Garlan Gunter
Jr. Member
Posts: 702
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« Reply #3 on: September 10, 2015, 11:38:52 AM » |
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MELONY
“You are still its lord,” she urged him, quiet, low, firm, and strangely quite as tranquil as the silent white that lay, deep, unrelenting, all about. “Lord of Winterfell and of the Realm. Under the Lord of Light alone.”
Her companion made small response, save for the low growl of the great white beast, scarce discernible to eyes less vigilant than hers now. The Lady Melisandre was unperturbed. Her warrior had spoken but little since the battle that left his King, her last champion, slain. It mattered naught. She knew, she had seen, in the flames alike as in the flesh, that he could fight, that he would lay waste to this wasteland and prevail over it. The time for colloquies was past.
Ahead of them the curtain wall loomed, so vast and, compared to the pallor of sky and long suffocated moor and fell, so dark; like a jagged remnant of smoke-grey palling to black, leaking shadow and steam about it from the appalling cleanliness. Like dragonglass. Like dragonsteel. Melisandre had never seen the fortress look so formidable, yet not half, either, so penetrable. In the shadow it cast her powers would wax weightily. Had she not seen as much?
“One is upon us,” so lovingly, now, did she murmur. “Draw.” And the slight, almost tentative figure in stained grey at her side drew indeed, with a stiffened and crooked motion, four feet and more of black steel from his side. It did not resemble the last Lightbringer, and that too brought the Lady succour. This time heat of a kind could be felt, the heat of passion and of pain, searing, aching; and the light the blade cast, if it had a colour, looked as if it had long lain girdled by Melisandre’s own flaming hair, by her great dark ruby of glamourie. The colours of the House Targaryen. A strange coincidence. No, nothing is a coincidence. But…a problem for another hour. They come.
The wolf knew his path well, and so did the man, if mere man was still what her new champion could be called; and they were beside a quiet wicket gate. But the enemy, the Last Enemy, were numerous, and they could not so easily be caught unawares. Before they had attained their ingress Melisandre’s crimson glare locked upon the pale sky glint of the Sidhe – and the Shadowbinder laughed.
“Show these, Jon Snow. Show them what you know.”
The grey figure asked no more, nor the bone-white shadow beside him. Ghost would not be left, for all that his strength would be of small aid here, and in truth Melisandre was glad of it; she still suspected something was left to be reaped from the familiar’s mind, scent, very tread. Carefully she called it, still snarling, back towards her, as the six Sidhe advanced, three ahead, one to the right fank, two, somehow, behind. And the grey stranger with his blood-black blade of evelight span. Two of the sentinels were winnowed at once, their own ice-blades seeming to meld with the piercing array dripping from each ledge and surface. Those who had thought to surround them Melisandre herself did not so much destroy as dismiss, breathing them to stray shards as the heat and denseness of the air about her bucked and swelled. The last guard on a sudden made as if to kneel. Her champion had no time for kneelers now. Down came Lightbringer upon its wan skull, so that the pommel slid and shimmered in the air, a white wolf still, whatever betided at its blade.
“Swift. To the Great Hall. To this latest and last of your Usurpers,” she urged, and the wolf let out a long, low thrill of melancholy relish. Through bailey and court they slipped and skidded and sprinted. The Lady could be tireless and rapid when she cared to show it, and there was no power anymore that she troubled to hide. Only her creation was her equal, aye, and more. The very wolf lagged and whined as they passed.
And then they heard it, the sound she had heard so often in rumours and in dreams, the dragonsong that filled the night. The three overhanging dooms that, as Melisandre had been first told by Lady Selyse so very long ago, had come to deliver judgment on Black Harren’s line. All at Winterfell had lain under silver shrouds. Now the night blazed red and clear, and the very Sidhe began to scream, a queer, shimmering music that spoke of pain and sorrow as unconnected, incomprehensible beauties.
“It is our hour,” the Red Woman gasped, and knew then she was addressing herself. The Great Hall was scarce a cloister ahead, and the court was packed as an elegant grove, a tamed forest of silver birchs, …of them. Only they began to fire like tallow now, and as they melted, so even more they thronged. Then Ghost hissed, drew himself back, and howled bright – yes, it was a bright sound, as Lightbringer had rang out when she unsheathed it anew. And, amidst their torment and their chaos, the Sidhe were all aware of them.
Contemplation was a luxury, a disorder, a weakness. There were only the flames, now, and they poured from the Lady below as from the monsters above. She had brought a dark lamp from Asshai in her hands of might, a lamp that would cast open the way for her warrior. For the first time the grey swordsman looked to her as if in full consciousness, humaneness, almost curiosity. “Go,” she bade him, “go and find him, the lesser bastard, the flayed child who has been named Culrikhan. The worthless and false heir of Brandon Stark. These are as nothing to you. Lay them down, and put him to Lightbringer!” The warrior nodded, for a moment that seemed slow, yet must have been over near instantly, as he swung to dispatch two more Sidhe in as many motions.
She must not waste energy in coddling the last strong man left. Melisandre breathed, and she was fell, and the demonlings weak as the water that must once have congealed them. She laughed harsher and harder, tore the black the red from her very back. Ghost was nowhere in sight, and no matter of hers. Forth she hurtled, to gaze in delight at the marvels of the infinite gradations of flames, their sources now revealed, cream glimmering to rose in the conflagaration, darkening green, black, so very black. Naked to the very bone, she felt herself deep as she might, spread herself about as the star of victory, abandoned herself to the joy, the surge, the raiment of fair dissemination, red, red, flowing soft and warm and gelling to dark spikes, leaping yellow phantasms of mocking affection…They were fleeing her now, as well they might, routed before her as much as by any dragon, the Army of Winter, the rabble gone awry…she was willing, thrilling to chase them, to use her every ember upon each of them…
Then she saw Selyse, staring doleful, lost, in a crevice of the Nightfort, abandoned somewhere folded in the flames the green dragon left in its wake. Davos Seaworth she saw, on a far sea with his arms about the last of Stannis’s House; his own legacy was long gone; she had seen Devan lost in the battle, Lady Seaworth and her babes had long perished by flamelight. Why these thoughts now, of such small moment? A severed arm, twitching and flailing. Blue eyes of Baratheon, not just gold death, on a tall lost form with its fingers peeled back almost to naught. The chilliest little girl, almost a maid, she had ever seen or even thought of, spinning an obsidian dagger. Was that almost real, or spewed from the cream dragon’s retorts? Both were immanent now. The silver queen on her mount in truth, and re-echoed in queer refraction below as the black dragon belched…
I vouched all for Snow, she could have wailed as she veered between bliss and despair, but who better than I to know it is nothing to flames? Where was he? There was but one way to see, a clear way. She needed fleetness now, not beauty, and it was a crone, another living corpse in all but thought and spirit, a flotsam of the centuries, who soared up, croaking sere as any crow, to the broken stronghold’s highest redoubt. Where is the wolf? Where is the Prince that was Promised?
Until then the dragons themselves had seemed to avoid her almost as much as the Sidhe, but then the green one, the one in whose spume she had seen her first, lost, betrayed Queen, gracefully attained her own height, or as near as was no matter. There was something playful in his gaze; for her part she was crying, she could not have sworn how or why. Surely she had erred twice. What was this sight if not a curse? Was Daenerys then Azor Azai, as in truth she had briefly wondered?
“I do not know,” Melony confessed to the beast in a voice no human would any longer be able to follow, craning and wheezing as she stretched towards its maw. And as its sigh dispersed her frail remnant, she felt her exasperation and loss blur into the relief of sleep far too long detained.
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