Of Frozen Memories
Fifth Day of the Twelfth Month 294 AC
The old man did not breathe heavily in the chill air that sent plumes of steam before his face. He did not stumble on the slick steps. Though the magic of Sorcerer's Deep and its great tree no longer sustained him, he was in such company as could wave away the burdens of age almost as easily as the gods could. He followed the cold light of the mage lantern deeper into the forgotten places over which he had walked so many times unknowing.
There were many crevices beneath Brandon's Wall, and not all or even most were the work of pick and shovel, of foolish raiders seeking to carve a way though. Some had been wrought of no hand but time and the slow shifting of the ice, of the bedrock beneath it, for in the slow passage of years even the shape of the land shifts.
Continents move about as fast as fingernails grow, the girl
, the Imperatrix, had told Aemon yesterday. It was admittedly hard to think of her in those terms and not just because she had insisted on not using titles in private like all of the Imperial household. She looked so at home here, in the echoing dark which had for so long been lit only by the fading rimefire that no mortal eyes could now read.
"I think this is it, the chamber Maester Kron was looking for at the end of his life!" Her voice was full of the sort of youthful excitement that could almost make a man of Aemon's years feel tired on its own. "Look at the arch here, it says 'crypt of'..." she traced a large crack that broke up the inscription with her finger. "Then there is the word for guard or watch... well, or shepherding, but I do not think that is applicable." She looked around as though to make sure there were no sheep in the ice cavern. "Then this last one is 'to take up' or 'to be invested with'."
"Now the true test then, how much of what he thought he would find here is present and how much wishful thinking," Aemon said, as much to himself as to her as he carefully passed through the arch before calling out an invitation in the Old Tongue, just to be sure for he was a black brother and that was a place the Black Brothers had delved.
Maester Kron himself had lived long enough ago that the word Maester almost certainly meant 'wizard', for the scholars of Oldtown, those who wished to come north to see the Wall, the most common by far were those interested in the arcane. The thing he sought was older still than the eighteen centuries that separated this moment from the one the seeker had breathed his last in.
His wittings, what little of them could be recovered even by sorcery, had called it the 'hall of heroes', a place of deep magic where the Crows of old were laid down to rest, yet in some way keep their eyes upon their duty. It had been something of a shock to find that the insult the Free Folk often threw at the men of the Watch had once been a mark of pride and prestige. The crow was the carrion bird that picked out the eyes of the dead and devoured its flesh so than they would not rise again to trouble the living. And indeed upon the wall of of rippling blue ice were etched with some instrument surely harder than steel the silhouettes of birds with wings outstretched.
As Aemon moved to study it, the whole room suddenly seemed to lurch sideways and in the blink of an eye he was under a luminous dome... and on the other side of that dome was what looked to be a warrior
carved of pure blue ice, wielding a sword of like substance almost as long as he he was tall, presently trying to wield it to carve Aemon's head from his body, though he could not pass the sorcerous dome.
The Imperatrix was trying to call out questions or a greeting, but the thing seemed to not even be able to see her properly so bent was its wrath upon slaying Aemon. Finally, she said another word, holding aloft a small crystalline bottle and the foe, the watcher of yesteryear, was as mist on the air, bound and sealed in wax.
***
The study was warm, the fire bright and cheery in the hearth. The news was far less pleasing to hear for all that. "There is no one left to talk to in there, no spirit capable of reason, only blind duty and a code of conduct that has become as breathing to the guardian. I think it wanted to kill you because you brought an outsider into the crypt, but I cannot be sure..." the Imperatrix sighed. "There weren't even any bones to read, all had turned to ice..."
"So it's another dead end?" Aemon tried to keep the frustration out of his voice. One would think a man of his years would have learned patience by now, but the urgency of their task drove him.
"Not quite," she replied. "The tomb the frozen guardian came out of seems to be linked with some of the deeper parts of the Wall, not quite the brain, but the nerve endings, let us say. Now the question is who do we connect in there and how do we do so safely."
Bulwark of the North: 68+3 (Aemon's Aid) = 71 (Failure) -> DC reduced by 5
What do you do with the near-mindless Ice Guardians Lya and Aemon found within the Wall?
[] Destroy them all to help clear the way and gain some blue ice on top of it
[] Leave them in place, they are protecting the Wall, no matter how dangerous they may be even to their allies
[] Trap all of them to send to the flesh forge to unlock the template
[] Write in
OOC: If you had been closer to a success, the reduction would have been larger, as it you barely squeaked though a -5. Also, it takes a lot of dead ice beings to get the template, since none of your forges have any affinity to ice, indeed the only one that can do it at all is the Qohor forge since the Old Gods really do not like ice. 
