The Monster in the Mirror
First Day of the Fifth Month 294 AC
As evening closes in on your first full day bearing the crown of a new realm, the time has come to hear of the crimes of a realm now passed into history. You stand in one of the most warded halls in the palace in the company of Garin and Malarys, as well as Bloodraven, to hear what he had gleaned from the minds of the Lannisters, old and young, lord and vassal. For his part, Garin looks pleased that it was not his task and that he could instead take the day to be with Selyse and his children after the night's excitement, while Malarys taps his fingers along the edge of the table in a subtle sign of impatience.
He did not use to do that, you realize abruptly, but the motion is too practiced, too commonplace, to be a habit he had just gained. Instead, at some point over the past year, he must have let his guard down enough to allow his hands to wander when he left his mind to do the same. How long will it be, you wonder, until you catch Blodoraven at some innocuous habit he had long since trained himself out of showing in most company?
Regardless of the answer, here and now Brynden Rivers takes center stage to give his account of what he had found in the minds of the four Lannisters interrogated. "For all the power they held and all the magics they came to wield, the motivations that lit the pyre of House Lannister are almost upsettingly pedestrian..." The ghost of a smile, neither kind nor cruel but simply weary, passes over his newly crafted features.
The Golden Shields had started, as many things do, with the best of intentions. To empower House Lannister, yes, but also to give a place for new made mages, to make the word witch less of a curse upon the lips of the smallfolk and to guard against the darkness Beyond, be that those who rose from the waves on moonless nights or the spirits conjured by foolish mages seeking instruction or companionship of fiends. In the immediate aftermath of their return from Valyria, there were no fewer than three attempted infiltrations among the circle of Lanna's students, the last of which cost the lives of practically all of them and very nearly ended with her enthralled also.
Over and over the pattern repeated. Tywin burned runes of warding into his flesh, lords fell to a few whispered words of enchantment as mortal defense upon mortal defense failed before the foresight of their foes. It did not take Lanna long to realize that to the Deep Ones they were not foes, but simply food, some of which fought back with some degree of skill, making it something like a boar hunt.
"When she managed to save the girl, Joy Hill, from what she later discovered was simply a splinter cabal seeking research opportunities into the ways of blood magic and hereditary compulsion, it shook her," Bloodraven recounts, his voice perfectly steady. "She came to see what the Deep Ones were doing as 'farming men' and anything that could be made to resist them as acceptable. She started instituting geas spells in order to allow the training of more reliable mages and even managed to sell the notion to her marid allies for a time, though ultimately she did not trust them that much, by reason of the failure to deal with Sorcerer's Deep, and..."
"Wait, why was she so interested in dealing with us then, if her focus was on the Deep Ones?" Garin asks. He had not been in the Deep at the time, but by now the 'us' is reflexive among all companions.
"She and Gerion thought you either were about to walk in Damphair's footsteps by means of some subtle corruption he had left behind or that you had already done so. It took months for her to shake off the suspicion, not helped by the fact that she was studying ever more subtle and complex means of control as a way to ward against Deep One mind magic," Blodraven pauses thoughtfully. "There is an old saying I heard among the Orphans of the Greenblood when I sought out their mages in my youth; it goes, 'see the enemy in the mirror, the friend across the field'. It is supposed to mean that you aught to learn to see common ground with your foes by understating common wants and character. I have found that a better reading of it is that we become our foes in time. Lanna Lannister was a woman in the habit of drawing lines in the sand an inch in front of her foot and then crossing them when pushed. Her enchantments were, after all, still better than the alternative. They were a way for the realm to be safe... and for her to stay in power."
"Astonishing, is it not, the sorts of paths men's minds can take when they lead to retaining and expanding power?" Malarys asks. "If I might hazard a guess, the devils made it worse. This is the sort of behavior the baatezu wish to entourage in the name of their lord."
"Not directly, never directly, until the last, but they made certain truths known to Gerion while he was on a mission away from his wife. While she was pregnant, in fact, and where before she had been hesitant to adopt the more extreme enchantments his brother was pressing for and his wife was increasingly agreeing with. Afterwards, he was so overcome by fear for the horrors that might be inflicted not just upon him in death, but his family also, that he agreed to wider use of geases not just among the Golden Shields and those lords who had proven themselves disloyal, but all who might present a weakness. As one might anticipate, that led to several desperate mages making unwise pacts with Hell to escape their earthly masters, which only confirmed the fears and suspicions that grew in the hearts of the senior Lannisters. Tywin had even begun to suspect that his daughter may have been using proscribed magic to escape the compulsions placed on her, and doubtless if he had found demonic meddling it would have been one more reason to tighten the chains."
What next?
[] Ask questions
-[] What equipment did they have on them
-[] Were Gerion and Lanna actually planning to defect before they too were ensnared in the bloodline curse
-[] Write in
[] Move on
-[] Write in to what
OOC: I tried to do this in one update, but it is just too much stuff and from too many angles.
