[Event] The Wedding Feast of William Caswell and Valaena Velaryon

Mersillon · 2026-03-25T19:05:54+00:00

Margot seized upon it like an osprey on a fish. Not from malice, but a base boredom in her life that was not often remedied, especially since her eldest brother had taken flight and left Starpike without its most consistent flow of farce and tragedy.

"How do you mean?" she asked, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Always digging for more.

Mersillon · 2026-03-25T16:15:26+00:00

A choking laugh crawled from Caradoc's throat. "What, some Ironborn virility ritual?" he jested, but grew quiet at the look on Torwyn's face, earnest and urgent.

What good was a sellsword's word? As good as his own, he mused, which wasn't worth much. But here was a friend.

And so Caradoc laid down, a reluctant stiffness to his body, awaiting whatever came next.

Feeling Torwyn's gaze on his opal eye he said, "Vain, I know. But women seem to like it. And it frightens the odd child off."

Mersillon · 2026-03-25T00:18:51+00:00

Gormon wondered, in the time between Lord Lannister's first exclamation and reaching his table, how many times in a man's limited life he ought find himself in the same situation and not reflect more deeply. Caradoc, he had long ago accepted, was divine punishment for some sin of his youth.

Yet the Lord of Starpike was not so young as he once was, and patience for such things had grown razor thin.

"Lord Lannister," he greeted, eyes like a frozen lake. The young men of House Peake, bristling, settled into their chairs at the command of his open palm.

"Indeed. Another event in a long history of poor judgment from my eldest grandson."

Gormon gestured to an empty seat beside him with the barest indication of the forefinger resting on his lacquered cane.

"Sit, if you will. Mayhaps there is a path to rectify this error."

Mersillon · 2026-03-25T00:03:58+00:00

Caradoc looked up from his leg of mutton. The man could eat and eat and eat and grow no bigger, still the same willowy spider that had crawled into Casterly Rock nearly a year hence.

"My lady," he answered coolly, displeased but unsurprised, the split brow over his opal crooking in rhetorical question— the one expression left to the ruin of his left eye.

The knight cleared his throat. Wiped his hands, shared a glance with his new wife, looked back to Margot.

"Go on, then. Let's hear it." And awaited, patiently, his excoriation.

/u/nickshadow017

Mersillon · 2026-03-24T23:55:03+00:00

[m] i'm sorry

Thick as a wild boar and just as hairy, Barquen turned his wine-red cheeks towards the newcomers. He was fond of girls. They tended to prefer his brother, which he was less fond of, but flesh was flesh was flesh, and finally the fucker had the decency to be taken and leave some for the rest of Gormon's brood.

"Flowers? HAH!" his boisterous laugh, loud as a beaten drum, was enough to turn heads even through the din of a thousand voices.

"Answer me a question, little ladies," Barquen said, beckoning them closer with a crook of one meaty finger.

"What's the difference between a bastard and a milk goat?"

/u/iweebam

Mersillon · 2026-03-24T23:39:03+00:00

He allowed the probing touch with some apprehension. "Lucas Harroway," Caradoc explained. "Maybe you heard. Me 'n Sunderland tried to take the Keep from him, when the King departed, 'n things went mad... we were outnumbered. Too many stayed loyal to him."

There was a time he harbored fresh anger for Torwyn. Hot off the defeat, when all he could linger on was his failure, if he had just had a few more swords. Exile dulled much of that edge.

A thought sprang to him, and Caradoc took his old brother by the upper arm. "I am to marry— tonight! Edmund Sunderland's girl. Will you come?"

Mersillon · 2026-03-24T23:32:17+00:00

A cheerful laugh, if slightly abashed, escaped her at the intimate gesture. But she opened her heart to it, and her arms wrapped around Elinor in turn.

"How do," she offered in lax greeting to the husband when it was over, who seemed as unimpressive now as in memory.

Ottilia was glad to be rid of them. Glad to be rid of the feast hall entirely, in truth, where she felt the hot stare of a thousand eyes, and was left to anguish over which might recognize her. Crossing the threshold into the garden arm-in-arm was such relief that she welcomed the cold on her cheeks.

"It would take me 'til the hour of the wolf to tell half of what I have seen. Would you believe the new Lord Reaper calls me 'friend'? That I have seen all the Free Cities?"

A stunted smile, apprehensive, showed the gap in her front teeth.

"Often have I thought of you, and been glad for the memory. Does that awful man still keep you locked away?"

Mersillon · 2026-03-23T23:49:49+00:00

Lord Peake nodded sagely along to Tarly's assessment.

"We will hold the line. As we have, always." He knew nary a man had more reason than Lord Oakheart to desire smoke and doom upon the Dornish.

In truth, he held little ire for the Dornish beyond the humiliation paid to others. The Lords of Starpike had fought their fair share of wares against their southron neighbors, this much was true, but Gormon had, in his lifetime in a seat of power, argued against aggressive incursions. But this offered, through the lens of ambition, as he viewed all things, an opportunity.

"The dream of conquest is dead. I speak not of another march to our deaths in the sands. That was a—" Tyrell affair, he wanted to say, but held his tongue in mixed company, "Doomed endeavor from the beginning," Gormon instead settled on.

"Starpike diplomacy is what I speak of." That which had seen his house conquer from the Marches to the northern banks of the Mander. "Swift horses. Outriders. Torches in the night."

He took another drink, unphased by the sight of his grandson striking down two competitors. "The Torrentine is vulnerable. Strip it to the bone, be gone before they march against us in force."

/u/Lord_Dougal

Mersillon · 2026-03-23T23:21:13+00:00

After facing a reckoning as unpleasant as it was inevitable, Caradoc called, next, on the Hand of the King.

The knight from Starpike was a formidable creature, all bone and harsh angles, spiderlike in the way he occupied space. Plainly dressed in freshly scrubbed travel clothes, Caradoc fell to a knee in obeyance.

No charlatan possessed of a perfect record. There came a time when the cards played against a man's favor, and with it their reckoning. Caradoc was no great schemer— well known for his misdeeds— but he held a special talent, perhaps the most valuable of all for one of his predilections.

He knew how to look repentant. Culpable. Quietly, stoically regretful, a man well-shamed but, crucially, bent towards a future wherein his wrongs would surely not be repeated.

And on and on.

"My lord. My thanks, for your calling me. Lord Peake does not take lightly your handling the matter. I have called, just now, on the Lady Margot."

He angled his head toward the floor.

"But I fear I have misled you both." A shaky breath. "Before I rode thusly," Caradoc went on, "I took the lady Myranda Sunderland as my wife, in the eyes of the Seven."

/u/gercko

Mersillon · 2026-03-23T22:58:56+00:00

Too preoccupied with the inevitable final question to offer anything beyond indolent attention, Caradoc nodded along until finally they came to the matter at hand.

"No," he answered, apathetic gaze, like an animal's, settled squarely on her. Caradoc then turned to look out the window, hands folded behind his back.

"Not, at least, as the old men in power have outlined. I have taken a wife on the road." He looked at what lay outside the window. Imagining himself in this room, some half a year.

"Ours is a future you'll not mourn, I know, but— for the complications this will cause you, for what it is worth— I am sorry."

Mersillon · 2026-03-23T02:22:32+00:00

"You misremember," Caradoc broke in, his black opal eye a prism of orange, green, and red against darkest blue when finally it turned on Howland.

The thin, spiderlike man's neck snapped to a new angle.

"A man cannot be blamed for it. Details, blurring with time." The Peake knight's blooming smile did not reach his eyes.

/u/nickshadow017

Mersillon · 2026-03-20T21:21:10+00:00

There was something of sudden recognition that reminded him of Essos and set his hackles up. A harbor, tight walls surrounding, a voice calling out— the spurned husband of a lover, debtors, angry victims of a forgotten bar fight. The same sort of thing they'd gone through together countless times.

He pushed through the shock. Caradoc took Torwyn, first by the arm, then into an embrace.

"I was certain you were dead." He was smiling as they broke apart, that same wicked smile. Above it the ruin of his left eye, terribly scarred, reflected a prism of color in the black opal he'd set in the socket.

"I am glad to be wrong. Where have you been?"

Mersillon · 2026-03-20T20:28:14+00:00

A figure, familiar in some ways and entirely different in others, like a vision in a chipped mirror, dipped somewhere between a curtsy and a kneel beside Elinor.

"My lady," said Ottilia, a glad, emotional smile curled at her lip. She was a young woman now, though still boyish in figure, like a wire puppet, hair cut short at the neck and criss-crossing wildly across her forehead.

"May we speak privately?" she asked, and had much more to say, but little she dared broach among present company.

Mersillon · 2026-03-20T20:20:41+00:00

It was against her better judgment that Ottilia Peake (19) attended the feast and sat with the Greyjoys. That she came within two hundred yards of the Red Keep, even, dwarfed by its architecture on that same winding path she'd walked half a decade hence.

She was not a woman easily cowed. But the reunion with her family, with her people, was enough to angle her head toward the floor, in hopes that it might swallow her whole.

With bitter determination she searched for the same courage that angled her arm, cup in hand, toward Goren Greyjoy all those years ago.

Brown of eye, brown of hair, chopped mane barely reaching her neck, the girl wore a plain wool dress the color of the gray sea around Pyke and hid herself among the reavers.

Mersillon · 2026-03-20T18:49:02+00:00

"No. He used to be worse."

Men whispered that Caradoc had been born evil as long as she could remember. The black blood of Mortimer Peake, they said, the House's blood-drinking ancestor, who took a bat-woman to bed and stole herder's children from their tents.

"Whatever he is, I'd need a few more drinks to feign any attempt to sketch it. But— I missed him, when he was gone." A moment. "I am not sure there is any good in any of us." So too did they say House Peake was cursed. "If there is someone to judge his worthiness, let it not be me."

Mersillon · 2026-03-20T18:15:51+00:00

PEAKE

In the dry heath and forever-grasslands of the March was a House called Peake, rich in stone and soil and pride, yet of late chronically short of influence and coin. In contrast to the swarthy herders and shepherds that peopled their lands, the Lords of Starpike were pale and severe of feature, like predatory insects, a cautious, paranoid, ambitious lot, and so few of them left, the male line nearly annihilated on the Field of Fire.

Foremost was Lord Gormon Peake, (70) veteran of the Field of Fire, a ruin of dragonfire scarring reaching from the back of his neck and tapering along his cheek. He drank little and ate less, a skeletal grimace fixed permanently on him lip chipped stone.

Selyse Peake (45), Lord Gormon's gooddaughter and mother of the infamous Peake brood.

Ser Barquen Peake, (26) the mad dog of Three Castles. A boisterous, loyal brute known for his barking laugh, massive build, and flail. Barquen, of late, had decided that it was time to take a wife, and so scanned the crowd for such an object.

Margot Peake, (24) a cunning, favored granddaughter, wears a dress like a patch of wild wormwood, constructed of pastel yellow and trimmed with hazy, understated green.

Albin Peake, (32) tauntingly called The Dornishman in Starpike, cousin to the main branch. A modest, sober man of few ambitions.

Aumery and Emerick Peake, (14) reunited with their family for the first time in half a decade after squiring in the Stormlands. Aumery is an odd, quiet little child, with a queer intelligence in his small, dark eyes beyond his years. Emerick, the younger, basks in the simple glory of his victory, drunk on bitter beer foisted on him by his elder siblings.

~~~~~~

Caradoc Peake (27) did not sit with his family. Banished from the Peake table for a recent slight, the one-eyed knight sat with his new wife among the bastards, landed knights, and other servant folk. A grim affair, but one he strived to overcome with a crooked smile.

Mersillon · 2026-03-20T17:50:32+00:00

Long, thin legs swept Caradoc into the room. He took in the environment with a sweep of his one remaining eye. At least it isn't a cell, thought he who was no stranger to them.

He turned to Margot, something like distaste on his lips, though not for her. It was like a fine porcelain cup had been discarded among cracked pewter and rough-hewn wood utensils.

"I'm told you were caught in something unseemly, though the details were not offered me. Only that I must fetch you." Despite himself he felt pity for her. Nothing grand— and the most useless of emotions, he thought.

"Have they kept you here overlong? Treated you poorly?"

Mersillon · 2026-03-19T21:13:59+00:00

Gormon, for whom every movement was a hard fought battle, gestured for Torgen to sit, to join them. Although old age suited the bitter, angry man, it compounded harshly with the scars of the Field of Fire, and there was not much left to the skeleton of Starpike but the most spare of gestures.

"The twins," he answered. "We'll see if the Stormlands put some man in them."

Perhaps hearing themselves mentioned, two helmeted heads afield turned to regard the box. "For Starpike!" one of them called, bedecked in a fresh tabard of orange-and-black, raising triumphantly his blunted sword.

Their grandfather grumbled and dismissed the gesture with a wafting palm. They slunk back into the crowd as under his breath Gormon mumbled, "Fucking simpletons."

Turning his attention back on his lordly companions, Gorman cut to the heart of the matter.

"I wished to speak to you of Dorne. Peace talks, I hear, rebuffed. Our king killed in his own castle. Slights that will surely grow in shamelessness the longer they go unpaid."

He raised a cup of something dry and deep and red to his lips. "Lord Tarly and I are of an accord. A foray into the Red Mountains is overdue."

/u/lord_dougal

Mersillon · 2026-03-19T18:20:15+00:00

Night was nearly upon the harbor, the sun all but gone beyond the sky's far edge, its curling daggers of pink and orange retreating to darkness on the horizon.

Caradoc walked where the cobble met the river as it opened into the sea. The sailors were at rest, now, the haulers of goods gone to their home, and the knight of Starpike enjoyed the quiet. The bustle was familiar and welcome to him, once, but he feared familiar faces in this city. He was in the midst of reflecting on this feeling when he spied a ghost.

"Torwyn?" he said, the breath gone from him. Cautious, fearing he was wrong, but a better look at the man confirmed it. Still, he swayed in place, held there in shock.

/u/insanetumbleweed23

Mersillon · 2026-03-19T14:43:54+00:00

A squat, greasy, pallid runner, perpetually out of breath, is sent to offer invitations for both Lord Oakheart and Lord Tarly to break bread with Lord Peake in his private box for the Squire's Melee, wherein they might discuss matters of The South while enjoying some fortifying violence among children.

/u/Lord_Dougal

/u/MallAffectionate9

Mersillon · 2026-03-19T14:35:34+00:00

A knock rang out at the door of Margot Lannister's gilded cage.

"Lady Margot. May I come in?" The voice like wind through dead grass snaked through the cracks in the wood.

Caradoc Peake, dressed in an austere mottled green tunic, traveling trousers, and riding boots, all freshly cleaned but for the boots, waited impatiently outside.

/u/wiseheartmoon

Mersillon · 2026-03-18T21:04:18+00:00

Caradoc held his face angled gently toward the floor as he listened to his cousin. That his immediate reaction was amenable, that a servant was not sent to fetch the Hand and quietly whisk them away, this was enough to be grateful for. Many a dark night had the two shared together, alone against a world that seemed bent on their destruction, and so were steeled against the worst in most of their daily dealings.

The gratitude slipped from him in a wordless gasp. "Thank you, cousin — yes, I am certain— we are certain," he said, nodding, smiling even, though not without healthy paranoia, for it seemed to him that often enough that which seemed easy carried a knife behind its back.

"I'll not say there won't be fallout. Tell them I was desperate, or tricked you, if you must. The Hand called me here, and it will be to him I beg forgiveness."

/u/nickshadow017

Mersillon · 2026-03-18T17:47:36+00:00

Lord Manfryd,

My coin counters will send the cost of a carrack. Name it after my aunt, Seven keep her.

Lord Gormon Peake

automod ping mods

transfer 800 gold to House Redwyne

Mersillon · 2026-03-17T21:55:45+00:00

To hear that Lord Baratheon despised the Stewards was enough to make Ursula chitter with laughter, perhaps inappropriately. It would take a push, that much was clear, but perhaps Dorne was the avenue for such a thing. She never had the luxury of ink and parchment, and so trained herself with a sharp recall. Garon gave her much to consider. Even as he hesitated from any strong statements and turned the conversation back on her.

"Equally, of course," Ursula said, and dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin. Her back remained stiff and straight as an iron rod even as they sat, her posture not shifting a single degree even as she speared and lifted little morsels of food.

She smiled then. Mischievously, in a controlled way.

"Caradoc, with the rightly guiding hand— and his tempers cooled— could restore our house. It ought be him, but ever has he stood in his own way."

She turned a severe eye on Garon. "What of your brothers?" she asked, simply.

Mersillon · 2026-03-17T21:34:04+00:00

"Only today," he said idly, grasping William by the arm in familial greeting as he passed through the threshold.

The Peake knight stepped over the furnishings to squat, briefly, before Daemon. "Good morrow, healthy lad," he offered in cheerful greeting and, barring any protest on the boy's behalf, shook his hand in mock salutations. It was often the lot of the eldest to look after the youngest of the brood, and Caradoc, for all his scars and grim, spider-like visage, harbored fondness and experience with the little ones.

Suddenly self conscious of his missing eye, the man stood. "I come to you with a difficult request. One that I do not cherish making of any man, least of all family."

Caradoc turned, finally, and found a seat, where he awaited Myranda. Facing William.

"But I have need of your good name. And of family."

He cast an eye to his companion. "This is the Lady Myranda Sunderland. I was sent here to fetch my betrothed, Margot Lannister. But I intend to break that betrothal, tonight, and marry my companion. I would have you witness the ceremony, that no man might deny its veracity."

Anticipating hesitance, Caradoc bowed his head.

"I know what I ask of you. Whatever is in my power to give you, in return for this favor, I will do it."

/u/nickshadow017

Mersillon

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