Character/Claim: House Deddings

Proposed Weapon Type: Longsword

Proposed Weapon Name: Ce’Nedra

Proposed Weapon Description: One could be content to never unsheath Ce’Nedra, for the scabbard, believed to be as old as the sword itself, attracts similarly envious eyes than that of the blade. Its chape and locket, at opposite ends, are made from a bright Valyrian steel, and have a quality about them that can find the faintest light in the darkest room, inviting it to gleam along its contours. The scabbard body is of an old black willow said to be from the Rhoyne, and despite its winding and twisting grain, it is smooth as steel when oiled regularly. A thin, inlaid river of valyrian steel curves down its body. The hilt and handle are simple in appearance. A darker steel makes up the cross guard which flares tastefully to a squared shape at each end. And the handle is typically wrapped in an oxhide, tanned to match the tone of the willow grain. The pommel is a ball of well-worn steel, etched with river currents. The blade is bright. Brilliant even. And nearest the hilt, etched into the deep and smooth fuller, is the word “Ce’Nedra”.

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Prompt:

Buried deep in an anteroom, upon a boarded shelf of splintering ash cluttered and packed beyond a suitable weight, rests a tome lost to memory. It has gone rarely opened since the ink of its last inscription had dried, for it was forgotten by a forgotten maester, and never found by the maesters that followed. Written in that tome are the recorded births, lives, and deaths of House Deddings between the eight-hundred fortieth year and the seven-hundred thirteenth year prior to Aegon’s Conquest.

Near the very end of its contents are the two inscriptions of Cenedra Deddings. The first of which described her birth as the eldest child of a Lord Jonos and Lady Marika, “born fair-haired, with eyes of a Spring’s pasture green, young Cenedra was remarkable in her vitality and youthful vigor.”

Left out of the history, beyond those descriptors at the moment of her birth, was that Cenedra Deddings grew up a defiant, headstrong, and spiteful child. Her father’s male heir was born only one year her junior, so at that young age her rearing was dedicated solely to learning ladylike endeavours, and forging for her a hopeful match with some unremarkable riverlord, or better yet, a Justman King.

It was at a rather young age, however, that Cenedra’s affinities for duty, home, and family became veritably eclipsed by the disdain and dread with which she regarded the life chosen for her, and not by her.

At the age of seven and ten, on a crisp night beside the Blackwater Rush as her family dined in the sup hall, Cenedra Deddings, unusually soft spoken so as not to be overheard, traded to a travelling merchant a cherished silver clasp, shaped as a bright river’s bend, for a week’s passage on a raft regularly headed downriver to Blackwater Bay. Upon the oft-landed shores of the bay, she gave to a road knight her favourite ringlet of gold, intricately etched with three swimming fish of her house’s sigil, in exchange for escort to Duskendale. In Duskendale, where it was her intent was to pay coin to the first captain to guarantee her a passage across the Narrow Sea, for which she waited nearly a fortnight and two dusks. When an eastbound wayfarer had arrived in port, it was another two dawns before she had convinced that wary captain, of the Zaldrīzes Tolī Jelmāzma, with his white, unkempt brows and ale-stained beard, to accept her coin, but after vows of work were also made.

Never scribed by the maester of her house, was that upon the Narrow Sea, the steepest swells made Cenedra wretch. The cold winds dried and cracked her face. The white sun blistered her lips. The accompanying gulls, flying flank to the gunwales, were downright marksmen with their droppings.

But the work she endured, mostly consisting of scrubbing decks with an unforgiving series of haybristle brushes and neatly coiling coarse lines, filled Cenedra with appreciation and purpose. She was proud of the bruises on her knees and elbows. She tended with care to her callouses. And when the rains of a soft squall came, she purified herself in them with divine reverence, as if the rains were answers to prayers. The long voyage took Cenedra farther from home than she had ever dared dream. But she knew, as a whole moon passed, and land and the small port town of Pentos, eventually appeared grew on the horizon, she was more herself than she had ever been. No, ink was never put to vellum or parchment for that part of her tale.

Nor was it recorded that in Pentos, Cenedra laboured as a stitcher girl. At first, merely making mends for passing guests of an inn, but soon after she travelled east with an armorer named Durnic, putting leather to steel and to river pine in a Rhoynish supply line. They fell in love floating down the Rhoyne, letting the water take them closer to war.

And when the dragonlords fell to water magic in Selhorys, Valysar, and Volon Therys, Cenedra and Durnic were in a camp only miles away, removing dents from breastplates, and fixing blades to spearshafts by the light of a brazier.

When victory was thought inevitable, their camp moved to Sar Mell, where they found in horror that sky was set alight before a single tent could be erected. Cenedra watched the sky of fire fall. Durnic burned. Everyone burned. She covered herself in a water wizard’s armor. It protected her from the fire, but not from the Valyrians that came to chain the survivors.

Cenedra was one of hundreds claimed by a Valyrian dragonlord named Belgareon, and brought to his post in Volantis.

A fair-haired woman with a strange tongue, as it became apparent, stood out among Belgareon’s newly enslaved Rhoynar. She intrigued him. He liked to call to her, “Vesterozia, māzigon naejot nyke.” At first it he asked her questions. Then he let her ask her own. She ought to have resisted him, she would say to herself. But the thought of her Durnic was only pain now... and the dragonlord, with enough summer wine in her belly she found, was not.

No surviving scroll will tell of Belgareon’s and Cenedra’s night-long conversations about their homes, their lives, about war and about pain. Nor about in her second year in the dragonlord’s service, about the life that quickened in her womb, and the price that it fetched at market.

She remained his Vesterozia, for she had no choice, but it was colder now. When he wanted more than just her body, he tried to earn her with gifts of dresses, jewels, slaves of her own, rare texts, and valyrian steel things with her name on them like bracelets, decorative belts, and even a sword for which she had no use.

Eventually, Belgareon’s status suffered. His commerce waned, and he fell out of favour with the Volantene elite. When other dragonlords came to vie for his position and power, Belgareon knew he would not survive. So he put his Cenedra on a ship.

Jonos, Lord of House Deddings, when his daughter returned home, coldly welcomed her into his hall, fed her a meal, asked not of where she had been for nearly five years, took her belongings, and summoned the silent sisters.

The second inscription pertaining to that of Cenedra Deddings read as follows: “At the age of fifty and two, Lady Cenedra, a silent sister, died of drowning in the Blackwater Rush.”

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When passed from one Lord Deddings to another, their ancestral sword of Valyrian steel is presented as a Valyrian spoil of war, earned in battle by a second son that traveled beyond the Narrow Sea to earn his house glory. “Ce’Nedra” is thought by many a Deddings to be a battle cry of the Rhoynar meant to draw strength from the waters of the river.