A Dreadful Call
First Day of the Fifth Month 294 AC
Thankfully, the remainder of the Westerlander houses do not require personal attention. Legion attention, yes, often administrative attention, and in one case the hunting squad you sent after the Vances. It is a pity in the abstract to lose potentially useful mages, but something tells you that the Lord of Sarsfield would not have acted so precipitously had he not had some cause to do so, and neither would the mages have been so quick to flee. Whatever the case, they are as guilty as sin now, and not just in the eyes of the local nobles. You cannot allow the precedent to stand and you will need Golden Shield mages to pin the crimes of their order upon in the trials to come.
The last note you make is about getting Lord Swyft not just weirwood but the sacrifices to grow one. The Westerlands are likely to be a bastion of Seven worship long after they are no longer called that. Having one lord who does not hold to the local creed can only help seed the values of the Imperium into the soil. The Valyrians did not get many things right, but not meddling in faith so long as it did not constitute a threat to the world or the souls of their citizens is, you will admit, first among that small group of precedents.
***
The sun is painfully bright over Kayce, the sound of the waves lapping upon the shore a soothing hum that you imagine for the man beside you must be as painful as nails on a chalkboard, for empty are the halls of his kin and empty are the corridors he had played in as a boy, yet all frozen, waiting in some sort of cruel mockery. You hear him whisper prayers to R'hllor for the souls of his kin time and again, and once when he reaches the door of his uncle's solar you see the shine of tears in his eyes, though you feign blindness to it, knowing that sympathy is not what he wants from you. It is not what he wants from any of you.
Page by page you piece the history together.
Herrock Kenning, Herrock the Whoreson, was not born to the lands between the mountains and the shore. No, he was born to the Iron Islands and raised to its ways. He was bathed in salt water and given to the Drowned God, but when he betrayed the Driftwood Kings for fat land and a high seat at the table of the Kings of the Rock, he betrayed the Drowned God just as lightly.
Alas, the ones who had made that false god did not so lightly forget. The line of Herrok was precious to them for some cause, valuable in the way a farmer might value a prized steer.
Echo by echo, you listen in on what had become of House Kenning.
First the dreams that woke the dreamers screaming, yet unable to recall what they had seen. Then the unexplained signs of seawater and mold in the corridors, then the fitful babes among the staff and other castle folk, for though the family counted Lord Terance, two of his living brothers, and all of their sons and daughters, more than a score in all, none of them had any small children and so he did not mark the hour.
Next came the desecration of the sept and of the crypt which the Golden Shields who came to investigate had counted the work of some petty necromancer, but which Qyburn recognized at once as, in his own words, 'something far less arcane'.
"They were seeking samples of a purer elder strain to be sure they had the work of their elder experiments. Those whom men called the Deep Ones slumbered long ages and much they could have lost between the islands and the Western shore. Perhaps whatever quality they sought for their experiments might even have been lost entirely..."
"Stop that, stop talking about them like they are pieces of meat!" Ser Kennos shouted, his hand flying to his sword hilt on instinct, though at least he did not draw it.
You are reminded of the fact that the man had to run away from Lannisport with the Red Cloaks on his tail over a duel a year ago, but you cannot blame him under the circumstances. "Let's concentrate on finding answers, not fighting amongst ourselves," you cut off Qyburn who was you suspect about to give his thoughts on the matter of men being meat, no doubt erudite but hardly comforting.
"If I were describing a robbery and murder, would you like me to leave out the greed, Ser Knight?" The former maester asks in cold tones that ring off the barren walls. "Motivations matter, for all that we do not understand them fully as of yet."
Whatever the Deep Ones had sought they had also found, for over the next several months there had been several disappearances at Kayce, starting with unknown and unrecognized bastards and culminating in one of Kennos' younger cousins, and then the Call. Like a horn from the depths, a command that everyone in the keep was seemingly helpless to resist. As Lya was quick to point out that was not enchantment, which does not generally work out that way. In a gathering of hundreds, someone would have found their voice enough to scream, someone would have been able to break free and flee... and that is not even counting the fact that, the lord, the lady and all of their children had talismans against enchantment.
According to Qyburn, the magics of the mind are different but not that much, not unless the Great Mind of the Depths had called to them and
that you would have noticed.
In the end, you find the answer you have long sought not in the library or the crypts, but in a far humbler place, the kitchens. Remains of the fish that must have been fed to the whole keep over the last several days are revealed, after passing through Qyburn's tendrils, to be 'psycho-reactive', though he could not say in quite what way after all this time. You could infer at least that this was what had primed the minds of everyone in the keep to hear the call of the horn and obey.
You glance towards Ser Kennos. He is the rightful lord with all his family lost, but would you be doing the man any favor to leave him in this tomb of a keep, particularly as you do not yet know what the Deep Ones wanted with him and his kin?
What do you do?
[] Raise up Ser Kennos as the new Lord of Kayce
[] Keep the keep and lands in trust while you study the knight to see what the Deep Ones may want with him and his kin
[] Write in
OOC: And done, and investigation in one update so as not to drag. I did not linger on the specifics on what you divined and who you asked but instead on what you learned. Hope it works. Not yet edited.
