The Ghosts of the Blackwater

Posted on Tue Feb 23rd, 2021 @ 7:13pm by Ser Renn Baratheon
Edited on on Tue Feb 23rd, 2021 @ 7:15pm

Mission: The Great Council
Location: Blackwater Bay

It's features were alien in the break of dawn, made early by a bloody sky. Its angles were alien- utterly foreign. Its stone was black and its landscape even more bleak than the storm-battered rocks of Storm's End. Renn looked on with astute eyes, studying the rampant strange triangular angles. Yet its surroundings were, on the whole, as mundane as anyplace. The squawks of gulls and other birds. A pelican had swooped alongside the ship before the sun had crested and Renn had watched it. He wondered if Humans would fly again.

Renn Baratheon turned his eyes back to the battlements, swaying slenderness idly while his elbows planted firmly on the deck railing of the Winds of Commerce. Green eyes narrowed. There was strategic value in the triangular battlements, particularly with the arrow slits. An archer could stand and fire, moving quickly from slot to slot and have an impressive angle of fire. Meanwhile, the way the light cast by the slope and thickness of its walls would make it next to impossible for an attacker to retaliate. That made it an expensive enterprise to take Dragonstone. Renn looked to the rugged landscape. Taking the beachhead would be hard enough, and in several locations, there was not enough beach to take. Those arrow slits could easily be given fire and directed at ships.

He lifted up on a hand and winced. He turned his hand and pulled from his palm a splinter. Scowling he discarded it with relish into the sea. In silence a deckhand passed behind him, mopping the deck of water and salt. Renn watched him pass in that same solitude then turned attention back to Dragonstone. "A siege then," he quietly mused. The standard of the Velaryon House fluttered in the breeze and that broke him of his mental exercise. Baratheon and Velaryon had no reason to war with one another, beyond a rivalry to be the better sailors entertain Essos' merchants and Slaver's Bay's decadent oligarchs.

"It's haunted you know..." A voice came from the pre-dawn behind him. Renn rose up on his hands a glanced back over his shoulder. "Might be the most haunted place in all the Six- even Seven- Kingdoms," the face was grizzled, with a patchwork of red and brown, and tinged at the chin with gray. His eyes were small and round in his furry, apple-shaped face and his cheeks were stung pink by the cold air. Renn recognized him as the valet who had doted on him- needlessly he thought- over the past few days.

"Master Yonas," Renn noted.

"Ser Renn," he did an abbreviated bow and approached. "See this beach..." he gestured up mossy, moldy slate pebbles and gray rocks. His breath had Peket on it, the cheaper variety from the northern Stormlands' coast Renn wagered.

"Yes," Renn said with a solemn nod.

"The first Summer eclipse after the dark days of Blackwater, when the sun was but a ring of fire, and it was night all around," Yonas intrigued, "They came by the hundreds. Men, they say, glowing the eerie green of Dragon's fire. Half burned and their fleshes eaten by fish from the deepest fathoms of the bay. They walked up the beach and they waited. Bearing the sigils of Florent and Fossoway and Musgood. All good men and true, damned to this world for forsaking the Seven," he spit overboard, "For following that heathen Red Witch."

Renn looked on, "I don't believe in ghost stories, Master Yonas," he said simply.

"They say you can still hear a little girl playin' up along the stairs of that tower there," he gestured, "An innocent girl sacrificed for that same Heathen God. Blood that runs in your veins, boy."

Renn blinked again and settled elbows against the railing. "And?"

Yonas shifted, "Seems like every time a King goes and offs himself... either old age or madness, or diseases you get consorting with low women... the whole Kingdom holds its breath. Waits to see if it all comes burning down again. Madness," his voice rose, "And heresy, just for a bit of a promise of power. And its the soldiers that burn for it." Yonas said, "Here we are again. This'll be the first time a King dies in your tender life but it won't be the last. Bran the Good lasted a good long time, and Waynn, bless him, well at least we'll think better of him than Aegon the Fat." He smacked his lips dryly, "For a time anyway. On dusty pages in that Old Town tower."

Aegon IV, the Unworthy, Renn remembered.

"But he was not a memorable man or great," Yonas finished. He tilted some toward the youth, "Your Mother summons you. Asks you to get your brother up. She wants breakfast before you land."

Renn straightened and blinked, "Thank you for the message. Master Yonas," he nodded to the man and turned. His dark clothing soon nearly blended him with the half-shroud of dawn waking. He descended the short, steep stairs down to the hold and proceeded back to the quarters of his family.