ooOoo
One little quirk of mine that is probably worth mentioning at this juncture: I never remember my dreams. I remember having had dreams. I just never remember what was in them. So I could have been spending all night since I got to Westeros seeing prophecies of the future, or browsing wikipedia, or whatever. I wouldn't know.
All of which is to say that I woke up on our first morning in the Sorrows feeling anxious and a little jumpy, but that was it. Frankly, those emotions could easily be explained by the creepy unnatural fog that we were going to be marching through for the next few weeks. I didn't have any inkling that anything was wrong until I went to fetch breakfast.
Ten pairs of bloodshot eyes turned to look at me as I approached the officers' table. My eyebrow rose almost involuntarily as I took a seat.
"I hope you didn't all spend the night tying one on."
They turned to look at each other. Through a series of glares, shrugs, and shaken heads, Rodrik was appointed their spokesman.
"You didn't hear, captain?"
"Hear what?"
"Most of the men had nightmares last night."
"Not just the men," one of the officers added.
"What sort of nightmares?"
"I saw the Shrouded Lord. He.." Rodrik trailed off, then shook his head. "I'd rather not say."
There was a general murmur of agreement around the table. I looked them over with concern. I really did sympathize, but there wasn't much I could do.
"This place is eerie enough to give anybody nightmares. If we keep moving, we'll be through it soon enough. The dreams will go away eventually."
The dreams were back again that night. By now some of the men were starting to show noticeable bags under their eyes. One night of bad dreams might have been a coincidence. Two in a row had me suspicious. I asked Jaenor if he knew anything about what was going on.
He shrugged. "The Sorrows have their ways of testing a man. Some pass. Some don't."
Left unspoken was the no doubt gruesome fate suffered by those who failed. While it was helpful to know that whatever was going on wasn't anything new, Jaenor was hardly offering me a solution to the problem. I was no pirate captain, ready to throw my crew overboard when they stopped carrying their weight.
I would have liked to devise a scientific explanation for what was going on, and use that to derive a solution. Hells, I would have settled for a superstitious explanation if it pointed us towards a cure. Unfortunately, I had a sneaking suspicion that a centuries-long fogbank covering hundreds of square miles that caused nightmares might just be beyond modern science. I'd recruited a septon to travel with us to provide blessings before battles and last rites as necessary. He was spending most of the day reciting prayers but seemed as helpless as the rest of us in stopping the nightmares.
The only resource left to draw on was a stubborn refusal to quit. That carried us through another day of marching, though the men were visibly weary and between the lack of sleep and the rough terrain we didn't cover nearly the distance I would have hoped.
The third morning I woke to find four men tied together back to back in the center of camp wearing nothing but their night clothes. They had tried to run off during the night. The sergeant tearing strips off of them was hitting the same notes that I would have: if you're so terrified of what's lurking in the mists, why run out there by yourself? I could hear the same lecture being delivered throughout the camp.
Two other men had successfully escaped our perimeter fortifications and vanished into the mists. Given the circumstances, I wasn't particularly inclined to send out search parties. That left the question of what to do with the men who had been captured.
Ordinarily the penalty for desertion would be death. The circumstances, however, were anything but ordinary. I ordered that the runners would be tied to each other and to a man in front and back, forced to march without their spears until we were out of the damned fog. I hoped that once we left the Sorrows behind the men would recover their right minds.
Another eleven men tried to run the next night. Six were caught.
The next day's march saw the first attempts to run off during the day. Subduing the deserters required a miserable muddy brawl. We barely covered half the ground that we had managed the day before. Even worse, the Tattered Prince reported that several of his outriding scouts had simply vanished into the mists. They could have suffered from the same madness as our men-the Windblown had had a similar number of night time runners-or they could have fallen victim to more conventional enemy action. I wasn't sure which scenario would be worse.
About the only bit of good news was that the pirates showed up without fail every evening after we'd made camp. Even if Jaenor Caengaris continued to be remarkably unhelpful.
"The Shrouded Lord's call is in their bones. Might as well just let them go."
I reminded myself that I was paying him for food. The advice was free, and worth every penny. He might have experience dealing with the Sorrows, but he didn't know the first thing about running an army. Displaying visible indifference to the lives of your men was one of the quicker ways I could think of to absolutely destroy morale.
The real problem wasn't that I couldn't get a good pep talk out of Jaenor. The problem was that I couldn't come up with a pep talk myself. I felt weirdly dislocated from the suffering the men were going through. I was probably having terrible dreams every night, but if I didn't remember them then I might as well never have had them in the first place. While that was a good thing from the point of view of my own mental health, it made it hard to connect with the men. I was a man tucking into a feast while trying to inspiring a starving horde to carry on.
I did put the word out to ask the men to volunteer if they felt they were near the breaking point. If we had to add people to the tied up marching chain it might damage morale, but it would be a hell of a lot better than having to subdue them by force.
The next day, our fifth of marching through the Sorrows, we had twelve people volunteer to be restrained and another three try to run off on their own. We managed to pick up the pace a bit, though we were still well off where I wanted to be. Not that we were on any particular schedule, but the faster we moved the faster we would be out of the fog.
We only had one person try to run that night. Six more volunteered to be tied up. I started to hope that we were over the hump. That things were looking up. Of course, that was the day we were attacked.
In the mists of the Sorrows it was impossible to see more than ten strides or so before everything faded to white. One moment everything was quiet. The same mucky, nasty slog that we'd been pushing through for the last week. The next instant the stone men were on us. They moved in an eerie silence and attacked without any regard for their own lives. The men on the front lines barely had time to get their pikes level before they were overrun.
More shouts drew my attention to our right flank. Another group of stone men had crashed into us from the side. The first square that they had hit had been completely unprepared, allowing several men to be tackled by the horde of zombies before their squad mates could turn and push the attackers off. Looking up and down the line where each square of a hundred men was marching independently, I could see them react to the threat by going into a defensive pincushion.
A freak gust of wind-or twitch of eldritch power, I couldn't really say-cleared much of the fog in the vicinity of the battlefield. Up ahead I could see a rise. A good fifty stone men were charging at us, but my attention was fixed on the figure at the top. He was covered in a tattered grey robe, and even from this distance I could feel the malevolence. It had an almost tangible presence as he seemed to hold me personally responsible for everything wrong with the world.
Our prisoners, the men who had needed to be tied up, they went berserk. Hissing, spitting, biting, they tried to attack their fellow legionnaires. Fortunately they were being held in the center of the square, away from the front lines. Still, it looked like ugly business getting them under control.
The long pikes proved their worth once more. If we'd been fighting off the stone men with one handed spears or, worse, swords, things could have gone differently. The stone men could suffer grievous injuries and continue fighting. They only stopped when they were physically unable to keep attacking. If they'd been able to come to grips with us they would have been able to do some major damage. Even if their bare hands wouldn't make for particularly effective weapons, their blood was a biological terror cocktail all its own.
Even for a magical plague zombie, though, crawling up twenty feet of spear planted through your guts is a tall order.
The stone men didn't show any sense of tactics or strategy. They simply charged forward, manifesting the single minded hatred of the Shrouded Lord. With the mist cleared, our crossbowmen could start whittling away at them from a distance. The stone men who survived that barrage impaled themselves on our pikes, and I felt a swell of pride. My men might be scared, but they were reacting to that fear the way a soldier should. By killing the scary things.
The clearing fog revealed that there had probably been not much more than a hundred stone men to begin with. They were unarmored and attacking with a single minded intensity. While intimidating in appearance, the main thing they were accomplishing was to die at a prodigious rate. My heartbeat started to settle as it became clear that the Shrouded Lord was going to run out of stone men before my men were going to break.
The Windblown cavalry charged up the nearly empty hill, easily evading the remaining few stone men in their path. Before they could reach the top the mist fell like a curtain, preventing the rest of us from seeing their final confrontation with the Shrouded Lord. I lost all sense of time. It could have been seconds later, it could have been minutes, but eventually the cavalry came riding back out of the mist.
Despite their best efforts, the Shrouded Lord seemed to have vanished into the fog.
We pulled back from the site of the battle before making camp. We left behind any weapons that had touched the stone men. The men who had been mauled were given mercy before we left them. Every man who had even been close to the stone men got a vinegar sponge bath, and we used vinegar to clean off any armor that looked like it had even a trace of stone man blood on it.
Oddly enough, even though we'd just seen upwards of twenty men die and had some unknown number of people at risk of greyscale, the mood in camp was cheerful. Well, cheerful in comparison to the mood the night before. I'd take a tangible enemy to fight and kill any day over nightmares and phantasms, and it seemed my men felt the same way. I decided it was time for a speech.
"Snarks. Grumkins. Night terrors," I said, then paused to look around. I at least had the attention of the men I could see through the fog. "Tonight, we are the most terrifying thing going. Little children look under their beds for monsters; the Shrouded Lord is looking under his to see if he's going to wake up with a spear up his arse!"
That brought a round of laughter. I let them settle down before I continued.
"The Sunset Legion doesn't spend the night huddled up trying to hide from danger. We are the danger! May the Mother Above show mercy to the next man who fucks with us, because I won't."
It wasn't a bed time story I'd ever tell to my kids, but the men seemed to like it.
ooOoo