Hello again. Here we go for chapter 2 and to save all of you having to read me drone on about changes and such (basically everything) I'll be doing that down the bottom.
Hope you enjoy!
**I own nothing**
Eadric
Eadric held back his deep-seated desire to curse Sanguine's name as he crashed to the floor, instead a grunt left him. "Just go through, it will be quite painless." Sanguine had promised him, a bold-faced lie as it turned out to be. Eadric sat himself up and checked to see if anything was broken. Nothing seemed to be, thank the divines, so there was some small measure of good news to be had.
How Eadric had let Sanguine talk him into this was close to a frustrating mystery for him. With no other options really open to him, Eadric blamed the wine he had consumed. Clearly, it had been talking for him those few moments ago which already felt like an age away. He was sure it had made the entire endeavour seem so reasonable. A new land to spread the gift of Hircine to, what could possibly go wrong? Of course, it was still within the realm of possibility that this was all an elaborate continuation of the prank Sanguine has sucked Eadric into in the first place. He certainly wouldn't put it past the hedonistic twat.
His brooding was cut short, however, as a voice from somewhere behind him barked. "You There!"
Though his vision had been blurred by whatever Sanguine had done to bring him here, Eadric turned to look at who had called to him. "Aye?" He could not make anything out clearly, though it did seem from both his surroundings and the feeling of the ground that he was in a wood of some kind.
"Explain why you are in these woods, so armed?" So he certainly was in a wood, that was good to know. Of the one who had demanded an answer, though, he could only make out the vaguest shape of a man in golds and reds atop a horse.
Eadric ummed and erred for a few moments as he rubbed his eyes, trying to clear his vision. "Can't say I know that myself in truth." The rubbing seemed to work and at last Eadric's vision began to clear somewhat.
"Something to hide then?" The man asked again. Though the precise details were still difficult to make out, it became very clear that he was decked in what could only be described as the most ostentatious armour Eadric had ever seen, easily putting the walking travesties the Elves wore to shame. It was either made from the same material the Dwemer used in their crafts, or was gilded in gold, for there didn't seem to be a single instance of simple steel showing, and whoever this was would have to be a fool to have armour made purely from the precious metal. Even the helm was flamboyant, being modelled in the shape of a sabre cat or some similar creature.
"No, nothing like that..." Eadric said as he tried to stand himself up. It was only as he righted himself that a headache struck him, throbbing pain pounding his skull. "Ugh... No. No. Just lost following a night to remember." He swayed slightly as he stood, trying to ignore the torment from within his own head.
The other man merely laughed, mockingly. "My, my. Is it a drunken giant that stands before me?" His laugh stopped as a blade slid from its scabbard at his side. "Still don't believe you though, giant. There are no inns or taverns for leagues around. Unless..." The man pushed his horse onwards, stopping only a few short feet away from Eadric. Soon, a blade tip was pointed at Eadric's chest. "These Northern lords know little law. Could be that you are part of a bandit brotherhood. I hope you are, you look like you may pose a challenge."
Eadric sighed. He was being called not only a drunkard but also a brigand. "I'm no bandit." He half growled through gritted teeth, though the effect was likely not overly intimidating as he still had a left hand massaging his aching temple.
"Really? That is good to hear. But I cannot take your words alone as proof of this, can I?"
"What else can I offer except my words?" Eadric asked, headache finally subsiding, now only to be replaced by growing anger. "Is it gold you want?"
Beyond them both, men snickered and a few laughed openly, which drew a scathing look from the golden one. "I have no need for gold." He said, looking back to Eadric. Slowly, he raised the tip of the sword to be just under Eadric's neck. "Do you even know who I am?"
"Can't say I do."
That brought a scowl from the other man. "You are an ignorant one. I am Ser Jaime Lannister of the Kingsguard. You will show the respect due to one of the seven." He said it with a haughty tone and at the same time sat straighter in his saddle.
Eadric had no idea what the man was going on about. Sir was a common term used for a superior, but a Kingsguard, whatever that may be, was alien to him.
When he gave no reply, the scowl deepened and his eyes, a vibrant green, darkened. "You cannot possibly be of the Kingdoms and not know what a Kingsguard is, or not understand the import of my name. Mayhaps you are of the Wildlings from beyond the Wall, or elsewise from the Isle of Ib. You have the look of some I have seen in the docks, save you are much taller. Either way..." The sword point that had been trained on Eadrics' neck came closer, now touching the flesh with its point. It took every ounce of self-control to stop Eadric from grabbing it, but he was hopelessly outnumbered, even if he could get to his axe or call upon Hircine's gift. "... Be you bandit or foreigner, you will surrender yourself to us. The King can pass judgement on you."
Eadric's eyes narrowed. "You wish to take me prisoner?" His voice was laced with a growl more like that of a wolf than a man.
The other did not seem to notice that, nor care at the growl itself. "I wish to lay you low where you stand." All humour was gone from his voice now. "But it is my duty as a knight of the Kingsguard to bring you before the King. A knight cannot dispense the king's justice." He said with some bitterness.
"Seems I have no choice." Eadric muttered, glancing at the hilt of the blade held against his neck.
Now, the smirk returned to Lannister's face. "No, you don't." He lifted his left hand and gestured for some of the men behind him to come forward. "Gather his arms." He ordered curtly, before waving the tip of his blade, only narrowly missing the flesh of Eadric's neck as it went. "Move then."
And that was how Eadric found himself, not five minutes in a new land at the behest of his lord Hircine, being guided to a large camp as a prisoner. They did not bind him or shackle him, instead choosing to rely on the spears and swords that the riders carried to keep him in check. At first only one bothered to level an iron-tipped spear at his back as they lead him on through the wood. It was only when they came upon the camp proper that more felt the need to bring their own weapons to bear on him.
The camp, if such a term could even be used for such a large encampment, was a wash of colour and finery that Eadric would usually only see in Cyrodiil or High Rock. He could not truly take it in though, or even appreciate it, for throughout it all, the urge within Eadric to call upon the gift and rip and tear into their bodies steadily grew. Resisting it was a struggle, every passing step it felt like his blood boiled that much hotter and brighter. It burned ever more fiercely as many within the camp turned to look upon the large stranger, some with suspicion, some with curiosity, and some even with a more appraising eye.
The parade continued along the length of the central path of the camp, a wide line of churned up mud and gravel that had once likely been a field of green grass. Down it lay the largest of the tents and pavilions, some even larger than the homes of Whiterun. The largest, however, was right at the end of the makeshift street. A magnificent giant of gold and black cloth, of a size comparable to that of the Bannered Mare inn in Whiterun, if not bigger. And that particular pavilion, it seemed, was the destination.
Eadric was led into the pavilion, still held at spear point by a few men, though most lingered outside. Though he cared little for it, the interior was just as opulent as the outside, with tables, chairs, and rich golden rugs covering the floor. In fact, it could easily be said that the decoration was finer here than even the halls of Dragonsreach or the Blue Palace, for it was that ostentatious. Eadric did not consider it for long, his attention was instead garnered by the lone occupant, a man of large girth and ink black hair butchering a great stag.
The man did not look up as he spoke, and his tone suggested he did not appreciate the interruption. "Tell me the carriage has been fixed or bugger off."
Jaime Lannister merely stared at the man for a short while. "Your grace." He eventually said to get the butchers attention. Clearly, this must be the King.
"Bah. What do you want, Kingslayer?" He asked as he picked up a rag to wipe his hands. It was only when he turned to look at the party that he stopped, and even then not for long. "Who's this?"
Eadric himself did not answer, carefully aware of the iron-tipped spears mere inches from his back. Instead, Lannister rattled on about the tale of his finding. Apparently, Sanguine's method of getting Eadric here was not as gentle in either direction, for along with him faceplanting the earth as he arrived, a loud bang had apparently heralded his presence to the world. He raised some protest when Lannister called him a drunkard fool, but his words were silenced before they left his mouth by a sharp jab into his back by a spear point that was thankfully stopped by his mail armour.
The King laughed when Lannister mentioned that Eadric did not know who he was, his double chin wobbling as he did from beneath his beard. "Hah! The Kingslayer is sore that not everyone knows his name? Your pride that easily wounded, Lannister?" He threw the bloody rag to the table and grabbed a nearby goblet, taking a long, greedy gulp from it. "Bring him closer, I'd have a better look at him."
With those words, Lannister stepped aside and the few who now held Eadric at spear point pushed him toward the other man, who looked him up and down as he neared, sizing him up. "Heh. Real big one you are. Bigger than Joffrey's Clegane I'd say. Mayhaps not the other one though." He hummed for a moment and waved off the men surrounding Eadric. "Put those down. I'm not some craven Lannister to need people with steel at their necks to talk to them."
"Your grace?" Ser Jaime said uncertainly, eyeing Eadric.
"Put them down!" The King bellowed when the men hesitated. To a man, they now obeyed, raising the points of their spears upwards and resting their ends on the ground. "Good." He seethed, turning back to the stag carcass and picking the knife up again to return to his skinning and butchering. "So. You've no idea how you got here?" He asked Eadric as he carved.
Eadric glanced at the men surrounding him for a moment. "Aye." He lied again, doubtless, none here would accept an explanation involving magic, for he had seen little evidence of it being here. Not one among the men who had apprehended him was a mage. Even more tellingly, at least to Eadric's mind, the very air around him felt somewhat empty, as if something important but forgotten was missing. "Drink will do that to one's memory."
The King chuckled at that. "Hah. True, very true. Lannister, leave us, and take your men with you."
Ser Jaime protested, albeit only mildly. "Your grace, he could be any manner of outlaw."
"And you disarmed him, did you not?" The King retorted. "Or is that one carrying all that because he forgot how to fasten a sword belt?" He gestured with a bloody knife to the man that held Eadric's weaponry. "Put them beside this beauty and begone. I'd talk with him without your smug face watching me, Kingslayer."
Ser Jaime looked to protest again, but quickly relented and waved for his men to do so. With that done, he stalked out of the pavilion.
When both Eadric and the King were finally alone, both men visibly relaxed. "Pah. Right prick that one, I can tell you. Doesn't care a fig for me, but he tries to keep up appearances, for the sake of what little honour he thinks he still has."
Eadric raised a brow at that. "And yet he is your guard?" He asked, unsure if he should use the 'your grace' or not.
"He is my goodbrother, and my wife is fond of him." The King answered as he carefully removed the hide from the stag. "Are you surprised I would remove my guards while you are here? Even if you could get to your weapons before I gut you, you would not get out of this camp alive."
"And if I didn't care for that? If I really was an outlaw I would be dead anyway."
The King snorted. "You're no outlaw. That's plain as day." He waved off the idea. "Your armour's too clean for a start, too rich as well. Can see from here that it's fine steel. And these..." He removed the knife from the carcass again and wiped his hands on the rag before picking up Eadric's sword from the small pile the guard had dumped the weapons in. "Forged with clear skill. An outlaw could not afford them, or steal them without getting the attention of Ned Stark up in Winterfell." The King held the weapon up, inspecting the scabbard that was decorated with traditional Nordic designs of Shor, Ysgramor and Kyne. Almost gingerly, he grasped the hilt and slid a part of the blade out. The sword, made from the finest steel in Whiterun and forged in the fires of the Skyforge, almost seemed to give off a light of its own in the sunlight that managed to pierce the pavilion. "No... this isn't the sword of an outlaw or robber knight. Who forged it?" He asked as he slid it back into the scabbard and placed it back on the table, looking now to the battle-axe that Eadric counted as his most prized possession outside of his wedding band.
"Eorlund Grey-mane." Eadric answered, a small smile spreading across his bearded face as the King inspected his gear. "It's Skyforge steel, finest you'll find in the world."
The words drew a raised brow from the King. "Grey-mane? Skyforge? These words are new to me. Either you are not from Westeros, or you're a bard." He snorted again at that last word. "No, you're a warrior, not one of them." When Eadric's expression became that of confusion, the King looked incredulous. "Gods, you're not, are you?"
"I prefer the term warrior-poet."
Despite the initial concern, the King nodded in approval. "A warrior who can sing his own songs, admirable." Remarkably, the portly king did not seem to struggle at all with the weight of the axe as he hefted it, he clearly had ample strength despite his girth. "Prefer the war-hammer myself, good for crushing bone and armour." The king admitted, carefully setting it back down atop Eadric's shield. "So, you have a name?"
"Eadric Haraldsson. And yours?"
The King laughed again and once more returned to the skinning, now almost done with it. "Aye, you're not from Westeros then. You stand before King Robert Baratheon of the Seven Kingdoms. I'd list the full title, but I've no mood for the tedium. Just know that until you cross a sea at some point, I'm lord of the land you stand upon. Take your weapons back, Haraldsson. Lannister won't like it, but such things bring me pleasure..." As he spoke, he snipped off the final bit of the hide, carefully and half reverently carried it to another table and set it upon it. "Almost as much as hunting, drinking and feeling a woman's warmth." Robert then returned to the carcass, beginning the work of removing the head from the body. It was only then that Eadric noted the number of points in its antlers. Sixteen, a monarch stag according to those who mounted animals for a trade.
"Shall I call you 'your grace' then?" Eadric asked as he picked up his sword and began buckling its belt back into place. As he did, it struck him that the King might have made for the perfect follower of Hircine had he only been fitter.
Robert stopped for a brief moment and glanced at Eadric. "Honour demands it, now that you know who I am." He answered plainly. "Brings me no joy to hear you say it, not like with the smug fuck I have to call my goodfamily, or the lickspittles of the court, but it is expected of you while you are here. And by the look of you, you'll need every edge when it comes to fitting in around here. You look like you hail from Ib, only I've never seen one of them come close to six foot." He shook his head and returned to cutting and slicing through the bone and muscle. "Where do you hail from then, if not Ib or someplace else to the far east?"
That made Eadric think. He could speak the truth and say he hailed from another plane of existence altogether. He could also say that he sprouted from the ground itself and that his people had women who were like their men, bearded and the like. Both would likely result in the same response, so instead, he told what he hoped could at least be a half-truth, if not an outright lie. "I do not know where it lies in relation to here... your grace. But we call it Skyrim, or the Old Kingdom if you're feeling poetic. It is the homeland of my people, the Nords."
"Skyrim? Can't say I've ever heard of it." Robert said idly as he pulled the head off of the rest of the stag's corpse and moved it to join the pelt. "Not that I paid much attention to the maesters' lessons on the like of that anyway. But I like to think I'd remember the name of a land if the people all look like you." Wiping his hands on the rag once again, he drained what remained in his goblet and moved to a chair near the back of the pavilion, opposite the entry flap.
Eadric shrugged. He had no idea what a maester was, possibly some kind of teacher. "Not likely they'd know about it either, your grace. I'm likely the first of my kind in these lands."
"If you say so." Robert muttered, grabbing a golden jug and pouring more wine into his goblet. "Matters little to me, you seem an alright sort." He paused in his speech to drain the goblet completely and refill it. "Do you have a place to go, Haraldsson?"
"Can't say I do, your grace." Eadric answered, slipping the haft of his axe into the sling that housed it, which was usually belted to his back. "Wouldn't even know which direction to walk in to get somewhere."
The King nodded slightly, soon knocking back another goblet of wine, which didn't seem to affect him at all. "Thought as much. In that case, Eadric Haraldsson of Skyrim, why don't you join us on the road to Winterfell?"
Eadric raised a brow to the offer, it certainly wasn't something he had expected. In truth, he had expected to be in a cell somewhere by now, if the worst came to pass, or following the road aimlessly till he found somewhere if the best did. "Well... I won't turn down that offer, your grace."
"Good." Robert said with a laugh. "Wouldn't want you scaring one of Ned's Lords like you did the Kingslayer. And I'd like to see how well you can swing that axe of yours."
As Eadric thanked the King, he hoped that the rest of his time in this land would go as well as this. For all told, that hadn't gone too badly at all.
Thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed it and feel free to leave me a review.
Now, onto the changes. (Just ignore this if you don't want to listen to me waffle on)
You'll notice that essentially the two things I didn't change about the opening was who the POV char was and the fact that Jaime Lannister was the first one to speak to him. I don't know about any of you, but rereading that first bit again 2 years after writing it, I found it very bare bones and rapid for the first proper bit of the story. I actually did try rewriting the Eadric bits before I ever attempted to go over the Daedra Council (The bit that would eventually turn into a much simpler discussion between Sanguine and Hircine) and was set in the first Bran chapter. I ultimately decided against this because it felt like even more of a contrived coincidence than Eadric arriving just as the King's Arrival part of the soundtrack started blaring.
This little bit at the end may become a regular thing I do at the end of chapters, or it may just be for a couple I wanted to talk about. Ultimately they'll become somewhat irrelevant because the plot of the books is slightly different from that of the show and I plan to have the Elder Scrolls bits impact the story more than it did in the original piece where everything stayed the same except with a running commentary from Eadric and Severus. In the event of that happening, I'll likely just have a natter about what directions I would have liked to explore but didn't find the time/willpower to, and where the first one was going to go if I'd stuck with it. Slight hint on that last one, very differently to where this one will ultimately end up going because of differences in the setup I hope a few of you can notice.
Waffle done.
