Part MMCLXX: Whom the Raven Calls
Whom the Raven Calls
Twenty-Sixth Day of the Third Month 293 AC
The Feywild runs close in the woods behind the old mill. You can hear it in the surging of the Trident's waters, in the rustle of the leaves. You can smell it in the air, heavy with the scent of mint and honeysuckle wafting around you like a summer's dream. You can see it in the colors of the woods, bright and flowing together. There is no descent into the depths of the earth, no long and furtive ride under green boughs. As you turn the corner around an oak tree, you see a woman garbed in green, her hair a crimson wave, not a hair out of place. Fox-kin, enchantress, old instincts whisper, setting you on guard, yet her smile is open and her eyes hold no mischief as she leads you by a path you could have sworn was not there a moment before.
"Come, we have been waiting for you, King of Men" she says, stepping lightly ahead.
"You sensed me?" Your question is anything but idle. If the fey could see you then so perhaps might other less friendly eyes.
"We knew of thine coming many moon-turns past," she replies, her smile taking on a slightly teasing edge.
In answer you give a small sigh. "Alas that I would have to come before the lord of the court knowing so little, perhaps doomed to some stumble or ill grace."
Ser Richard look on with a spark of amusement behind the guise of dutiful solemnity as the fey woman blushes faintly, her game suddenly no longer quite so entertaining when seen in the light of a possible dereliction of her duty. "The Seer upon the Pale Throne told us of the Waking Dreamer."
Now it is your turn to abruptly fall into a thoughtful silence. Never before had you stumbled into one of Bloodraven's plots, though considering the fey woman's words perhaps that is not the right word. He expected you to find this...
"What is he to you?" Waymar asks, obviously less concerned with any missteps and perhaps rightly so. If Bloodraven foretold you coming then surely he could guess what you might make of the circumstances at hand... even if you don't quite know what that is yet.
"Too curious by half are thee, oh Knight of Bronze," your guide chastises gently while you cross under an arch of pale yellow flowers glowing like old gold in the forest's eaves. "Why then would you fault your sister's interest and not allow her to accompany you? I would have much enjoyed her company and that of the Sun's Daughter."
"She is not strong enough yet to answer any challenges she might be offered within," Waymar answers, the words coming out slower as his mind catches up with his tongue, hearing the truth of them for the first time. It seems he has accepted that Ysilla is bound for interesting times without quite acknowledging it to himself until now.
Thankfully for your friend you arrive in the fey lord's 'audience hall' before he can brood on the matter overmuch. The fey woman slips into the shadows, motioning you forward into a great clearing the likes of which could never exist in the world under the sun. Underfoot stretches a carpet of springy moss dotted with flowers like small golden stars fallen to earth.
The lord of the court bears no crown but a helm of bright green seeming almost to spring from the earth itself though great wings stretch at his back. His face is beautiful in every respect but somehow unsettling in the whole, a mask that tries a little to hard to echo the form of human kind and fares poorly at containing the otherworldly mind that lies beneath.
All around him his subjects flicker and dance to the fiddle of grigs and the haunting pipes of satyrs, yet among the merriment you catch eyes by the scores and dozens upon you, flashing with interest. In that much at least the courts of men and fey are kin.
"Hail and well met, King of the mortal kindred," the prince greets you, smiling, before you can do more than bow. "Thine subjects have been restive of late in strange ways, paying back kindness with grumblings I can make little sense of I fear."
"I shall do my best to see to it that this knot is untangled," you vow. "But first I would know what the Last Greenseer it to you, for it would be unfortunate to undo the weave that he is working all unknowing."
For ten heartbeats the fey lord does not speak, until you are near certain he never will, then he picks up the thread of the conversation as though it had never been dropped. "He is the guide who led us here, who bid us to be gentle with these mortals even in their follies, to aid them where we could." A smile or something like one crosses his features. "'Tis for the best of causes, a thorn in driven into the hand of the divine..."
"Martyn," Waymar breathes beside you. "He is the seed of a schism in the Faith..."
No sooner had he spoken the words that you can see Bloodraven's plan laid out before you clear as day. A Septon to break with the Faith in King's Landings not from false visions, or some hidden vice, but genuine and goodly conviction, a righteous leader and even should he fall a martyr in whose name the cause might carry on. You shake the thought away. Admiring Bloodraven's work is not why you are here today, but rather smoothing out the creases in the design.
What do you propose to the Lord of the Glimmerwood Court?
[] Write in
OOC: We've been talking about Bloodraven's plans for a long time but you guys never got to see one in action, so when I saw Songs and Glories in the Riverlands I took the opportunity to draw back the curtain a little, to show you an example of how he works.
Last edited:
