House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Commons - 0

A2 - Reputation - 5

A3 - Medcorps - 32

A4 - Marshal - 16

A5 - Non-Coms - 8

S1 - Wikipedia - 3

S2 - Steam - 0

S3 - Wookiepedia - 13

S4 - World - 45

-----

Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Fallout Wiki

Thanks to the Radicorn, Planetos now has a new type of Mythological/Lovecraft Mythos creature present in its lore (though more common in recent times).

A Radicorn is attracted to those who have committed murders, and when it finds one who got away with it, it will become increasingly horrifying to look at based on the number and severity of the murders committed that the individual got away with.

It is an entity that starts out looking like a (Non-Westerosi) Mythological Unicorn and largely stays that way when around those who have received punishment and/or absolution.

Note: Attraction to murderers and hatred of those who got away with it are separate traits.

They have been known to be quite fond of those who admit it/accept their punishment.

So despite appearing across the world, most of the records of their behavior come from Maesters who served with the Night's Watch, with Aemon Targaryen being quite fond of them and the current foremost expert on them.

Maester’s Notes: (Some In-Setting Lore)

I have studied the Radicorn for many years now.

I confess my interest began less scholarly than it later became.

They are magnificent creatures when at peace, possessing a beauty and dignity that accounts written only by those unfortunate enough to be pursued by one tend to omit.

For many years I favored the argument that they were spirits rather than animals.

Reliable accounts place Radicorns in multiple locations at the same time, and their ability to cross distances that should require weeks or months makes any ordinary explanation difficult.

Some maesters still argue that every reported Radicorn may be a manifestation of a single spirit-like entity capable of appearing in several places at once.

Others consider them an exceptionally strange species of unicorn spread throughout the known world.

If they are truly separate creatures, whether there are thousands of them or merely a small number capable of crossing vast distances with impossible speed remains unknown.

My own opinion has shifted with greater opportunity to observe them.

Whatever else they may be, Radicorns behave remarkably like living creatures when left to themselves.

They eat, rest, wander, and otherwise possess habits familiar in any animal, and I have become increasingly inclined to regard them as creatures of flesh and blood, albeit ones in which magic is extraordinarily strong.

Their apparent relation to the unicorns native to Skagos strengthens that conclusion.

Radicorns are generally regarded as larger and considerably more magically potent cousins of those smaller horned creatures.

Even the Skagosi unicorns possess abilities difficult to explain as entirely natural.

They have been observed standing comfortably upon slopes approaching the vertical and crossing broken mountain terrain at speeds that would be extraordinary even upon level ground.

The Radicorn may simply represent the same strange nature carried much further.

Their behavior toward men is where matters become more difficult.

The principles by which they judge their quarry remain unclear.

Their judgment cannot follow the strictest possible definition of murder, or they would spend most of their existence pursuing commanders after battles.

Neither do they appear concerned merely with the law, as they have been known to pursue the lord who ordered a killing rather than the knight who carried it out.

What can be said with greater confidence is that they seem particularly concerned with concealed crimes and killings for which the responsible party escaped consequence.

They have, by contrast, been repeatedly quite gentle with members of the Night’s Watch known to have admitted their crimes and committed themselves faithfully to their lives as Brothers.

I admit this has done much to improve my opinion of them…

Whatever measure the Radicorn uses, it appears to value something I have also come to value greatly during my years at the Wall.

Men arrive here for many reasons, and not all arrive willingly, but there is a considerable difference between a man forever fleeing what brought him here and one who accepts what he has done and gives himself honestly to the Watch.

Radicorns appear to recognize much the same distinction.

Whether this reflects morality as men would understand it, instinct, magic, or something stranger remains beyond my ability to say.

Their nature presents similar contradictions.

Against their ordinary animal habits must be weighed their apparent ability to cross great distances with little or no elapsed time, their simultaneous appearances in distant places, and their uncanny ability to continue following their quarry through obstacles that should be impassable, including barred castle gates and, in several reported cases, entire oceans.

What is much better established is that a Radicorn’s appearance worsens according to the crimes of the person it pursues.

The purpose appears to be exposure rather than execution.

They habitually reveal themselves while their quarry is in public, particularly when those connected to the victims are nearby, yet there are no reliable accounts of a Radicorn actually killing its target, it merely gives chase.

Curiously, there are few credible reports of the pursued choosing anything except flight.

Even seasoned knights have fled immediately upon seeing one.

This has led some to suspect that the creature inspires more than ordinary fear, perhaps exerting some supernatural compulsion upon its chosen quarry.

The pursuit itself generally continues for some time, with the Radicorn remaining close behind without ever quite catching its target.

It then vanishes just as the chase appears ready to end, often after driving its quarry directly toward someone closely connected to one of their previous victims.

A surviving spouse or child is the most common result in the accounts available to me.

A recent case has brought the subject unusually close to the Night’s Watch.

A “Ramsay,” who claimed to be the unrecognised natural son of Lord Domeric Bolton and had been connected to several local disappearances, was brought to the Watch as the result of a Radicorn’s pursuit.

He is presently serving as a Brother of the Night’s Watch.

I will be interested to discover how the Radicorns receive him now.

- Aemon Targaryen, Maester of Castle Black & Brother of the Night’s Watch

World: Witcher Wiki

Thanks to the Enhanced Elementa Oil, previous statement from Chapter 71:

“Downside: a Westerosi Warrior’s usual methods will have little to no effect against these things.”

As regards Frost Talus and Frost Pebblit, is no longer valid.

It is now such that regular weaponry works 25% as well on them as it does on other creatures, while weapons made of Dragonglass still work as a 1-hit KO.

Also, their Weakness to Fire has been increased, with it damaging them 25% more quickly.

Finally, any damage done by Weirwood is now 25% more effective across the board, along with working against others and their creatures at 25% effectiveness.

This applies to any damage done by anything made of Weirwood by anyone/anything.

So a branch falling on you does 25% more damage, and so does a club swung by a Giant.

However, it is specifically the Weirwood that is more damaging, so an arrow with a Weirwood shaft is still doing its damage through its tip and so doesn’t get any buffs.

Note: Weirwood can and has been known to be used for weapons in things like Bows, but this is specifically the parts that naturally fall off.

Mass production of Weirwood weapons would likely be seen as Abhorrent Evil by worshipers of the Old Gods.

-----

Story:

It turned out military superiority did absolutely nothing to make the Red Mountains move faster.

Kingsgrave was behind you, the three loyalist invasions were finally close enough to communicate properly, and every serious report suggested Aegon Blackfyre was being pushed toward Yronwood.

Unfortunately, none of that widened the roads, flattened the mountains, or persuaded several thousand men to stop needing food.

The Dornish were also still being Dornish about the entire situation.

Small raiding parties kept appearing from places your scouts would've sworn contained nothing larger than a goat, attacking whatever section of the march looked least prepared, then disappearing back into the mountains before anyone could force them into a proper fight.

They rarely accomplished much against actual soldiers, but wagons, wounded men, horses, camp workers, and everyone else whose first responsibility wasn't stabbing Dornishmen made much easier targets.

That meant you couldn't simply stretch the army into whatever marching column moved fastest.

Soldiers had to remain scattered throughout the whole thing, close enough that an attack against the baggage train didn't require half the army to reverse direction before somebody carrying a spear arrived.

The result was a moving compromise between speed, protection, supplies, wounded, animals, and terrain.

It worked remarkably well, which still meant you were crossing the Red Mountains at roughly the speed of an especially determined snail.

The wounded were becoming their own increasingly complicated part of that problem.

Earlier in the campaign, somebody badly injured could simply be placed inside a protected group and sent back toward friendly territory.

That still made sense for men who were actually finished with the campaign.

It made considerably less sense for somebody who needed two or three weeks before he could march and fight properly again.

Every mile farther into Dorne was another mile farther from replacement troops.

If an experienced soldier could recover while travelling with you, sending him all the way back toward the Marches merely because he couldn't currently swing a sword seemed increasingly wasteful.

So more wounded travelled with the army as they recovered.

That meant more wagon space, more healers, more food, more guards, more attention to camp placement, and more arguments about when somebody was actually healthy enough to stop occupying all of those things.

Thankfully, your Infantry had become remarkably good at functioning without requiring you to personally supervise every breath.

Sergeants kept men together, officers handled ordinary discipline, companies knew how to establish themselves in camp, and most routine problems died several levels below you.

The more awkward personnel problems increasingly went through Omek.

He had no neat formal position making him your lieutenant, which was useful because what you actually wanted was his knowledge of the men, their skills, their strengths, their relationships, and which particular sergeant, corporal, officer, or ordinary soldier could handle whatever strange problem had appeared.

That meant even more things stopped before they reached you personally.

It also left you with more spare attention than an Infantry Commander probably had any right to possess during an invasion.

Naturally, you responded by finding several other jobs.

Berenice was happy to provide one of them.

You'd helped with the Medcorps before, and nobody needed to explain how to clean a normal wound or wrap a bandage around something that had stopped being the correct shape.

You were competent enough that somebody could hand you a common battlefield injury and expect useful work instead of immediately searching for someone better trained.

The trouble came when the injury stopped being common.

Berenice demonstrated that one afternoon by taking your hand and pressing it against the side of a soldier's chest.

"Don't just listen to his breathing this time," she said.

"You already know what bad breathing sounds like, so tell me what this feels like instead."

You concentrated, which would've been considerably easier if the soldier hadn't been watching both of you with the expression of a man wondering why Lord Stark had suddenly become part of his examination.

At first there was only warmth beneath your palm and the steady movement of his ribs.

Then you reached out, trying to understand more than your ears and fingers alone could tell you.

Something inside moved with every breath, while something else didn't move quite enough.

"His left side feels tighter somehow," you said.

"The other side moves more easily when he breathes."

Berenice nodded without removing your hand from the man's chest.

"Now stop deciding that tighter means injured, because that is how you convince yourself you understand something you don't."

That was encouraging in the usual Berenice fashion.

You tried again, paying attention to the difference itself instead of immediately assigning it a familiar name.

There was pressure somewhere deeper than the muscles, and something about the rhythm felt wrong in a way you couldn't comfortably describe.

"It doesn't feel torn or broken," you said.

"It feels more like something is stopping it."

Berenice gave you a small approving nod.

"Better, now decide what sort of stopping you're actually feeling."

She tapped two fingers against the man's chest.

"Does it feel like sickness, old damage, something inside him that shouldn't be there, or simply a body that has been doing hard work for forty years?"

The soldier looked mildly offended by the last possibility.

Berenice ignored him with the confidence of someone who had been insulting patients professionally for years.

That was the part of Springlord healing you were only beginning to understand properly.

A Springlord didn't look at someone, determine what was wrong using one set of knowledge, and then begin doing magic through some separate set of knowledge.

Feeling the person was part of understanding the person from the beginning.

Berenice could put a hand against someone and notice things another healer might need much more time, experience, or luck to recognize.

That didn't make the answer automatic, because noticing a difference and knowing what that difference meant were entirely different accomplishments.

You could feel that something inside the man's chest wasn't behaving properly.

Berenice could recognize what sort of wrongness she was feeling because she'd spent years learning how healthy bodies felt, how injured bodies felt, how sickness changed them, how age changed them, and how several problems could overlap until the obvious answer became completely wrong.

The Grandfather corruption everyone had been encountering lately had simply added another miserable thing for the Springlords to learn.

Once Berenice explained what she thought was happening, the practical work became much easier for you.

That was increasingly the pattern between you.

Your hands usually knew what to do once somebody gave your mind the right problem.

Understanding the problem was harder.

Several days later Berenice had you examining a man whose wound looked perfectly ordinary until she asked why the heat around one edge bothered her more than the other.

You eventually noticed the difference she meant.

You did not eventually understand what that difference meant without help.

"You're still trying to find whatever looks wrong," Berenice told you.

"Sometimes the useful question is what should be happening here that isn't happening."

You frowned down at the man's arm.

"That sounds deliberately less convenient than ordinary medicine."

"It usually is less convenient than ordinary medicine."

Berenice adjusted the dressing before continuing.

"People would be much easier to heal if they agreed to have one problem at a time."

Unfortunately, nobody had informed the war.

You kept working with her whenever your actual duties allowed.

Sometimes that meant an hour after camp was built, while other times it meant riding beside one of the medical wagons as Berenice explained why two injuries you'd have treated almost identically bothered her for entirely different reasons.

Sometimes it meant Janus landing nearby with a scrap tied to his leg.

That had become another ongoing project entirely.

The project itself was going rather well.

You and Jon had started making the outward parts of your communication with Janus much more consistent.

Commands sounded the same whenever possible.

Gestures meant the same things, small objects went with particular people, and Janus received rewards often enough afterward that anyone watching could reasonably decide they were seeing years of training finally becoming useful.

The fact that most of the real communication came through the bond remained nobody else's concern.

One morning you sent Janus toward Berenice with a short note concerning two recovering Infantrymen.

He returned later while you were speaking with an officer, landed on your shoulder, and waited until you removed the reply from his leg.

You glanced around after Janus flew away again.

Nobody was staring at either of you.

One man nearby had watched the raven arrive, then immediately returned to complaining about wagon spacing.

That was almost beautiful.

Ravens already carried messages across Westeros every day, and everyone knew they were clever birds.

The Maesters had spent thousands of years making an intelligent raven feel about as strange as a useful horse.

The unusual part was how well Janus listened to you personally, and even that was increasingly being filed away as something Lord Stark had spent years teaching his bird.

You were working fairly hard to encourage that conclusion.

Janus himself remained perfectly capable of ignoring something important because a shiny buckle had offended him.

The impressive intelligence everyone increasingly saw depended heavily on your attention and the bond between you.

That was exactly why you needed something better than your current collection of useful little demonstrations.

"We've done well enough with this so far," you told Jon that evening.

"People recognize that Janus is trained, and most of them have stopped finding the small things strange."

Jon glanced toward Janus, who was currently perched on a tent pole and worrying at a leather tie.

"That was what we wanted."

"It was the beginning of what we wanted," you said.

"We still don't have an actual plan for when I need to explain something useful he saw."

Jon stopped watching the raven.

You continued before he could answer.

"We can't keep winging it and invent the explanation afterward."

You looked toward Janus again.

"That was an unfortunate phrase, but the problem remains."

Jon's mouth twitched slightly.

"We need to know what we're actually trying to make people believe before Barristan asks how I know something happening behind a wall."

That removed the remaining humor rather quickly.

The little messenger tricks were useful.

They were also comparatively easy to explain.

A raven carrying a note between people he knew required almost no conceptual work.

A raven telling you where three hundred enemy soldiers were standing behind a castle wall required considerably more.

"We need something visible that people can understand," Jon said.

"Something they can watch Janus do instead of simply taking your word for it."

"I'd noticed that particular difficulty already."

Jon ignored you and looked toward the tent table.

"A map might work if we can teach him enough."

You considered the idea carefully.

"Lay one out, send him scouting, then have him indicate where he saw men."

Jon nodded.

"He could land beside a place, respond to several marks, or choose between locations."

The possibilities weren't terrible.

Unfortunately, the obvious problem arrived almost immediately.

"We would need everyone watching to believe that whatever he does actually means what we say it means."

"Yes," Jon said.

"That is where this becomes unpleasant."

You could use the bond to know what Janus had seen.

You could probably use the bond to make him move toward whatever part of a map you wanted.

The problem was convincing everyone watching that Janus had supplied the answer rather than you putting on an extremely specific performance with a bird.

"We're going to have to act."

Jon made a face at you.

"Yes, that was also my conclusion."

You'd grown up with several people vastly better suited to that problem.

Sansa could make a social performance look effortless while simultaneously noticing which person in the room wasn't convinced.

Robb's ability to become exactly the person a situation required was something the entire family had learned to respect.

You and Jon had generally occupied the simpler position of saying what you meant and expecting people to cope with it.

Unfortunately, quite a lot of Southern nobility had spent their lives learning how to communicate three different things while technically saying only one.

That made an elaborate deception an especially poor place to discover whether practice could compensate for talent.

"We can still practice," you said.

"That doesn't mean I like depending on it."

"We don't really need to like it."

Jon's answer would've been easier to dismiss if he weren't obviously right.

Kingsgrave had already given you several examples of information Janus could've provided if you'd possessed a safe way to explain it.

There would be another fortress, another battle, and more men dying while useful knowledge stayed inside your head because explaining how you knew it might create another disaster entirely.

You couldn't simply announce yourself as a warg and hope everyone decided this particular Northern horror story looked friendly.

You also couldn't spend the rest of the war deciding secrecy mattered more than soldiers.

"We need something better before Yronwood," you said.

"Not necessarily finished, but something we can deliberately build toward."

Jon nodded after thinking for a moment.

"Then we keep the map idea and start making as much of it real as we can."

"Preferably almost all of it eventually."

"That would certainly make lying easier."

The conversation ended without removing the danger.

That was becoming a familiar result whenever you and Jon discussed Southern ideas about magic.

The lords studying the Green had become useful for much the same reason.

They were already curious enough that asking strange questions no longer immediately made the conversation strange.

You were supposedly discussing Northern customs, Southern customs, the Green, runes, religion, and whatever unfortunate plant had most recently become evidence.

That provided considerable room for you and Jon to ask why particular explanations made sense to them.

The oddest part was how often everyone understood the individual words perfectly.

One evening a Reach lord compared rune workers to several other crafts involving specialized materials and training.

You understood every comparison he made.

You simply wouldn't have expected the grouping itself to matter as much as he clearly expected it to matter.

It was like discussing carpenters, bowyers, foresters, and shipwrights.

A Northman knew perfectly well that all four could be grouped together through their work with wood.

You could talk about them that way whenever doing so was useful.

The Southerners sometimes seemed to treat the fact that they belonged inside a larger kind as important information about the thing itself.

You started noticing the same weight appearing in other conversations.

Not enough to tell you what principle they were using, but enough to make the old explanation of Southerners simply having an arbitrary list of acceptable and unacceptable magic impossible to maintain.

There was a structure beneath their reactions.

You and Jon had begun feeling around some of its edges without yet seeing the shape connecting them.

That was considerably more useful than believing no shape existed.

The Dornish, meanwhile, continued contributing their own form of education by attacking whenever everyone had gone long enough without remembering that you were invading their homeland.

Most of those attacks remained minor.

One produced Sergeant Hugh.

Hugh had joined your Infantry when the loyalist armies split, one of the Crownlander sergeants who'd agreed to move into the Prince's Pass force rather than remain with his original contingent.

You knew him well enough that seeing his name among the wounded was considerably different from reading another unfamiliar entry in a report.

A Dornish raiding party had hit part of the marching column, lost several men, injured several more, and escaped back into the mountains with most of its own strength intact.

Hugh had taken a deep cut along the outside of his leg.

It wasn't the sort of wound that made anyone start discussing amputation.

It was the sort that made walking miserable and serious fighting a terrible idea for the next several weeks.

More concerningly, some Grandfather-tainted blood had gotten into the wound during the fight.

When you reached the medical area, Hugh was lying back while Berenice examined the cut.

He looked at you, then at the bloodied bandage currently being removed.

"Apparently this is what it takes now, my lord."

You paused beside him for a moment.

"I see you during Infantry work all the time."

Hugh gave you a long look.

"Exactly, my lord, that's what I meant."

Berenice made a noise suspiciously close to laughter.

You decided neither of them deserved acknowledgement for that.

The joke stayed with you anyway.

Hugh wasn't angry, which would've made the whole thing simpler.

He was comfortable enough with you to make the joke because the relationship was still good.

That didn't make what he was pointing at any less real.

Berenice pulled your attention back before the thought could develop further.

"Put your hand here, and don't immediately start with the blood."

You placed your palm beside the wound.

The corruption was immediately obvious once you reached out toward Hugh.

You'd encountered enough Grandfather-tainted injuries by now that the wrongness nearly announced itself.

There was something invasive about the feeling, something that didn't belong to Hugh and didn't care what happened to him as long as it remained.

You reached harder toward that part.

Berenice tapped the back of your hand sharply.

"I said don't start with only the blood."

"I can already feel the corruption clearly."

"I know you can feel it clearly."

Berenice shifted your hand slightly.

"Now feel the rest of the wound with it."

You obeyed, and that was considerably harder.

The cut itself was obvious from the outside.

Understanding everything happening beneath it became another matter.

Some tissue felt tight in ways you couldn't separate cleanly.

Some felt damaged in ways that blended unpleasantly with the corruption.

You could tell the wound was responding badly.

Berenice would've thrown something at you if you tried passing that off as a diagnosis.

"What are you worried about besides the blood?"

She kept working while she waited.

"The corruption is spreading through the injured area."

"Yes, and what else are you feeling?"

You concentrated harder as Hugh carefully kept still.

"The muscle underneath doesn't feel right either."

"Better, but keep following what changes."

Berenice began cleaning and opening part of the wound more carefully.

You followed what she was doing through your hand.

That made some of the differences easier to understand because each physical change gave you something to compare against what you felt.

Then the Grandfather corruption shoved itself back into your awareness.

That part was simple in a way the rest wasn't.

Not easy, because holding against it took real effort.

Simple, because you knew exactly what you wanted.

That did not belong inside Hugh.

So you reached for it and pushed.

The resistance was unpleasant.

You pushed harder until Berenice's shoulders relaxed noticeably.

"Good, keep holding that pressure exactly there."

She adjusted something deeper inside the wound.

"You're taking most of that burden away from me."

That was satisfying enough that you focused even harder on the corruption.

"And keep feeling everything happening in the leg."

You looked over at her.

"I'm still holding the corruption back properly."

"I know you're holding it back properly."

Berenice looked directly at you before continuing.

"We're healing Hugh, not fighting his blood."

Hugh raised one hand slightly from the blanket.

"I personally support continuing to heal Hugh."

"You don't get a vote while you're bleeding."

Berenice didn't even look at him.

You returned your attention to the wound.

That was considerably harder than simply pushing.

The corruption wanted force.

The injury wanted understanding.

You could follow some of what Berenice was doing, especially when she explained it while she worked.

There were still points where she changed pressure, adjusted what she was encouraging, or deliberately left something alone and you couldn't tell why until she told you.

Sometimes you anticipated her correctly.

More often you remained half a step behind her.

The useful part was that Berenice no longer had to divide herself evenly between the delicate work and forcing the corruption backward.

You were carrying most of that pressure.

She still corrected you repeatedly.

At one point you started encouraging part of the wound to close faster.

"Stop doing that immediately," Berenice said.

You released your effort at once.

"That part needs to stay open until I'm sure nothing remains trapped underneath."

You looked back toward the wound.

"That would've made the injury considerably worse."

"Yes, which is why pushing harder isn't the same thing as knowing where to push."

That was probably going to become annoying advice.

It was also extremely good advice.

By the time you were finished, Hugh looked exhausted and considerably less wrong.

The corruption hadn't vanished completely, but you had forced it back far enough that Berenice was satisfied with the direction of things.

The wound itself was clean, controlled, and likely to heal properly if Hugh avoided demonstrating whatever clever idea had gotten him cut open originally.

"I was standing exactly where I was ordered."

Hugh sounded genuinely offended by the accusation.

"Then avoid being ordered there again."

Berenice's answer made him look toward you for support.

You carefully found something else to examine.

The lesson remained obvious afterward.

Power wasn't your problem.

When Berenice gave you something magically demanding but conceptually simple, you could carry an enormous amount of the work.

The complicated part was knowing exactly what you were touching, what several overlapping problems meant, and what changing one thing would do to everything around it.

You'd helped Hugh substantially.

Berenice still understood the patient far better than you did.

That seemed like an excellent reason to continue learning.

Several days later, Janus accidentally acquired a much better explanation for himself.

You were speaking with one of the Reach lords who'd become involved in the Green discussions when Janus dropped from a nearby tree and landed on your forearm.

The lord watched him settle for several moments.

"He's remarkably well trained for a raven."

The Reachman looked between Janus and you.

"Have you ever used him while hunting?"

You looked at him more carefully.

"What exactly do you mean by that?"

"For finding game, mostly."

The lord gestured vaguely toward the surrounding mountains.

"Ranging ahead, finding where animals are moving, and that sort of thing."

The question had never occurred to you in quite that form.

You answered very carefully.

"He's been coming on hunts with me for years."

Janus shifted against your glove.

"We've spent a lot of time looking for game together, and after this long I usually know what he's reacting to."

Every word was entirely true.

The lord nodded as though the explanation fit perfectly.

"That makes a great deal of sense."

You waited for another question.

None came.

He didn't ask whether you'd formally trained Janus to locate deer.

He didn't ask whether another man could borrow Janus and expect the same result.

He simply looked at the raven, looked at you, and placed the entire thing inside an explanation involving years spent hunting beside an unusually responsive bird.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

You let the thought sit instead of immediately forcing it into the rest of your plan.

Janus continued his messenger work in the meantime.

By then he could move between several people you dealt with constantly, provided you stayed engaged enough through the bond to keep the whole performance running smoothly.

The outward routines were becoming real enough that parts of the distinction between training and warging were beginning to blur even for you.

Then Janus arrived one afternoon carrying a short message from farther back in the marching column.

You removed the note immediately.

Supply wagons had been attacked, several people were wounded, and whatever attacked them wasn't Dornish.

You were already calling for your horse before Janus took flight again.

It wasn't until you were moving that the best part occurred to you.

Nobody had reacted.

A raven had landed, delivered a message directly into your hands, and flown away again.

The soldiers around you had treated it like a horse arriving with a rider.

Excellent.

The situation at the wagons was considerably less encouraging.

Most of the fighting had ended before you arrived.

Several enormous bodies were sprawled beside the road, all built heavily enough that the comparison to giants came naturally until you actually looked at them.

Their skin ranged from bluish gray to a strange greenish gray.

They were shaped enough like men to make the differences more unpleasant.

Your first thought was Grandfather.

At this point that was less paranoia than pattern recognition.

You dismounted beside one of the bodies.

"What in the hell is that thing?"

"Not another Grandfather creature, my lord."

You turned toward the speaker.

A Stormlander knight stood with several other men around another corpse.

"You know that with some confidence?"

"I've seen one before this war."

The knight nudged the corpse with his boot.

"Two years ago, near the western hills."

That got several people's attention.

Another man claimed his cousin had encountered something similar much farther north.

Someone else had heard of a pair being killed in the Vale.

None of those encounters fitted particularly well with a Dornish branch of Grandfather worship.

"Could they simply be giants?"

One man asked it while staring at the nearest body.

"They're much too small for giants."

Another soldier shook his head.

"And giants are basically men anyway."

"Very large and often hairy men."

"Yes, which is why I said men."

Someone else suggested ogres.

That produced several conflicting opinions about what an ogre was actually supposed to be.

Eventually somebody suggested snarks.

That quieted the argument for a moment.

Lord Teba had arrived by then and was examining one of the corpses with considerably more interest than disgust.

"The Mountain Clans have stories matching these."

He crouched beside one massive arm.

"I know of at least two encounters in recent years."

You looked toward him.

"Did they call them giants too?"

"Some people did, but snark is the name I've heard more often."

You looked back at the creature's face.

"The snarks in the stories I heard had long beards and claws."

Teba considered the entirely unbearded creature.

"Then Dornish snarks don't have beards."

That seemed reasonable enough.

Nobody had ever agreed much on what snarks looked like beyond living in lonely places and being unpleasant to encounter.

Apparently these were snarks.

The wagons were a substantially larger problem.

The actual attack had lasted minutes.

Getting the army moving afterward took hours.

Two wagons were damaged badly enough that their loads needed transferring.

One horse had broken a leg and needed killing.

Another team had panicked and tangled itself badly enough that three men were still arguing over whether the harness could be repaired without cutting half of it apart.

Several crates had split open when one wagon overturned.

A smith was needed immediately.

The nearest smith belonged to a contingent whose lord had already redirected him toward an unrelated repair.

The wounded needed attention.

The next section of the column couldn't pass because everyone involved had managed to stop in exactly the worst part of the road.

None of the individual problems were especially difficult.

Together they produced a magnificent demonstration of why armies sometimes lost entire days to events that barely deserved three lines inside a battle report.

Berenice's informal network caught much of the trouble.

That was good, and it also made the weakness painfully obvious.

People came to Berenice because Berenice listened.

Then Berenice came to you because you could usually get somebody with enough authority to care.

That worked much better when Berenice wasn't already responsible for several bleeding soldiers.

You needed something less dependent on locating one extremely busy healer.

For specific problems, you had specific people.

Medical problems belonged with Berenice, while archery problems naturally found Tulin.

Infantry personnel problems usually had some officer, sergeant, corporal, or soldier who could solve them, with Omek being particularly useful when you needed to know which person actually fitted the problem.

Then there were problems where the defining characteristic was that nobody obvious owned the whole mess.

That was Teba.

You found him still near the damaged wagons.

"I need you to do something annoying."

Teba glanced around the thoroughly disrupted road.

"You'll have to narrow that down considerably."

"Don't take over the army's logistics."

That got his attention.

"I need you to start figuring out who should talk to whom when something like this happens."

Teba looked more interested than worried.

You continued before he could misunderstand the assignment.

"Which teamsters can redirect wagons without finding a lord first, which smiths can be moved when something breaks, and which problems actually need Berenice."

You gestured toward the road.

"Also which problems only reach her because everybody knows she'll listen."

Teba nodded slowly.

"So you want the structure underneath the work."

"Exactly, because somebody should eventually command it properly."

You glanced toward the surrounding contingents.

"That doesn't need to be you, and I probably shouldn't decide the permanent commander myself."

"You want whoever gets the job to inherit something usable."

Teba's mouth twitched slightly.

"Instead of inheriting several thousand people who all know Berenice."

"That is exactly what I want."

Teba looked across the wagon train again.

"I can start doing that."

Of course he could.

That was what made Teba useful.

If you knew exactly what problem needed solving, there was often someone more specialized.

When five different systems had collided and you needed somebody broadly competent enough to work out what the problem even was, Teba was one of the safest men you could point toward the wreckage.

Over the next several days he started doing exactly that.

He found people who should've already known one another and introduced them.

He clarified who could authorize small changes without waiting for a lord.

He identified support problems that had been reaching Berenice despite having absolutely nothing to do with healing.

Most importantly, he began turning a collection of useful personal relationships into routes other people could actually follow.

The system remained incomplete, which was perfectly acceptable.

But whoever eventually received formal responsibility for the whole thing would inherit something better than a thousand separate emergencies.

Around the same time, Willas Tyrell's army became close enough to start producing visitors.

The armies themselves remained separated by a distance that mattered when thousands of men, wagons, horses, and wounded needed to cross it.

For a lord with a small escort, a messenger, or anyone travelling at something resembling ordinary human speed, the gap had become much less impressive.

The Reachmen noticed first.

One young lord disappeared for two days because his cousins were serving under Willas.

Another came back with his uncle and three knights who apparently considered visiting the Prince's Pass army a better use of their evening than slowly marching behind it.

Before long, people were moving between the two forces constantly.

Scouts and messengers did it for genuine military reasons.

The Reachmen mostly did it because slowly travelling toward the same fortress became much more tolerable when you could spend dinner annoying relatives you hadn't seen for months.

The visitors brought questions with them.

Kingsgrave had become a particularly popular subject.

The story had spread far enough that several men arrived specifically wanting to see the runes everyone claimed had helped bend a castle wall.

Nobody in your army could honestly tell them how much the runes had mattered.

That did absolutely nothing to reduce their enthusiasm.

Northmen explained what the marks traditionally did.

Southerners explained why that obviously meant everyone should try using them on things the Northmen insisted nobody sensible had ever used them on.

The whole argument began reproducing itself with new participants.

You rather liked that.

The medical questions mattered considerably more.

Willas's army had no Springlords.

That had never been particularly important before Grandfather worshippers began contaminating battlefields with blood that made ordinary wounds dramatically worse.

Now it mattered a great deal.

People from Willas's force started hearing that the Prince's Pass army was getting better results against the lingering corruption and came looking for explanations.

The first few made you nervous.

These weren't Southerners who had spent months watching Springlords work, arguing about the Green, and gradually becoming accustomed to every new piece of Northern strangeness.

One Reach knight asked Berenice how much of the difference came directly from the Old Gods.

You waited for the conversation to become difficult.

Instead, Berenice explained that the Springlords were an old Northern healing order, that their work had always involved the Old Gods, and that the King's religious settlement already recognized their practice.

The knight nodded thoughtfully.

"Can any of that treatment be taught to our healers?"

That was considerably easier.

The visitors already had somewhere comfortable to put the idea.

Northern healers, an Old Gods religious order, recognized practice, and particular experience with Grandfather corruption.

They were much more interested in whether it worked than in reopening every question the Prince's Pass army had spent months slowly answering.

That was useful information by itself.

The two armies were exchanging more than people.

Apparently they could exchange explanations as well.

The visitors also brought better information about Willas.

The poisoning had been worse than the earliest reports made clear.

Not because Willas had secretly been moments from death the entire time.

He had been close enough.

The more interesting part was what happened after survival.

The poison belonged to a broad sort known for leaving survivors weak for months, with some never recovering completely.

Willas was young, healthy, and improving steadily enough that everyone expected him to recover.

He was still far from well.

He tired quickly, moving took effort, and long periods of work exhausted him.

He could command in shorter stretches, but nothing about his recovery looked quick.

That changed how you thought about the attack.

Someone hadn't merely selected whatever poison killed most reliably.

They had chosen something where death was one useful result and months of weakness was another.

Given what had happened to Willas's army while he was incapacitated, that looked considerably less accidental now.

The western force had recovered as Willas recovered.

Whoever poisoned him had understood exactly how important keeping him out of command could be.

Nobody could tell you exactly what poison had been used.

Dorne had enough perfectly ordinary poisons without importing Grandfather into everything.

But the lingering weakness sounded close enough to some of the contamination you'd encountered that another possibility remained uncomfortable.

Someone might have used a known kind of poison and then made it worse with whatever Grandfather worshippers were doing.

That brought Hugh back to mind immediately.

You now knew something about your own healing that you hadn't known before.

You were very good at supplying sustained magical pressure against lingering corruption once somebody helped you understand exactly what you were pushing against.

The Springlords were already much better at Grandfather-tainted injuries than Willas's healers.

Perhaps they could help him.

If his poisoning had any supernatural component, they might help considerably.

You might even be useful personally.

That was an attractive thought.

Willas functioning properly again would strengthen the whole loyalist campaign.

Then you remembered that Willas Tyrell had recently been one of the most powerful lords rebelling against Joffrey.

Sending a collection of Northern magical healers to personally restore him was the sort of gesture that could acquire political meaning whether you intended it or not.

If Willas were dying, you could worry about that afterward.

He wasn't dying.

He was recovering slowly enough that you had time to ask Joffrey first.

So that went onto the growing list of things you wanted to discuss once the armies finally met.

The increased attention to support staff also changed another list.

You'd been thinking about postwar migration for a long time.

There were soldiers in the loyalist armies who had little waiting for them at home beyond poor land, crowded villages, or lords who barely knew their names.

Long Lake had room.

You'd always intended to encourage some of them to move north if they survived.

Lately you had started noticing other people.

Medics who had learned through the wartime corps.

Smiths, experienced teamsters, and people unusually good at making several hundred wagons stop behaving like an argument with wheels.

Craftsmen and people who had picked up useful practices from parts of Westeros you'd barely thought about before coming south.

A few Southerners had also become surprisingly comfortable around Old Gods worship.

Some had gone farther than comfortable.

Watching Springlords heal people while everyone else struggled against Grandfather corruption had made the question of whether the Old Gods were worth praying to considerably less theoretical for a few men.

It wasn't some enormous wave of conversion.

It was enough that you could imagine several of them willingly moving somewhere that put weirwoods much closer to ordinary life.

You eventually mentioned the broader thought to Tulin while the two of you were riding near the middle of the column.

"I think I've been thinking too much about soldiers."

Tulin looked sideways at you.

"You've spent several years building an Infantry."

He adjusted his reins.

"You should've expected that possibility eventually."

You ignored the observation.

"I mean after the war, not during it."

You gestured vaguely toward the moving support column.

"If I'm encouraging people to move to Long Lake, I should be looking at more than who fights well."

Tulin nodded immediately.

"That part seems fairly obvious already."

You were beginning to regret choosing him for this conversation.

"Medics, smiths, people who understand supply," you said.

"Even people who simply look at something differently."

That got more interest from him.

You glanced back toward where Kingsgrave had disappeared behind the mountains days ago.

"Northmen knew more about those runes than anyone else in the army."

You looked back toward Tulin.

"That still didn't make any Northman think to scratch flexibility runes into a castle wall."

Tulin grinned.

"It took a Southerner who didn't know enough to understand why that was stupid."

"Exactly, and then the stupid idea worked."

Tulin lifted one shoulder slightly.

"It might have helped the wall collapse."

"Which is considerably better than most stupid ideas manage."

You couldn't argue with that.

"The point is that knowing more didn't mean we had every useful idea."

You gestured toward the Southern contingents moving nearby.

"Bringing people north could also mean bringing ways of thinking we don't already have."

Tulin stared at you for several seconds.

"What exactly are you looking at?"

You frowned at him.

"You've only just remembered you're Lord of Long Lake."

"I've been aware of that for some time."

"Apparently not this particular part."

He sounded much too pleased with himself.

"Rito leave, learn things, meet people, and bring things back."

Tulin nodded toward the road ahead.

"Hund do almost the opposite and pull outsiders in until they're Hund without making them forget where they came from."

You nodded because none of that was new information.

"I know how both of them work."

"I know you know."

Tulin grinned again.

"That's why this is funny."

That was unfortunately fair.

He continued before you could defend yourself.

"Different people around the lake do it differently."

Tulin's tone became more serious without losing the humor.

"But if you spend years travelling across half the realm, fight beside people from everywhere, become Lord, and then come home with nothing except stories, people are going to wonder what you were doing."

"I was fighting a fairly substantial war."

"Bring back one good smith and they'll forgive you."

You laughed despite yourself.

Tulin's point stayed with you after the conversation wandered elsewhere.

He'd been talking about Long Lake.

That was enough to start your thoughts moving farther outward.

Long Lake could benefit from more people and more ideas.

The North could too.

Uncle Ned had spent years building relationships well beyond the North, while Robb had developed his own collection during the war.

Joffrey had never hidden that he wanted the kingdoms to function as something more substantial than seven separate groups periodically remembering they shared a King.

Your own life already made that feel less strange than it might have once.

Starks and Baratheons were woven through most of your important relationships now.

Maybe bringing medics, craftsmen, soldiers, and useful ideas north after the war was one small part of the same thing.

Long Lake was particularly well suited to making that part stick.

You kept turning the thought over during the following days.

Then Janus brought you back toward the more immediate problem.

You found Jon one evening after camp was established.

"I think somebody solved part of our raven problem by accident."

Jon looked up from sharpening his sword.

"Which particular part did they solve?"

"The part where neither of us can act."

Jon stopped sharpening for a moment.

"That still leaves several different problems."

You sat across from him.

"One of the Reach lords asked whether I use Janus like a hunting bird."

Jon set the whetstone down.

"What exactly did you tell him?"

"That Janus has hunted with me for years."

You folded your arms.

"I told him we've spent years looking for game together, and that I know Janus well enough to tell what he's reacting to."

Jon waited for more.

"Was that genuinely everything you said?"

"That was genuinely everything I said."

Jon stared at you for another moment.

"And he concluded you trained Janus to help find game."

"He never actually said that aloud."

Jon's expression became deeply unimpressed.

"He absolutely thought it."

"Almost certainly, which is why I'm telling you."

For the first time in the entire project, that felt like an advantage.

Jon leaned backward slightly.

"So instead of telling people you trained him to scout soldiers, we tell them he spent years helping during hunts."

"We don't even need to say helping very loudly."

You pointed toward Janus outside the tent.

"He genuinely came on the hunts."

"He genuinely ranged ahead of us."

Jon was starting to see the same path.

"I genuinely watched what he was doing."

"You genuinely learned his behavior."

"Very well, as it happens."

Jon's mouth twitched.

"This is dishonest."

"Yes, but importantly it isn't lying."

"You're getting better at this."

"I'm specifically getting better at avoiding the part I'm bad at."

That distinction mattered considerably.

You could carefully tell true things when you were paying attention.

What you were bad at was constructing an elaborate false story and maintaining it while someone much better at social games started pulling on loose threads.

This approach required much less of that.

Jon leaned forward again.

"What happens when somebody asks him to find something?"

"We make sure he's learned enough visible behavior that he can."

"And what happens when somebody asks him to do it for them?"

"He doesn't know them well enough."

Jon considered that answer.

"Conveniently true."

"Those are my favorite kinds of convenient."

Years of familiarity were already doing most of the explanatory work.

Nobody expected a hunting dog to perform exactly the same for a stranger who borrowed it for an afternoon.

Why should Janus?

You returned to the map problem.

The idea still made sense.

The explanation around it changed.

You didn't need Janus to look like a raven who had somehow been educated in military cartography.

You needed him to look like a hunting companion whose old skills were gradually being adapted.

Search, return, indicate, respond, receive reward.

Those were behaviors you could actually practice.

The bond could fill the gap between what Janus had genuinely learned and what you needed him to appear capable of doing.

If you repeated the routines long enough, some of that gap might eventually disappear anyway.

"What about numbers?" Jon asked.

"Finding men is one thing, but telling Barristan whether Janus saw fifty or five hundred is another."

"We don't know how to do that yet."

"Good, because I was worried we'd solved everything."

You laughed at him.

There was no danger of that.

There would be limits to what you could plausibly explain as training.

There would be questions you hadn't anticipated, and somebody eventually might notice that what you knew exceeded anything Janus could reasonably communicate through ordinary behavior.

You were still balancing between using something that could save lives and exposing something that could put both of you in danger.

The plan was better now.

More of it was true.

More of the visible behavior could become genuinely trained, and less depended on either of you suddenly becoming talented actors.

That was relief enough for one month.

It also gave you another small piece of what you and Jon had been noticing about Southern ideas.

A Southerner apparently saw meaningful differences between a well-trained animal, someone unusually skilled at training animals, and a warg.

A Northerner could discuss those same three things while treating them as heavily overlapping descriptions of the same broad reality.

A man exceptionally good with hounds obviously had a strong way with hounds.

Whether somebody called that training, familiarity, talent, or warg mostly changed which part of the thing they were emphasizing.

The Southerners did not appear to use the words that way.

That difference mattered even when you were all looking at exactly the same raven.

You still couldn't see the whole structure behind those distinctions.

You could see enough of its edges now to keep testing them deliberately.

The mountains gradually opened as the month drew toward its end.

More riders appeared along the roads, followed by more wagons and more standards you recognized.

The scattered signs of Joffrey and Robb's army stopped feeling like messages from another front.

They started looking like an army you were physically approaching.

You recognized houses you hadn't dealt with properly in months.

Some of those lords had known you before the Prince's Pass campaign changed your reputation.

Back when the armies divided, your standing among them had trended distinctly negative.

Even the more favorable lords had tended to see you as strangely obsessed with common soldiers, Infantry organization, sergeants, and responsibilities respectable young nobles usually left to somebody else.

Quite a lot had happened since then.

You'd commanded successfully, built better relationships with Southern lords, helped break Vulture's Roost, and come through Kingsgrave with considerably more respect attached to your name.

Seeing those banners felt like a real opportunity.

These were relationships you'd handled poorly before, and now you had much better ground to rebuild them from.

Then Hugh's joke returned to you.

Apparently getting wounded was how a soldier got time with Lord Wulfric now.

You'd spent a long time deliberately building personal relationships with the men who served under you.

Then other problems had demanded attention, one after another, and you'd largely moved on because the Infantry structure was strong enough to survive without your constant presence.

That structure was still working exactly as intended.

The personal side was less automatic.

Men you had spent months speaking with, training beside, eating around, and learning individually could still notice when their lord stopped appearing except when some piece of official Infantry business required him.

Some of them could easily feel set aside even though setting them aside had never been your intention.

At the same time, the banners ahead represented an unusually good opportunity.

Your older problem with the lords had improved dramatically in the Princes Pass Army, but many of these lords likely still thought quite poorly of you.

This could very well be the perfect time to turn that arround, as they would be hearing all sorts of stories about you from the Princes Pass lords.

Your unlikely to receive a better opportunity any time soon.

However, you could likely get on with things as they were, as the three armies should only be together briefly before splitting up again, and spending more time among the men again could address something real as well as your conversation with Sergeant Hugh had shown.

You hadn't decided what to do with either thought when another banner appeared beyond the next stretch of road.

Black stag on gold rose above the growing collection of standards.

The royal banner cut through everything else you had been considering.

Joffrey was there, and Robb was there with him.

After months of fighting separate pieces of the same war, you were finally about to see both of them again.

As the Prince's Pass army finally arrived at the siege of Yronwood, you smiled.

-----

Skills:

Pursuits:

Martial:

(12) Physical Form - 175/400 (+15)

(11) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 135/300 (+15)

(12) Archery - 160/400 (+20) (Gifted)

(13) Heavy Armour - 150/500 (+30) (Prodigious)

Avocations:

(12) Equestrianism - 45/400 (+20) (Talented)

(10) Hunting - 20/200 (+0)

(10) Seacraft - 35/100 (+Merged) (Knack)

(7) Fishing - 60/100 (+1)

(6) Swimming - 40/100 (+1)

(6) Climbing - 60/100 (+0)

Scholarly:

Applied:

(12) Accounting - 260/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

(7) Northern Law - 70/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) General Westerosi Law - 60/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) Castrametation - 150/100 (+30) (Knack)

(4) Poliorcetics - 85/100 (+0)

Contextual:

(9) Mathematics - 85/100 (+10) (Knack)

(10) Northern History - 190/200 (+5) (Knack)

(8) Northern Cultures - 80/100 (+0)

(8) Westerosi History - 45/100 (+5)

(7) Westerosi Cultures - 30/100 (+10)

(7) Common Literacy - 25/100 (+0)

(6) Valyrian Literacy - 30/100 (+0)

Social:

Public:

(14) Management - 100/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

(8) Stewardship - 90/100 (+15) (Knack)

(12) Strategy - 200/400 (+50) (Prodigious +)

(9) Public Speaking - 50/100 (+25) (Skilled)

Personal:

(12) Interpersonal Communication - 145/400 (+30) (Skilled)

(5) Acting (Lying) - 70/100 (+15)

(11) Common Speaking - 160/300 (+40) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 190/300 (+5) (Knack)

(8) Valyrian Speaking - 15/100 (+5) (Knack)

Magic:

(1) Theory of Magic - 10/100 (+10)

- (1) Potentium: Heartsense + Warging - 10/100 (+10)

(19) Verdancy:

- (10) The Green Aura - 200/200 (+-800) (Talented)

- - (3) The Green Touch - 5/100 (+305)

- (6) The Green Knowledge - 5/100 (+505) (Knack)

(37) Potentium:

- (1) Potentium Studies - 75/100 (+5)

- (4) Combat Intuition - 15/100 (+0)

- (2) Clairsentience - 10/100 (+110)

- - (10) Heartsense - 200/200 (+1100)

- (5) Warging - 90/100 (-160) (Talented)

- - (3) Warging Theory - 50/100 (+350) (Knack)

- (2) Somatic Insight - 80/100 (+180) (Knack)

- - (5) Force Healing - 70/100 (-60) (Gifted)

- - (6) Healing Trance - 5/100 (+505) (Knack)

(7) Enchanting:

- (6) Westerosi Runes Theory - 40/100 (-60)

- (1) Westerosi Runes Practice - 100/100 (+100)

(18) Adamancy:

- (7) Armored Recuperation - 100/100 (+800)

- (4) Burden Opponent - 100/100 (+400)

- (3) Ending Blow - 50/100 (+250)

- (2) Ocular Renewal - 100/100 (+200)

- (2) Cold Resistance - 10/100 (+110)

(5) Numinance:

- (1) Revive - 100/100 (+100)

- (4) Sensor Shroud - 5/100 (+305) (Knack)

-----

Earning: 7

Spending: 0

Banked: 122

-----

Rolls for Next Turn:

T5 = Power/Skill for a Prominent Figure

L3 = Slightly Inconvenient

-----

Voting:

Main Actions: (What should we focus on in the next chapter?)

A1 - Focus on the needs and training of the Common men.

A2 - Focus on your reputation with the Lords by training with them.

A3 - Work with the Medcorps and other Support Staff.

A4 - Focus on your Marshal Skill by Training with Jon and the Knights.

A5 - Focus on the Organisation and Non-Coms of the Army.

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia

S2 - Steam Games

S3 - Wookiepedia

S4 - World Rolls List (On Cooldown 1/2)

-----

Information/Maps:

1 - Varys The Spider’s War Map

Imgur - File Garden - Catbox

Key:

Red - Baratheon Loyalist Coalition (POV)

Blue - Stannis’s Rebels + R'hllor Support + Privateers + Euron

Purple - Slaves of the Grandfather (“Golden Company” + ”Dorne”)

Yellow - Independent Veil (Arryn Loyalists + Mountain Clan Rebels)

Pink - Arianne Martell’s Counter-Rebellion

2 - Full Planetos Map

Note: Not accurate to Westeros or Western Essos/the Free Cities.

3 - HACK - Lore

Chapters 76 and 77 were partly an attempt to get everyone caught up on the amount of setting information that’d accumulated outside Wulfric’s immediate POV.

My assumption was that I could do one enormous catch-up, then keep future Information Sections relatively short.

What actually happened was that clarifying all of that mostly demonstrated how much more there still is to clarify.

This is the kind of setting that benefits from continuous elaboration, and I really don’t want that to mean stapling several thousand words of supplementary worldbuilding onto the end of every chapter.

So I’m taking the middle option.

HACK - Lore is basically where I’m collecting the Information Posts going forward.

I’ll link new ones as they’re made, including the three new ones below, and if you already read something when it originally went up as an Information Post then you’re fine.

Nothing’s being moved into some separate category you’re expected to track independently.

What is changing is how I’m treating the Story Section itself.

One of the advantages of this being a Quest rather than a normal fanfic is that I can genuinely ask whether Wulfric has any reasonable way to know something, and if the answer’s no, then he just doesn’t know it.

I don’t need to invent a conversation, letter, spy report, or incredibly convenient passerby just so I can get information in front of the protagonist that participants actually need.

That’s simplified the writing process quite a bit and lets me prioritize Wulfric’s actual perspective much more aggressively.

The trade-off is that some information participants genuinely should know is going to exist outside the Story Section.

Going forward, I’m going to assume that Information Posts are part of what you know about the Quest.

If you mostly engage when new chapters come out, the links I include with them are meant to be useful and relevant information, not optional behind-the-scenes trivia.

You can ignore them, but things are going to get increasingly confusing if you do.

You can already see some of that here with Clan Rito, Lord Teba, and the more developed Northern and Southern conceptions of magic, and that effect’s only going to become more noticeable as the setting keeps developing.

On the other hand, I really don’t want this to turn into me assigning you several thousand words of homework and expecting it done before next class.

So, I’m putting a pretty huge amount of effort into making these interesting on their own.

I’ve already started treating Information Posts as self-contained pieces rather than letting them become giant rambling responses to comments.

Sometimes that’ll mean a proper essay.

Sometimes I’ll use an image because it explains something better than another wall of text.

Sometimes I’ll experiment with in-setting documents, like the one attached to this chapter’s personal roll.

The information matters, but the goal’s still for reading it to be part of enjoying the Quest rather than the price of admission.

4 - Lore 5: Clan Rito and Lord Teba

Clan Rito has been developing quietly in the background for a long time, but until fairly recently it would’ve been very easy to reduce them to “Tulin’s people” and Lord Teba to “Tulin’s dad.”

They’re considerably more important than that.

Clan Rito is as fundamental a part of Long Lake as the Heart of the Gods or Clan Hund, with its own history, institutions, relationships, and reasons for becoming part of the Long Lake identity rather than simply being another generic Northern group.

That history also reaches beyond Long Lake, particularly into the Mountain Clans and several parts of the North we haven’t had much reason to interact with directly.

Following those connections also gives us a much better look at how the North actually works.

Clan Rito and the Mountain Clans have spent thousands of years exerting the sort of quiet institutional pressure that rarely produces a single famous battle but can still help explain why the Starks ultimately beat the Boltons, why Stark rule developed the way it did, and why choices made centuries ago still matter to the Lords of Long Lake today.

And then there’s Lord Teba himself.

He’s our friend and minion’s father, certainly, but he’s also a lord with his own history, strengths, priorities, and an unusually important place inside the institutions Wulfric inherited.

This is where Clan Rito stops being background flavor and starts becoming one of the pieces needed to understand both Long Lake and the North around it.

5 - Lore 14: Myrcella and Tom Baratheon

We’ve spent a great deal of effort establishing that Joffrey doesn’t need different genetics to be recognizably Robert Baratheon’s son or to become an interesting person in his own right.

That does quietly leave two other blonde-haired children of Robert sitting just outside the camera.

The easy answer would be to leave Tom and Myrcella as whatever generic versions of them we already have in our heads, or give them slightly nicer personalities and call that development.

This is an attempt to actually ask who these two people have been becoming while most of our attention was somewhere else.

And because neither of them has been developing in isolation, looking at Tom and Myrcella also gives us a useful glimpse at what some of the characters around them have been doing in the meantime.

Myrcella and Arya have become an increasingly effective team in King’s Landing, while Tom has spent his time as Ned Stark’s page alongside an increasingly capable Sansa.

So this is mostly about finally giving two underused characters the attention they deserve, while also letting us catch a little more of the world that’s been continuing to move around them.

6 - Lore 15: What Northerners and Southerners Mean by Magic

Magic is one of those quietly dangerous pieces of worldbuilding that feels like it barely needs explaining because everyone basically understands what magic is.

Except, once you start actually thinking about it, we really don’t…

We know what it’s like to read about magic in a fantasy story.

We don’t know what it’s like to live in a world where reality itself can’t be assumed to be completely understandable, where people can spend a thousand years studying something only for the deepest answer to genuinely be magical hand-wavy bullshit.

That has some fairly enormous consequences for how people understand reality, what they consider worth investigating, and how entire cultures develop around things they can observe without necessarily being able to explain.

This is an attempt to work backward from that problem and establish how we got where we are now.

Along the way, it gets into why Northerners and Southerners conceptualize magic so differently, what those differences tell us about how they conceptualize reality more generally, and how institutions like the Old Gods and the Faith of the Seven developed some of their most important qualities.

And those differences are going to matter considerably beyond just explaining magic.

7 - What about Arceus?

AhegaoRuiner over on AO3 reminded me of something that’s been conspicuously absent from the recent Information Sections: what exactly is Arceus doing?

We’ve gotten increasingly solid pictures of the other gods and how they interact with the setting, while Arceus basically arrived, claimed the Summer Islands, and then wandered offscreen.

The short answer is that Arceus has taken the power restrictions in almost the exact opposite direction from everyone else.

Most of the gods are involved in plot-relevant problems to varying degrees, which means their ability to simply solve things has to be heavily restricted.

Good doG is the clearest example.

She’s completely aware of what’s happening to her people beyond the Wall, but she’s also aware that RNGesus isn’t allowing the Long Night problem to properly progress until one year after we return to Long Lake.

Arceus is mostly avoiding that problem by staying very far away from our plot.

That doesn’t mean we have unrestricted, maximum-power, perfectly lore-accurate Arceus sitting on Planetos.

There’s still an upper limit somewhere.

But so long as he’s staying on the Summer Islands and doing things we have essentially no way to observe, he has dramatically more room to flex than gods whose actions keep intersecting with Wulfric and the current story.

The practical result is that the Summer Islands are quietly turning into a small Pokémon world.

Not completely.

They’re still the Summer Islands, they’re still on Planetos, and their existing culture hasn’t simply been deleted.

But they’ve got the full range of Pokémon by this point, trainers are becoming a thing, and Arceus has probably started introducing at least some Pokémon-related technology as the whole system develops.

It also happens to fit the Summer Islands remarkably well.

They were already culturally predisposed toward resolving disputes through things other than increasingly elaborate ways of stabbing each other, so introducing a whole social structure built around people training magical creatures to fight under controlled rules has landed in unusually fertile ground.

So the answer to “What’s Arceus been doing?” is basically: a great deal, almost none of which currently has anything to do with us.

That “currently” may matter eventually.

Several people have suggested that after the Long Night we should finally take advantage of the fact that this is a very large planet and go on a proper Great Journey.

If that happens, two of the obvious first destinations are the increasingly Pokémon-shaped Summer Islands or reconnecting with the lost colony Brandon the Shipwright established beyond the Sunset Sea.

So Arceus hasn’t disappeared.

He’s just been offscreen playing The Sims: Summer Islands Edition while the rest of us deal with Westeros.

8 -Mixing Magic and Rolls

Thanks to the more developed understanding of how magic works in the setting, I’m officially allowing something people have wanted for a while: mixing powers and magic systems together.

I’m not going to balance every possible combination individually, because that’s exactly how you miss one stupid interaction and accidentally turn the Quest into godhood by spreadsheet.

Instead, the balance is that this is extremely difficult.

I explain the Melisandre side of this in more detail in Chapter 15 of HACK - Lore, but she’s probably our clearest individual example.

She’s at the extreme end of magical understanding, with centuries of experience across multiple kinds of magic, and the shadow baby is still pretty much the one clear example we get of her creating something genuinely cross-disciplinary.

As incredibly useful as that working is, even an extreme expert clearly isn’t inventing new cross-disciplinary magic everyday.

Valyrian steel gives us the larger-scale version.

The Valyrians clearly figured out some kind of cross-disciplinary magical process, presumably involving their absurdly advanced magical metallurgy, and then used Valyrian steel everywhere.

Once they’d figured out how to make it, they could basically treat that result as its own established system instead of rediscovering the underlying synthesis every time somebody wanted a fancy chair.

But even the Valyrians are good evidence for how hard this is.

From what we actually know, they seem to have developed one absurdly successful magical material and gotten very good at using it.

If they’d completely mastered whatever broader field produced Valyrian steel, you’d expect at least a few substantially different results to survive from an empire that had thousands of years to work on it.

There could’ve been more advanced applications somewhere in Valyria, and knowing me I’ll probably invent some eventually, but from what we’ve actually got, even they seem to have been scratching the surface of whatever broader system they’d stumbled into.

That’s roughly the difficulty level I’m aiming for.

For us, the route into this is a new skill called Theory of Magic.

Think of it less like learning a crafting recipe and more like needing a doctorate in two completely separate subjects before you’re even qualified to start inventing the field created by combining them.

Then you discover your new field also requires a doctorate’s worth of work, except the available literature is approximately nothing because congratulations, you’re the literature now.

So Green plus healing does not equal instant immortality in a bottle.

You’d need to become extremely capable with healing, extremely capable with the Green, develop enough Theory of Magic to understand how those systems can even interact, and then start doing the actual work of inventing whatever synthesis you’re trying to create.

There’s one important caveat.

I’m grouping related powers into broader areas, and combining things from the same area will be easier than trying to bridge completely different magical traditions.

The clearest example is the Force/Potentium.

Developing a new Force Power by combining or extending things Wulfric already knows is going to be considerably easier than trying to bolt the Force onto the Green and seeing what sticks.

I’m already treating Wulfric as having made a smidge of progress in that direction, specifically through trying to recreate some of the senses he’s used to having while inside Janus or Jinx.

So if people want relatively approachable synthesis ideas, combining two Force/Potentium Powers is probably the most straightforward and versatile place to start, with Adamancy as the runner up.

But the larger door’s open too.

We can mix genuinely different magical systems and powers.

It’s just also, very deliberately, about the hardest thing we can attempt in terms of skills in this Quest.

-----

Write-In/Questions:

1 - Any Questions about the New Skills system, especially the Magic Section?

2 - Heal Willas: Yes or No?

I could see Joff going either way on this, so I’m leaving it up to you lot.

But keep in mind neither option is free:

“No” means he and his army are limited for a while.

“Yes” means we and Joff get some points with the Reachmen and lose points from… basically everyone else.

For Copy/Paste:

Heal Willas: Yes

Heal Willas: No