Part MMMDCLXIX: Tale of the Young King
Tale of the Young King
Eight Day of the Fourth Month 294 AC
"Mercy?" A laugh slips past your lips unbidden. There is a time and a place to this, that time is not now. Only a fool would let an enemy seething with resentment at your back, and little good would such a servant do the Ferryman. "Maybe you haven't been paying closer attention."
"Accursed be thine line bloody one not by my word or deed, but by your own. A tithe of blood in blood is paid, you would not let the sea separate us and claimed the whole world for your own. Should tine fire outlive the night to come, the vengeance of those you have cast down shall fall upon you, and the men who groveled at your feet shall remember themselves. So saith I, Nairos of the Shrouded Light," the fey lord speaks his name with mocking certainty, a challenge.
Alas for him it is a challenge you are more than capable of meeting. Though the fey mage's mind is neither quick not easy you persevere and the answers you find are grim in the telling.
***
A dark haired boy not quite a man staring into the surface of a pond as rain begins to fall, the raindrops begin to mix with tears, though there are none beside him to cause the grief. In the distance a hunting horn calls. "He'll come and find me, he'll say Your Highness and bow prettily, and he will forget the words I said to him. Damnable duty be done..." he whispers.
Ripples pass over the watcher's eye. Is it the water... or is it fate? He does not care and never did for petty mortal heartbreak, a child's fancy denied, save in so far as it tugs the unseen strings and opens a path never before walked. The blood of the Storm God, the blood of the Lady of the Winds. The King that might have been...
"Young King, forget now thine sorrows and let the rain wash away your woes." A thousand tinny voices weave into a tinkling chorus. Nixies and pixies, grigs and sprites sing. It is not their will that guides it, but one who sees the lost piece upon the board of fate. "The Spring King you shall be in place of the Mead King, summoned in the hour of need, in the hour of want... come forth... come forth."
The luminous being promised glory and he promised fame, he promised power going down through the ages, seeking to turn the boy into a mummer in the grandest play, but Renly Baratheon whose heart had been broken, cared nothing for any of it. He wanted love and he wanted joy, above all he wanted to be more than the princely name he bore to the one he would carry in his heart.
Here a lesser spirit might have offered a love potion, baited a common hook, but Nairos was no lesser thing. He knew of the plans for the girl Margaery, he knew of the glasting sent to recover the crown, but he did not wish to revive the old oak, but plant a sapling anew. "Be a man, be a lover, be a knight, be the wandering soul and when the hour is set be the king the Seven realms need."
***
Lunch runs late that day, it is also done under the heaviest wards you can manage.
"This Nairos and his faction in the Violet Court wanted to reincarnate the Star Crowned King as Renly so they sent him off to play knight errant somewhere in the realm?" Dany asks, caught somewhere between wonderment and worry. "I mean, why... how?" she waves her hands in an expression of frustration you are all too sympathetic of.
"The schemers in this case, as in many others, would have preferred a more ambitious puppet, but he was heartbroken and only wanted to run from his life so they gave him that and Renly Baraheon was replaced with Renly Storm who thought he was the same man right up until that fateful meeting," you recount. "We thought the Court of Stars was making a power play through the changeling. Instead it was the opposite, the changeling was a distraction while Renly's quest shaped him into a proper 'kingly' vessel. Thus when the Old King woke to wed Margaery and bind the Court of Stars and the Reach together, the conspirators planned to poison him."
"How?" your mother gasps, spoon frozen above her plate at the notion of a king killed by his own retainers, foe though he might have been.
"Arrows are not the only mementos of Winter those of the Violet had kept, there was also a bottle of blackened silver, lost in the destruction of their court." Unfortunately, you add inwardly. Poison that could kill a god is something you would very much have wished for. "In any case the death of the Old King mid-ritual would have allowed his powers to flow into the ritually prepared vessel to Renly, who would then return to replace the changeling, wed Maergery as per the Tyrells' foolish promise and win not just the Reach but all of the Seven Kingdoms."
"So what now?" Dany asks. "The Old King is a shell, the Court of Stars is broken..."
"Nairos hoped that the rage and sorrow at the destruction of the Court of Stars would empower Renly to become a sort of avatar of their vengeance so he seared the knowledge of where he might be from his own mind beyond all hope of recall... fortunately he was less careful about what his co-conspirator knew..."
"Dusk Dancer knew where Renly is, nameless and rootless?" your mother interjects. "We really should bring the poor boy in, for his own sake as much as to tie off loose ends politically."
"He is in Limbo, a corner of it shaped to seem like the Stormlands around the time of the Andal Invasion, as far as Renly, or Ser Renard as he thinks of himself as, he is a hedge knight fighting off Ironborn raiders. Why that in particular is supposed to make him into a vessel to the Star Crowned King I could not tell you..."
"Because he is of the blood of the Storm Kings. It's a traditional foe for his line to face," Dany offers. "A foe across the water."
"So who are we going to send to break the truth to him?" your mother asks, practically.
What do you reply?
[] Go yourself
[] Send Renly Storm, he deserves to face he one he had so long sought
[] Write in
OOC: Here we are, I rolled through some minor decision points so we could have a decent sized update.
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