power, lest the Enemy possibly catch some glimpse of it through her. He was a wise man, and courteous in how he exercised that wisdom in ways most of the knights of Westeros could not match, for courtesy Rina had learned was above all other considerations. The old seer would always carefully examine the one before him, even if it was just to judge where best to stick the knife.
"What news, Wisdom?" she asked using the Valyrian courtesy, which he did not seem to mind. "Why are we
here?" She motioned at the swirling blizzard, the ice underfoot. "It feels too close to the heart of Their power."
"It is not, the sky would be...
different if this dream reflected the Lands of Ever Winter as they are," came the faintly rasping reply. "This is... a reflection of a reflection, if you will, a story the Green Dream has been telling itself for over six millennia so as not to forget what Winter should be. As one might imagine when one lives as a tree, sleeping the winter away, the vision of what it is tends to be... rather monotonous."
Rina could not help but laugh. It seemed wrong to do it in this place, like laughing in a sept when the septon was reading from the Deeds and Parables, but she did it anyway. The Last Greenseer was really quite charming, if he were more a man and less a force of nature and incarnation of divine will, Rina might have found herself harboring one of those bouts of inappropriate affections for older men that writers of Lyseni romance liked to make much of. "Why are we inside the memory then?"
"Because a memory is a symbol, and in dreams a symbol may be a path," he replied. "Just as not all that walks in the light is tainted, not all that is frost is tainted," he motioned over his shoulder at another sign of movement, though this one was a good bit more ungainly in the air than any raven,
This too she recognized. "Alyn?" she asked, confused and a little suspicious. Her furry
friend was many things, but able to dream-walk was not one of them.
Not-Alyn looked down at itself almost sheepishly as it landed on the ice and replied in a voice that was eerily like Rina's own. "Ah, not quite. I chose to appear in a comforting guise, though I was not expecting this. I suppose distant kinship breeds associations in dreams. I am... well I suppose you could call me your other half."
If Rina had not already been thinking of Lyseni ballads and their too-common similes, she probably would not have laughed again and replied that her hand in marriage was not on the market.
The next words sobered her at once. "I am the echo your tale of rebellion forged. Would that I might claim to be wise, would that I might claim to be old, but no older am I than your second life. I am as a shard of ice broken off from the edge and floating in the waters of time, but together we may yet be more than each apart. Tale and flesh together, a new being in memory of elder things. Already we grow close, near as to touch..."
Rina was weary indeed of strange pacts, even with the Greenseer at hand, but she had long since learned to parse out such speech into plain Common. Even were it not so the strange, signs of late would have marked it; the weight of iron in the hand, the way she had struggled to speak a white lie about a courtier's ill-chosen color of doublet. "You mean become fey, and leave...?" The question trailed off, she had been about to say 'my humanity' but was she really even human anymore? Still, she would miss her family dearly to take that final step, and a knowing step it had to be.
"Think of it not as leaving your humanity behind, for that is a part of your being," the Greenseer said. "Think instead of carrying it with you into a place where it has never rested, into a place where its denial has bred malice best left unnamed. That you can turn upon its head." More softly, as though not daring to give them too much weight, he added. "Should victory be deep enough, perhaps the whole world might learn of it."
Still Rina hesitated, for she had never truly wanted power and the less said of life eternal the better, but fate seemed bound and determined to grant this boon.
Should she not see it fairly wielded against the Enemy of All?
It would have been easier to make the choice if she were ice, she thought at first, but then recalled that ice alone could make no choice and so as flesh and blood Rina spoke the word: "Yes."
Not-Alyn jumped in her arms and then a comforting, familiar weight settled around her shoulders as her heart slowed and slowed... stilled. No, Rina realized, it would beat once for every year, for every turning of the seasons that should be from now until Winter's coming, and when that hour at last arrived the final gambit would be played.
Rina Becomes Ice Fey
She woke with Alyn purring on the pillow next to her and smiled. That smile was still her own, whatever else might have changed.
OOC: No treasure hunt for Rina, though there is glacier slowly floating south she might want to visit eventually. Not yet edited.
