You quickly make your way through the ruined keep, jumping over a collapsed wall and forcing your way through the half rotten remains of an obviously bashed in gate. As you clear the castle you find yourself on a step hill, nearly a small mountain, with a great forest stretching to the horizon to your right and the wide sea to your left.
A small village, home to no more than three hundred souls, is nestled on the thin strip between forest and sea and the scream clearly originated from there. You frown, not spotting the threat immediately before your eyes are drawn to the sea. A thin mist covers most of the water but does little to hide the two quickly advancing ships that had been hidden within.
Looking at the reaction of the villages for a moment longer you see most of the woman and children quickly heading for the woods while the able bodied men grabbed everything from hammers to makeshift spears, obviously preparing to defend their meager livelihoods even though they had little hope of winning. At full sprint you might make it just in time to the village after the battle had kicked off, you would not manage it before and might even be too late. You could also remain where you are...you did after all not know why the ships were attacking...you might just be drawn into a situation you did nothing about and could not discern what your actions might reap. A last option would be to head for the woman and children, they would be able to give you information….but it would likely doom the male villagers.
Howls of the Lost
You do not waste time as you rush down the village, seeing the distance between the ships and the cost shrinking fast than you would reach the settlement yourself. Gritting your teeth you speed up a little more, barreling down the step decline like a runaway horse with half a dozen wolves on its tail.
Even as you race downwards your mind is in turmoil, the last words of your goddess ingrained deeply into your conscious. You were far from home with no chance of returning to your loved ones...Verena had not been lying, this you had felt more clearly than ever before. Not that the goddess of justice would have done anything else but speak the truth.
Never would you see Helena again, hold her in your arms or watch your children play in your hall. Never would you drink a glass of wine with your wife or spar with your brothers...all this was lost to you.
A how of barely contained grief threatens to escape from your throat as you finally break through the last bush separating your from the village, the sounds of battle already greeting you as you continue your mad rush, never once slowing down. You see nearly sixty raiders just entering the outskirts of the village, an equal number of peasants awaiting them behind a makeshift barricade. Ten more had taken to the surrounding rooftops, hunting bows punching down five of the attackers before the rest hit the barricade like and avalanche howling for blood. Even with the barricade you could see that the brave men, and even a few woman, did not know what they were doing, hacking at everything they could reach without any cohesion. It was everybody for himself, making your inner commander twitch in imaginary pain.
Not slowing down you notice your position, directly to the side of the barricade and that at least a third of the raiders were already making to flank the barricade that had halted their advance for the moment.
First Impression
The inertia of the step decline still enhancing your steps you do not slow down and charge right at the dozen men trying to flank the villagers on your side, while an equal number did so on the other side. A few meters from the raiders you roar out a challenge, the men whirling around to you at the same moment you hit their number like a charging ox.
Your coiled fist smashes into the face of the first sailor to turn to you, driving its nose straight into its brain in an explosion of blood and brain matter as you steel plated hand meets soft cartilage. Not slowing down you break the neck of the next man in line as you simply extend your left arm and hit him in the neck with the remaining kinetic energy of your charge. The loud crack is clearly audible as the raider is thrown off his feed and smashed straight through the wooden wall of a nearby house.
Not slowing down you twirl your dagger and cut the throat of a third man before burying it in the chest of a forth. Both go down with a bloody gurgle, the blade of your dagger snapping off at the hilt as you try to withdraw it from the still twitching man, his metal hauberk having caught the brittle steel.
Cursing you glance around, searching for a weapon even as the remaining men recovered from their shock and advanced on you with murder in their eyes. Most of them were armed with axes and short swords but a few had swords and shields...as had one of the men you had felled. Jumping back you can grab a shield and a sword just in time to block two axes that bury themselves into the wooden shield before being ripped out again by the raiders. One of the remaining men goes down as an arrow buries itself into his neck, a hunter obviously having noticed the flanking maneuver. The remaining raiders curse in a language you do not know as they glance back and forth between you, their brethren still assaulting the barricade and the rooftops. You just hoped that you had been recognized as friend and weren´t about to get shot as well.
Shaking yourself out of your thoughts as you have to parry yet another strike you twirl the sword again, smiling grimly beneath your helmet. You killed four with just your hands and what amounted to a rusted knife...now it was time to show these pirates what you could really do.
Skirmish
Sword twirling in your hand you jump forward, reflexes born of thousands of hours of training and battle emerging again as steel smashes upon steel. Eight men still remain and attack, snarling and cursing in their native language as they recover from their surprise. You duck under a hatchet seeking to bury itself into the eye slits of your helmet and gut the man wielding it like a fish.
As he goes down with a pained groan you catch another axe on your shield while hacking off the leg of another pirate trying to attack you. He topples with a shriek which you quickly silence with a deft stomp to the neck, breaking it with a loud crack.
Then you stagger forward, missing your next swing aimed to take off the head of a third man as you are hit in the back by the thrust of a sword wielded by a sailor obviously more competent than his brethren. You armour turns the blow aside, sparks flying as steel meets steel with a metallic shriek.
Turning around you absently smash in the face of another attacker with the hardened edge of your shield, the man toppling over backwards in a shower of teeth and blood. You finish your turn just in time to catch the next blow upon your shield, the vicious attack cracking the hardened wood but not destroying it as you feel your arm shake at the force behind it.
1,4,4,6
3
Grunting in surprise you are nonetheless on the attack again a moment later, your blade flashing trice in half as many seconds and three men crumble to the ground with throats slashed and bodies opened up in a very much unhealthy ways.
The remaining two men turn to run, panic gripping their minds as fear of their lives washes away the battlelust that had been driving them forward until now. You thrust your sword through the back of the slower man and watch the last survivor getting punched down by an well aimed arrow a moment later. Looking up you see the same archer that had supported you once before.
The man nods to you before turning around and shooting down another arrow into the main fight. You do not have currently eyes on the battle but through the sounds it seems to you that the men that had taken to flank the other side had arrived behind the barricade by now, likely causing the fortification itself to waver as men turned to face the new threat.
They would not last long that way.
Skirmish 2
You hesitate for a single moment, looking around sadly. In your old world you had been surrounded by death more than once and it seems that your debut in this land would be as you left your old once. In blood….and fire, you mentally add as the smell of burning wood reaches your nose.
Shaking yourself out of it you quickly move to the left and quickly make your way to the barricade. Turning around a house, more of a hut really, you find yourself quickly closing in on the burning wagons making out most of the improvised fortification. It had been broken in the time you had taken to kill the flanking pirates, the villagers desperately fighting to contain the breach at the same time as they fought off the other flanking group.
You a girl no older than fourteen being gutted after she drove a kitchen knife through the defending arm of a pirate, the man roaring in pain and striking her down with his axe in response. As the girl goes down you see Helena in her actions for a moment, your wife always being one to fight...not one to flee. For an instant you see her falling instead of the nameless girl and a fury like no other kindles to life within you, almost choking you as a roar of rage escapes your lips.
Half a dozen men turn around only to receive the brunt of your grief stricken wrath. A head is carved in with your shield, the hardened wood splintering some more as the skull is shattered like an egg. With your other arm you drive your sword through the neck of another raider, almost decapitating him as you rip out the weapon sideways and shower his brethren in blood and gore.
The next two to come at you die at the same time, your shield finally exploding into splinters as you use it to block and axe aimed at taking off your head before using the stuck weapons to bludgeon their owners to death with brutal efficiency.
All the while you counter blows seeking to finally put you down, your armour earning its fair amount of scratches as it protects the vulnerable flesh below from numerous blows.
Still the mental image of not Helena before your eyes you continue causing bloody carnage in the rear ranks of the attackers, more and more of the pirates turning around to face you as you prove yourself to be more dangerous with every second. Having lost your shield you are faced to defend yourself with your sword alone...but that is nothing new to you and you are more than up to the task.
Something that the pirates soon learn as well as you murder your way through their number with great skill supported by a liberal amount of plated fist or foot to weak points of the human body. Blood and viscera are spilled in unholy amounts as you cut down the next four attackers, their bodies quickly bleeding out at your feet as you continue to advance with the single minded intention to see them all dead.
Again your armour manages to safe you from most of the blows raining down on you before one raider gets lucky and stabs through a weak point in your armour, cutting tendons and causing your left arm to hang at your side uselessly. (take a wound)
Grunting in pain you stagger for a moment, missing your next attack before forcing yourself to continue with a pained grimace. Not having access to regeneration sucked more than you remembered...maybe attacking the main force hadn´t been that a great idea after all.
Even so you had already killed eight of the attackers, not counting the ones put down during the flanking attack, and another three follow as they try to take advantage of your injury. They quickly learn that in injury did not mean that they could easily kill you for the trouble you had caused.
A sudden hesitation goes through the attackers as a shriek echoes over the village only to cut off into a bloody gurgle. Using the pause in the fighting you turn to look behind the barricade, where the force flanking the other side had been killed to the last man, a grizzled villager pulling a sword out of a new corpse wearing somewhat higher quality gear. He looks up and your eyes met for a short moment, the man nodding to you equaly grateful, curious, repectful and wary.
One, then two, and finally all remaining attackers turn around and run for their boats while the remaining archers rain down arrows at the retreating enemies. Looking around you see blood and bodies everywhere in the quickly fading light of the approaching night and the burning houses surrounding you. For every attacker you counted two or more dead villagers, fury rekindling as you turn to the fleeing men.
You continue to look after the retreating men until the leave your sight, using the time to quickly caste two spells upon yourself. Both do not look impressive and likely wouldn´t even be noticed if one didn´t know what to look for...still, their effects were nothing to look down upon.
A sigh of relief escapes your lips as you feel your arm healing, the bleeding stopping as flesh knit itself together with a slight glittering of light looking like a weak reflection of the quickly fading sun. The second spell manifests itself with a slight whispering in the wind, your mind focusing itself in a way you had not experienced before.
Sighing another time you finally turn around and walk to the people going over the battlefield. The villagers move to the side warily at your approach and raise their weapons as you close in on the small area where their wounded had been gathered to be healed...or to ease their passing.
You slowly raise your hands, empty of the swords you picked up on your way, and take off your helm. Seeing your face eased some of the tension, your next words taking care of the remaining mistrust.
"I am here to help and have some training as a healer. Am I allowed to save your comrades?"
"Your help was...and is...very much welcome, stranger", the man that killed the priates leader answers as he approaches, waving the other people down. "What do you need?"
Your mind flashes back to the long time spend in the company of your friend Renard and what you learned from him through direct tutelage, being under his care or just being in the vicinity. "Hot water, any clean linen you can spare, needle and thread, fire and...whatever you have to numb pain."
He nods and points at some men, barely more than boys, who sprint off at once, "Yes Milord, it will be done."
You are already at the side of the wounded as he answer reaches you and had already covertly saved one of the badly wounded villagers from death through a quick use of your healing spell as his next words reach you, making you pause even as the boys arrived with the first of the required materials.
"Milord, we are grateful for your help. But...forgive me for asking...who are you? Where do you hail from?"
The man nods carefully as he watches you work, treating men he had already thought lost with a proficiency uncommon to see in a small village such as this. "Lord Rutheen, I am Harre, the quick they call me nowadays. I have a few more questions if you allow?"
Waving him to go on he quickly does, only hesitating for a moment. "….how did you end up in Dragonsfall, Milord? The nearest town are Deepwood Motte and Thorren´s square, both many days ride away."
You pause for a moment and look up, the sky having turned dark with stars starting to sparkle in the gloom. You did not recognize the sky and feel another bang of loss, the urge to just lay down and cry becoming nearly overwhelming for a moment before you take a deep breath and gather yourself again.
"There was a battle, fire...i lost and the next thing I know is that I away here.", you carefully state, misleading without lying and even with that you do not feel comfortable.
"You wouldn´t be the first noble to shipwreck upon foreign shores", he acknowledges before your discussion drifts to other topics. You quickly learn that you had landed upon the lands of Westeros, the North to be precise, where Lord Rickard Stark rules fair and undisputed from the great fortress of Winterfell.
Before too long you have done what you can and lay down to sleep in one of the many houses now without owners, Harre having shown you in even though you had lost the ability to understand him. Slowly drifting off to sleep a single tear escapes your left eye, a memento to all what you had lost.
The next morning you are awake at the crack of dawn, the rest of the village only just starting to stir around you.
You stay for nearly four month before moving on. At first you have great difficulty to hide your spell granted proficiency with the local language and are often forced to go with smiling and nodding while more or less guessing what somebody wants from you.
Learning a language takes time, even with the advantages your abilities grant you. Once you had struggled your way past basic proficiency and into a moderate level of understanding you no longer had to use the spell of understanding every day. Connections between words became logical to you more and more as your knowledge grew and before long you started to dream in a language once foreign to you. Sadly you could not gain full literacy as nobody in the village actually knew how to read and write...you would have to try again in another place.
The village had suffered a great tragedy as you arrived and would have suffered a lot more without your help. "The North remembers", was one of the sentences you often heard if you asked if you could help with something and got a headshake. You had saved the village or at least made it vastly easier for the inhabitants to do so and would have a place to stay because of it for as long as you might live. Not one to sit by idly you pull your weight despite the villagers protests and used your prodigious strength born from long years of fighting and training to help rebuild the village. Wooden beams to heavy for two regular men you lift into place on your own, nails vanish into the wood with one hit instead of half a dozen and trees fall before your powerful swing with frightening ease. It did not take long for the villagers to give you a moniker, especially those you had taken to training in combat, turning you once again into "Hadrian the Black". You could only shake your head at the strange ways fate turned sometimes and continued your work.
Cleaning up the village took a while, as did burying the dead. The Ironborn raiders, as you learned they had been, were simply thrown into a big hole and buried just deep enough to keep wild animals from digging them up again. The villagers got a much better treatment. Equipment and weapons the Ironborn had been wearing had been stripped from the corpses beforehand, to be distributed among those that had lost family during the fighting or to help the village itself recover in other ways. Harre tells you that he intended to build a small dock for fishing boats and maybe the occasional trader to make port at from the money he might gain by selling a few weapons and armors. He also spoke about hiring a blacksmith and building a forger...or a windmill, both would see the village grow.
You do not claim anything of the loot beyond the two steel swords and their sheaths that you had taken during the fighting. What you had gained was more than enough for you next to the satisfaction of putting down what amounted to sea faring bandits.
As the weeks go by you learn a lot of the local culture and events. After the local calender you find yourself in the year 280 after a Dragonlord conquered all of Westeros, his descants still ruling nearly three centuries after his passing. In fact the crown prince, one Rhaeger Tageryan, had just married a Dornish Princess a few month before, hopefully securing the families fortunes for another generation.
The villages overlords turned out to be House Forrester, ruling from their grand fortress of Ironrath deep in the Wolfswood you could spot every time you turned around. House Forrester again was beholden to the Starks of Winterfell, who owned their allegiance to the Iron Throne in Kings Landing. The village itself was located on the eastern side of what was called Seadragon Point, close to the Rills, making it the middle of nowhere and the reason why the attack hadn´t been noticed earlier.
As it had been beaten off the ruling Lord didn´t need to send any help but would require a report on the happenings for which Harre would leave at the same time you intended to set out again. You were thinking of going along with him or heading for Torrhen´s Square or directly to Winterfell. But there was still time to decide.
Other things you learn are the existence of guest rights, something you greatly appreciate in its meaning and simplicy. The people of the north themselves also become dear to you with their dry humor, ways to look at things and honourable conduct. Harre becomes a friend in the time you spend in the village, greatly helping you to work through your grief at losing your old home and family. He is also a great help discouraging some of the village girls who had taken a shine to you, impressed by your martial skills and abilites in general.
It would still be many month before you would call yourself recovered but the first steps had been taken.
Harre followed the old gods, one religion amongst many as you learn. Others include the faith of the Seven, which turns out to be the main faith in Westeros, or the Faith of the Drowned god most Ironborn followed. Foreigners sometimes followed a burning god Harre didn´t know the name of, the Bravoosi on the other hand often praying to the many faced god. Verena was completely unknown in these lands you learn with dismay but this doesn´t stop you from remaining faithful to the goddess you owned your very life to. You pray to her every day even though you never feel her presence as you had before...but ever time you cast a spell you feel...something...reaffirming your faith even if it was just to you alone.
One morning you and Harre meet at the villages border, intending to set out.