Chapter Text
So many people lived their lives asleep. Let them dream, for if they woke to the nightmares that lurked in the unseen world...they would never sleep again. For the night is dark, and full of terrors.
The Vulture Queen shambled over the mud caked hills towards the wending rivers. They say that those who are awoken can smell a pot cooking a league away. Now she could smell smoke, sweat, and blood on the wind. She could also smell her sisters approaching.
The Green Fork was a wide river that flowed fast and deep. The two largest tributaries come together just north of the Twins, where the Green Fork runs deepest and swiftest. The river flows to the southeast, with the kingsroad roughly parallel for much of its course. Nearby sits once fertile valleys, green woodlands that have been scared by the fires of war, pillaged towns, and ruined holdfasts and castles.
Bleak as the midwinter frost. The Riverlands were a bloody battlefield that had never seen such cursed evil. Only oath breaking could conjure such a hell. The Vulture Queen could feel a cold wind blow through the holes in her cheeks and across the bone of her exposed skull. Winter was coming.
Ahead on the banks of the Green Fork, she could see her sister waiting for her.
Maggy was squat, with warty greenish skin, crusty yellow eyes, a toothless mouth, and jowls. She had a bent-back, and pendulous breasts. Her breath smelled strangely, strong and foul, and her body odor smelled of sickness.
Maggy's yellow eyes met her empty eye sockets. The Frog bowed her head to the Vulture.
"I called and you answered," Maggy spoke in a deep, croaking, accented voice. "I stood at the waters edge and sang for my sisters."
For a moment, she studied Maggy before nodding, "I heard your song from across the God's Eye. And I came."
"A slaughter has raged while I've waited. Our sister approaches. And our coven shall be mighty." Maggy reassures.
"The blackbird is spying on us. He wishes to stop us." The Vulture warns as she shuffles over to a bolder to sit.
"The blackbird? You speak of the Raven? He would have to cut out his third eye to stop us. He is weak, and grows weaker by the day."
From the south bank came another, no more than three feet tall. She has white hair, so long that it almost touches the ground. Her flesh is very pale, and she has red eyes. She walks with a gnarled black cane.
"I heard a song so sad, I have come to silence the sound." The ghost of High Heart whispered in her warbling old voice.
"I sang the song of the dead. The rivers demand vengeance for broken oaths. A river has called to each of us. I am called by the Green Fork." The green skinned crone stooped low to scoop up some of the mud.
"I am called by the Red Fork," the ghost said solemnly.
The Vulture Queen looked out at the river with no eyes and yet she saw much. "The Blue Fork calls my name and as the rivers join, so too must we as a coven. Curse those who might stand in our way." She lifted a boney finger covered in black rot with blue bruising. Small holes peppered the skin and went clean to the bone, "Something wicked this way comes."
There, floating down the stream was a small fleet of corpses. Nearly a dozen men and half as many women. But most hideous amongst them was the corpse of the headless direwolf with grey fur. Crossbow bolts protruded from everyone and everything that floated across the water's surface.
An outcropping of rocks rose up out of the river and the bodies one by one got caught between the stones.
"My dream has come to pass. I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart butchering a golden stag, aye. I dreamt of a man without a face, waiting on a bridge that swayed and swung. On his shoulder perched a drowned crow with seaweed hanging from his wings. I dreamt of a roaring river and a woman that was a fish. Dead she drifted, with red tears on her cheeks, but when her eyes did open, oh, I woke from terror. All this I dreamt, and more." The ghost whispered.
The Frog pulled her shoes from her ancient and gnarled feet before stepping into the river. It took the green sister an hour to pull each body to the water's edge. Her only surprise was when she pulled one body out of the water only to find his head replaced with the direwolf's.
It took them some time, but the eventually found the missing boy's head. It was bloated and grey. The eyes were wide and horrified.
"Handsome boy, such a shame." The ghost whispered. "Saw his sister, I did. Whisp of a thing. Dark and vengeful that one is. She will bring much woe. The wolf girl."
Maggy coughed, "They shall all bring woe now. Oaths have been broken. Guest rights broken. Kinslaying. And worse."
It took the coven all day and night to pull out the cross bolts and mend the wounds. It took even longer to sew the heads of the boy and the beast back onto their rightful bodies. The Frog raised a black tent she had brought on the back of a donkey.
It was a dark tent with a tall peaked roof. The inside of the tent smelled of cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, almond milk, onions, cloves, lemongrass, and saffron, as well as even stranger and more rare spices. The only light was provided by an iron brazier shaped like a basilisk's head, which produced a dim green light that made the walls of the tent look sick, and made red blood look black.
Maggy cried softly as she pulled the body of the wolf boy into the tent, "my great granddaughter was his wife and Queen. She would have bore him a son. But my granddaughter used what I taught her and poisoned the babe in the womb. She plotted with the enemy and left him to die. Now my bloodline is cursed as kinslayers."
"No man is more cursed by the gods than a kinslayer," the Vulture admitted.
The Frog wiped the tears away, "Instead of Kings, my blood fell into a chamberpot six months too soon. The gods are cruel masters."
The Vulture felt pity for the Frog, her family was damned now to a dark hell. Together the three sorceresses dug a pit and they began to bury the dead in the soft black soil and sticky red mud. Their bodies were covered in potions and herbs. Rituals and rites were performed. Old songs were sung that came before even the children and men. Songs of trees, and earth, and rivers and mountains. Songs of fire, water, and ash and snow.
A song of blood.
The torches and bonfires burned low and dim that night along the river. No matter how many logs were added, it was as if the light could only just pierce the shadows. This darkness spread to the marshlands of the neck on down to the blackwater rush. It spread from the edges of Maidenpool, all the way past the Mummer's Ford, down the Red Fork to Pinkmaiden.
There in the tent of the Frog, the three sisters of the coven began to sing and dance with shadows. Dark spirits moved that night. Black demons visited their tent to pay homage or to whisper godless words.
Beneath the soil, things moved and shifted. Flesh, bloated with water and rent by blades stirred to life.
The nethermost caverns...are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabac say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the daemon-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.
It was an old passage but the Vulture knew it well. She'd read it long ago in a book so cursed her flesh began to rot there after. Leper they called her. But lepers die and she had lived well beyond her natural years. Still, the words rang true. Only death could pay for life, there is power in a King's blood, no man is more cursed than a kinslayer, and that is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
What would rise from that sour soil would be the silence after the song.