The year is 286 AC. King Jaehaerys II has just passed, leaving the throne without a rightful ruler. While his three children fight for the crown, Winter creeps closer, and unimaginable darkness looms.
Not all alliances will be so typical this time. In fact, many people have a crucial effect on the way this story is told. As for the ending, we only hope there are enough people left alive to tell it after its passed.
Events
Join us for our first event, the wake of recently deceased King Jaehaerys II.
Updates
AUG. 19: So we are now officially open to the public. We have a mini-event flashback thread going on, and our main event just began. Feel free to make a second canon if you can keep both of them active enough.
Don't hesitate in pestering staff with questions; it's what we're here for! Let's raise a glass and make a cheer toward a successful launch of Winds of Winter.
Post by THE REAVING KING on Sept 10, 2017 15:54:37 GMT
Dragonstone’s library was a beautiful place. The books, the scrolls, the Valyrian knowledge thought lost but held here. Maester’s , over the span of three hundred years, had looted much of its magic. As desperate for knowledge as Quellon himself, they haphazardly mined the library for older, more obscure tomes.
But not all treasures had been taken. The Reaving King stood underneath the shadow of something amazing. He arranged the thin sheets of iron on the back wall of his study. On each sheet, of which there were ten, were scrawled runes. The runes of the alphabet of the First Men. It was a language known only by certain maesters, obscure historians…and Quellon himself.
This was the reason he called her to him today. Away from her torture, away from the violent hands of his Ironborn interrogators, Ashe Tully’s maid had been summoned to Quellon’s study.
Doors opened behind him.
He turned as she was dragged in. Talia had been given a torn sack for clothing. Neck, wrists, and ankles bound in chains, she was dropped to the ground in front of him.
Chains that marked and kept her captive were heavy scars upon Talia's visage; seeming all to large for the small woman that they kept bound. They left raw, inflamed marks upon the woman's skin. Her neck was in the worst condition, though her wrists mirrored the same state. Claw marks streaked up and down from where her nails had dug in and tried to scratch the collar off in a panic attack, pink flesh and scabs left behind in the aftermath.
The maid remained on the floor after they had dumped her in the study. She shivered in the sack, the precious clothes that had been given to her by Lady Ashe gone. Taken and disposed of, more than likely. There was no safety net for her here, no comforting object that she could cling to. There was just the sack and her chains.
Talia was silent, jaw clamped together in anticipation for a hand to come down and strike her. She hurt enough already. Slowly, her head tilted up to look at the man that she'd been dragged to see. The trembling seemed to increase tenfold, though Talia had already known.
Her breathing halted, eyes blown wide as they fixed upon the Greyjoy. The sight of him was just as effective as his hand wrapped around her throat.
Post by THE REAVING KING on Sept 11, 2017 21:12:06 GMT
Quellon looked down on the girl. Drank in her fear. Felt his wrists and neck burn as if they too had been chained for days on end. She expected a punch or a kick or a cock, a vile raping or a horrible beating without rhyme or reason. The girl had been cowed and broken—taken from some Riverland shithole, put into a pampered station, and then thrown down again.
None of it meant anything. Whatever abuses a girl with a pretty face suffered were not reasonable. Evil people hurt everybody, and made the good evil too. Maybe what the Ironborn did to this girl blackened her heart too. Maybe now she was thinking If only I had a knife, or a crossbow.
Quellon stepped over her and sat in the chair behind her. With one armored boot he kicked the other chair out. It nearly flipped over her prone body but she was enough weight to stop it. With a hand, he indicated for her to sit.
She was pretty—too pretty for a lord to ignore her. Underneath the bruises and the blood there was a gem there, waiting to be polished. She would have been good for Dalton, Quellon knew. He was a man who loved the smallfolk. The young lord appreciated what a person was, not just where they came from. The Reaving King was of similar stock. That was why he had done what he done, after all.
“I’ve thought about killing you,” Quellon said. He let the words sit there, a weight on her shoulders. He wanted this woman to chew on the idea of her death, and to chew on the fact that she had been shown mercy. “Then I thought about giving you to one of my men. That would have been no better. Then my son, but he is likely off finding love somewhere else now.”
Quellon picked up a book from the table. Its cover was hard black leather, and when he opened it the pages were thin, likely written on onion paper. He flipped through them with one finger. “There was the idea to use you.
“I could turn you into a killer, but you’ll never forget your fear and hate for me now. You would, with time, use I taught you out of this book. So if I can’t give you to my men, and if I can’t kill you, and if I have no use for you, then there is nothing left.”
The Reaving King looked at her. His one eye carried with it every bit of conviction and strength that he had. “I could either rape you and make you my salt wife, or I could make you my thrall. If asked, you would choose the latter. To serve my ship and to bleed your hands and feet as you worked hard on the rigging. You’d become an Ironborn, with time.”
But there was something he didn’t say. Being an Ironborn was no blessing. She would be killed in battle one day, without a shadow of a doubt. A girl like her couldn’t survive the wars to come by fighting on the front lines.
“I wonder what you are willing to do to live.”
It was not of the Reaving King’s personality to ask questions directly, but the question was there nonetheless. Would she take up the axe and kill herself, or would she throw herself at Quellon to survive?
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