I lay my palm over the ancient grey stone and called up heat. Enough to burn through flesh at a touch, reduce a torch to ash, or soften a handful of rock to sizzling slag. My normally pale skin flushed as the heat rose and smoke came from lichen blackening away as my fingers pressed over them and an acrid stench filled my nostrils. I pried to press the heat into the stone surface, direct and amplify it as with previous tests on large boulders and smaller rocks both, but there was... not quite resistance but rather as if there wasn't anywhere for the heat to go.
Frowning, I tried to reach into the grey stone directly with my magic instead, the gigantic sheet of basalt that served as a door for the ancient tomb of the First Men. The fine grains of the igneous mineral sparkled mockingly. Basalt was volcanic; reaching into it with Pyromancy and pushing it into remembering its once-molten condition should have been a lot easier than melting normal rock. Except my attempts at doing so felt like fumbling in the dark, my magic subtly but firmly rebuffed. I tried harder, drawing deeply upon my power until the skin of my hand took on a bronze sheen, until the effort was like trying to lift more than twice my weight.
The rock softened just a little, enough for it to feel like a thin film of boiling-hot mud had splattered over the harder stone beneath. My fingers ached now but they were ever so slowly sinking into the material so I pressed on. One eighth of an inch in, rivulets of sweat started rolling down my forehead and into my eyes. A quarter of an inch in I was panting and my arm started to shake. Higher and higher the required effort rose until my whole body felt the strain, the painful warmth of trying to push my magic against its limits. I gasped and pulled my hand back as if burned before the tips of my fingers could sink more than half an inch into the rock's face.
Smacking my fist into the stone door's face didn't accomplish anything physically except to leave my other hand hurting too, but I instantly felt better as I took out my frustration on the barrier as much as I was able. Bloody First Men and their fucking magic-repelling construction! This was a tomb damn it, not the freaking Wall or some great stronghold. Why was it warded against magical intrusion? Worse still, it was the third ancient barrow in a row that had such protections built into it... out of a total of three I'd checked. I was beginning to think that all of them would prove so protected because apparently, builders back then had nothing better to do than add magical defenses to all their creations just to annoy wandering sorceresses half a dozen millennia later!
I stumbled back and fell on my backside, feeling way too tired for this shit. Trying to open the tombs via non-magical means was not going to work. Not only were the stones making up the barrow so large it seemed the work of giants, but they had been fitted so well together not even a hair would fit between them. They reminded me both of the barrows of the Atreides in my father's homeland and the interior of the pyramids of Giza for their craftsmanship. Moving even one such rock would take a small army, and they'd have to start from the topmost one since they had been arrayed in interlocking, gravity-assisted pattern without mortar. For a single individual, even one mildly superhuman in some ways, it was completely impossible.
Taking in lungfuls of air as my body slowly cooled down, I started second-guessing my decision to spend half the gains of the last milestone on the bronze flame of War. It had given me glimpses of the lives of countless levies and sell-swords, men-at-arms and guardsmen. More than the first time I'd invested into it, it didn't show so much training as life both on the march and at guardposts, long hours of great boredom often in harsh conditions, maintenance of arms and the duties of the camping ground occasionally sprinkled with the terror and butchery of battle... and all absolutely useless in getting into the ancient tombs.
Yet despite how easy the clash with the bandits had been, being pushed back by that fat axeman despite being stronger and faster had been a rude awakening. As soon as Keera was gone I'd reached for the quickest way of getting more of the combat skill I had found myself lacking. Five dead from my first-ever victory over other humans which had also been my first human sacrifices had been more than enough to provide a little safety with one more little jump in power. Perhaps the decision had been too hasty, but it had felt right. When the next warrior who was just better than me came there would be no time for visions.
The other half of that milestone was still untapped and my fingers itched to invest it into the orange flame and assault that stupid door with stronger Pyromancy... but that would be me rushing into things again. Moreover, it wouldn't work. With my current magical ability I'd barely left a dent before being exhausted; a single investment wasn't going to make me an order of magnitude stronger.
I bit into a strip of smoked meat and chased it down with some hard cheese. Both the bandit leader and the fat axeman had had traveling supplies of surprising quality that would last me at least a week or two. With abundant water in the form of snow and the magic to boil it I was good for food till White Harbor and beyond even with hunting being far less lucrative in the Barrowlands than in the Neck. The problem was money. All five bandits had had a paltry seventeen copper stars and two dozen pennies between them, not a hint of silver or gold. Most of my reward from Howland Reed had been paid in goods, leaving me with not enough coin for passage on a ship. Relatively safe passage at least, which meant a cabin with a door that locked while I slept.
I finished the last bit of cheese and got to my feet. The fatigue from pushing my magic would linger for hours still and the tingling aches might last for days but I was not going to wait to recover around a barrow. Featherball was already on the lookout for our next objective and I didn't want to be late.
xxxx
We followed the Kingsroad north through the barrowlands, with Featherball hunting winter hares and the occasional fox while I dined on cheese and smoked meat and the occasional berry. Twice we had to get off the road to avoid people of dubious intentions and once we had to flee our camping site at the approach of a pale stripped feline the size of a small tiger I was pretty sure was a shadowcat. After a two-mile run in the dark with Featherball risking her life to distract the dangerous predator twice, I finally knew why everyone used sacrifices for their big spells.
Magical backlash sucked. Three whole, dismal days and nights of avoiding any magic bigger than sharing Featherball's senses or producing a candle-sized flame while my body recovered at a snail's pace. Anything bigger would have pushed back recovery even further and actual combat magic would have made my condition worse. It could have been worse; mages without a storied bloodline would probably be suffering for weeks. That did not mean I had to like it, just find a way to avoid it in the future.
On the fourth day, circumstances took yet another annoying turn. The clouds that had been growing thicker overhead for days finally burst into a torrential downpour that was more sleet than not. Soon enough both of us were soaked, something Featherball kept hooting and clacking her beak at me about as she rode on my shoulder with an air of supreme disdain. What was I supposed to do about the storm? Tear the clouds from the skies? Summon a wind to push them away? I had as much ability in Elementalism as Featherball did in juggling. At least with me mostly recovered I could keep both of us warm enough.
By that evening, the sleet storm had subsided to a cold drizzle. With visibility clearing, we saw the crossroads coming up miles before we reached it. While the kingsroad went on to castle Cerwyn in the North and eventually Winterfell, a smaller, muddier road extended to the East and West. Barrowton and Goldgrass lay to the West, the White Knife river and the city of White Harbor to the East. None of those destination was closer than two hundred miles still, but next to the crossroads itself there was an inn.
The inn's main building had long, low wings that stretched out along the kingsroad. The lower story was made of granite, the upper one of whitewashed brick, and the roof was slate. It had thick, diamond-shaped windowpanes and from the large trapdoor on one side there was also a cellar. It was surrounded by outbuildings, including stables. Behind it was an apples tree orchand and a fairly extensive garden, with a decent-sized area fenced in by a wooden wall where a large barn and what I was fairly sure had to be a chicken coop were in. Swinging from a bronze post at the end of the inn's wooden dock is a flaking shingle painted to depict a tall, hooded traveler leaning heavily on a staff, with a bow strapped to their back and a raven sitting on one shoulder.
That was a sign if I ever saw one. My spear was rather staff-like and Featherball could pass for a raven if you squinted. And you were half-blind. And you'd never seen a raven before. OK, she really couldn't pass for a raven but the rest of the image was close and I felt like eating a hearty warm stew while sitting next to the roaring fire in the inn's hearth, for a change.
Walking through the door, we were greeted by a homey, clean, warm common room, only half-filled by a crowd of suspicious travelers. A pair of tired serving wenches in their early thirties were busy dispensing ale and getting pawed at while a younger woman plucked half-heartedly at the strings of what was probably a lute and sung off-key some stupid song about a bear and a girl dancing. There was also licking involved, but that was the point I stopped listening to protect my brain cells from an early death.
I took a seat with its back to the wall at the empty table farthest from the so-called singing, pulled my hood down and started wringing the rainwater out of my hair. A subtle pull shifted the flames at the hearth a little towards mine and Featherball's direction, and an invisible tap into said flames poured energy into my fatigued body like injecting liquid caffeine directly to my veins. My mind cleared enough to notice the not so subtle stares coming from... everyone, really. Some of them were only wide in surprise, or momentarily shifting to take me in from head to toe with some interest before reluctantly returning to their own affairs. Others were less benign.
Quite a few people noted my spear and bow and the leathers half-hidden by my cloak, an older man even gave me a nod in... acknowledgement? Wariness? I wasn't quite sure. Others' stares lingered, some to my face, more quite a bit lower. But the sizable group that had been sitting way too close to the singer only gave my equipment casual, almost disdaintful glances, then several of their party of a dozen slowly took me in from toe to head and leered. Those guys were going to be trouble.
One of the maids approached not much later. There was no menu, obviously, not with most of the inn's patrons being illiterate, but they had an uncommonly large selection of foodstuffs on offer. Barley bread, hardbread and bisquits, white cheese and yellow cheese in both soft and hard varieties, barley soup, lentil soup, pork-and-onions stew, beef-and-barley stew, bacon, sausages and salted mutton. Their vegetables I ignored except for the mushrooms; I'd never been particularly fond of greens back on Earth and after half a decade of protein-heavy diet in the Neck I'd become even less so, but mushrooms had always been a favorite of mine.
In the end I got the beef-and-barley stew, two sausages, a plate of fresh mushrooms and some soft cheese for dinner, with a wheel of hard cheese and five pounds of salted mutton to replenish my travel rations. The total came to forty-five pennies, which I paid for with five stars and five pennies. Compared to food prices in the Neck the mushrooms and mutton came a bit above average but everything else was not even at half price, with the cheese at under a quarter. I gave one of the sausages to Featherball before she could fly off with the whole pack mutton then tucked in to enjoy some proper food for the first time since my arrival to Westeros.
It was nice, in fact the beef and sausages were better than anything I remember from back on Earth, and leeching heat from the hearth let me recover more in a couple of hours than I had in a couple of days but all good things must come to an end. The intrusive stares had been fixed on me for some time and more than half the group of scruffy-looking, lightly armed, aggressively odious men had gotten restless. Clubs, knives, even an axe left their sheaths more than once or were loosened in preparation. Those among the remaining patrons that noticed either looked on warily or got up and left.
Having no interest in a bar fight, I finished my stew quickly than I would have liked and followed the example of the latter. Just as I'd been expecting, the group of men followed not half a minute after my exit then cursed and walked faster to catch up with my quick, steady march. They carried their weapons a bit more openly now, and though none of them had anything more dangerous than an axe, their arms rested easy enough in their hands to make me wary. Even a club could be deadly if wielded with skill.
"Ho, lass!" one of them shouted to whistling from the rest. "Where are you going in such a hurry?" Laughter followed. Instead of answering, I bolted. The men cursed and followed after to warcries of "After her!" or "Get the bitch!" or the ever-popular "Wait for me!"
Featherball flew off my shoulder, allowing me to run unburdened by weight equivalent to a really fat cat (or several normal ones) while also letting me keep an eye on my pursuers without having to turn back. Unlike my earlier escape from the shadowcat I didn't try for any four-minute miles but kept at a slow run perfect for long distances that kept me not far beyond arms' reach of my pursuers. That continued for a good ten minutes while the cursing from behind multiplied and the would-be rapists started huffing and puffing while they were still far too dressed for their liking. Not much later they inevitably gave up.
"Not worth it," I heard one of them saying as their rag-tag group came to a stop and tried to catch their breath. I kept running of course... until I was a good hundred yards from them. Then I stopped too, pulled my bow from its sheath over my shoulder and strung it in one quick motion. Turned away from them as I was, the men didn't really notice... until one of them fell to the ground screaming with an arrow through his right hip. He'd gotten lucky; I'd been aiming for his center of mass.
"The fuck?" someone shouted in shock, before eleven men started running at me with more murder and less lust in their eyes than before. I missed my next shot and the one after it; shooting moving targets was way harder than stationary ones. But the distance between us dwindled and one more of them dropped screaming. The next one died near instantly, my shot taking him through the head as he tried to duck it.
"We got you bitch!" the fastest of them to come within fifteen yards roared, axe raised.
"Nope!" I threw back over my shoulder as I turned around and ran once more... at nearly twice the speed the tired, untrained runners could manage. They pushed themselves to catch up but failed dismally. I might not be quite Usain Bolt fast yet, but they could barely manage eight or nine miles an hour at a dead run and soon they couldn't do even that. Again, I stopped far enough to manage four shots before they could get to me and started shooting. After two more of them fell, one of them dying not to the arrow but to a broken neck from the fall, the others broke and bolted.
From then on it was all over but the screaming. With Featherball giving me a bird's eye view there was nowhere for them to hide in a place as wide open as the barrowlands, and being already exhausted while I could manage four-minute miles with every death being an energy boost, running meant that they died tired. Even scattering couldn't help when they stopped running as soon as they thought they'd broken line of sight.
"Mercy!" the first guy I'd shot down pleaded, his britches soiled with blood and other things. "I got a family!"
"And if you'd stayed with them, kept drinking at the inn, or done anything other than charging after a girl your group outnumbered twelve to one, you wouldn't be dying after seeing your rapist friends being put down one by one," I told him before stabbing him with the spear. Then I started looting.
Enough bandits and I'd have the coin for passage across the Narrow Sea in no time.
A hundred miles east of the crossroads, the White Knife set the border between the Barrowlands and the sparsely forested lowlands ruled by House Manderly. At half the size of the Danube back on Earth, the White Knife was not a small river and until the rapids near the same latitude as Winterfell it was passable by even the largest medieval ships. From what I remembered of the books, the Manderlys had once hidden a fleet of warships in it during the War of Five Kings. This would have complicated overland passage for a medieval civilization... were we back on Earth and not a very different world.
The bridge linking the Barrowlands to Manderly lands had been built on a fairly narrow part of the river where the White Knife had worn a path between two hills. There the Northmen had built a bridge of stone elevated high enough for ships to pass underneath. That wasn't very unusual in and of itself, if not for two things. The least surprising was that the bridge was in excellent condition close to a thousand years after its construction. It was also wide enough and seemed strong enough for an army to march over it - or several modern trucks. The actual surprising part was its stone arc, which spanned well over four hundred feet. That might not seem very long at first glance... until one realized pre-industrial masonry on Earth only ever built arches a bit over half that length. Modern Chinese masonry could certainly match it, but that was with a modern understanding of physics, mathematics, materials science and computers to crunch numbers for you, not some medieval guys with picks, abacuses and mason lines.
I walked across the exceptional architectural feat, running my fingers across the parapet and prodding the structure with my magic. Unlike the tombs of the First Men, the structure was surprisingly receptive to the examination. The grey-white stone that made the bridge look cleaner and shinier than it actually was echoed the ancient fire that made it, a shadow of volcanic heat stirring under my fingertips. It was neither limestone nor marble but grey granite, which would have made it a bitch to work with medieval tools but partially explained the bridge's durability. The real secret however was in the mortar fusing the well-cut stones together. Translating the vague impressions I got from my magic through the lens of modern geology, I was fairly sure that one part of the mixture was lime with some gypsum and three parts felt far more fiery in nature, almost like volcanic glass ground to dust and ashes.
Huh... weren't those the components of Roman cement? I wondered if the Northmen even remembered how to make it these days. Beyond the obvious benefits in large-scale construction, I was pretty sure that this type of cement had limited regenerative capabilities that let it last for millennia while more modern construction materials would collapse much sooner from cumulative microfractures. Of more immediate use, a construction material that was seventy-five percent ground volcanic glass might have interesting interactions with the Others and their magic. Given the Long Night was less than a decade away, this needed further testing. I made a mental note to capture an Other when my magic had grown enough attempting it would not be an elaborate form of suicide.
Still twenty miles away from White Harbor to the south, I got off the road and marched down the riverbank. By the time I was far enough away from the road that a campfire would not be seen by any travelers, Featherball had come back with her third catch for the night, a decently sized squirrel. I gave the small hare and chicken she'd caught previously back to her and she tore into all three with gusto while I started a decent campfire and dug into my own meal of mutton, cheese and flatbread. The mutant swamp owl stared once at my food, hooted derisively, then decapitated the squirrel and swallowed its head whole.
I sighed in relief at the continued evidence that Featherball could find her own food out there, and not just because the still-growing ten-pound bird ate more than I did every day. I'd had no idea what constituted proper food for an owl, let alone the mass of mutant weirdness that was Featherball. I'd been prepared to put a ritual sustenance spell together if I saw her losing weight outside the Neck, but I'd also had no idea how that would work on a growing animal. Would the magic generate new mass for Featherball's growth? Would she remain an eternally juvenile raptor? Would she become the world's first ever winged wight?
Instead of mentally wrestling with those questions and no answer in sight, I sat back against the trunk of the enormous pine providing cover for our little camp and reached out with magic towards the campfire. Not the flames themselves though, this was not another attempt at Pyromancy. No, my magic sought out the tiny little motes dancing close to the flames and suddenly my view of the world broke into a thousand thousand reflections I could make neither head nor tails of. Normally, sharing senses with an animal through a Greenseer's abilities was easy, the magic itself providing some sort of mental buffer or perhaps a translation that allowed the person warging said animal to instinctively adapt to wildly different senses without being overwhelmed. This was not so, here.
Taking over insects was incredibly easy; they had so little resistance to outside intrusion they might as well not be resisting at all and the only issue was using a light enough touch to not break them into useless wrecks. Even doing it to dozens, hundreds of insects at once did not need more than a small fraction of the effort to take a squirrel or rat and the insects being killed had no impact on my mind like an animal would have... probably because a human mind couldn't actually fit into them at all. But sharing the insects' senses? Even when trying to narrow my focus to a single insect it left me with a jumbled, incomprehensible mess and trying it with many insects at once had given me a headache each and every time.
Trying to control the moths drawn to the campfire worked only as long as I gave them simple, general orders, using the slightest of touches to shift their interest and attention. It was enough for rough movement, even general targeting of simple actions - land there, bite that - but sharing senses did not work and left both me and them disoriented for minutes. Trying to assume direct control made the little bugs sizzle and pop as if they'd flown into a fire. No wonder there hadn't been any insect wargs in the books.
I wondered whether it was truly impossible or it just required far more ability in Greensight than I possessed...
xxxxFeatherball woke me up before dawn by hooting next to my head. As alarm clocks went she left much to be desired, but made up for it by being more dangerous than a guard dog and a hell of a lot more perceptive. Having her around made sleeping in relative safety easier; whether it was worth getting laughed at by a bird several times a day was anybody's guess.
After burying the remains of our campfire and erasing most traces of our presence in the area, I stripped down to my smallclothes and jumped into the river. The waters of the White Knife were cold enough to make a Northman blanch at the idea of a bath but once again magic saved the day, allowing me to wash off many days' worth of dirt, sweat and oil off my hair, skin and undergarments. Hygiene wasn't the issue, what with magic capable of killing any bug or microbe on contact far more easily than it could men, but I refused to enter the city caked in grime like some savage.
I got off the river's freezing waters and drew on my pyromancy - hard. In moments my skin, hair and smallclothes were steaming. In about a minute I was clean, dry and warm, with my undergarments having that pleasant smell of freshly ironed linen. My hair remained perfectly straight instead of frizzing out horribly due to all my sorcerous physical enhancement from the flames, as was right and proper. I wondered whether Melisandre used similar means to maintain her looks or relied on glamour spells instead and made a mental note to ask when we eventually met.
Four hours later, Featherball gave me a bird's eye view of White Harbor, the only true city in the North. It was built on a pair of hills where the White Knife met the sea, a cluster of bright white buildings two miles across and enclosed by walls of stone forty feet high and fifteen thick. Two keeps dominated the cityscape, built on the city's two hills; one bright and grand and palatial with flags depicting a trident-wielding merman flying over its battlements, the other black and dour and beginning to crumble, with houses stuck to its outer walls like barnacles as it presided over the harbor. A wide, slightly elevated, paved avenue linked the two keeps, two dozen roads branching out from it and through the rest of the city, while a so-called godswood with an enormous weirwood sprouted within the crumbling keep's walls.
The city's harbor was more than a mile wide and split in two, a thirty-foot wall with sixteen towers separating the inner harbor from the outer. Hundreds of ships and boats of all sizes made their home in the two harbors, several of them under construction in the integrated shipyards. The harbor was incredibly busy, an entire market district attached to it providing space for merchants, traders and artisans of all types not merely to exchange goods and commodities but to make them. Through Featherball's superhumanly sharp eyes I could see wood and wool, hides and cheese, crab, fish, clams, cod, eels, herring, lampreys, lobster, mussels, salmon, whitefish, and winkles traded by the bushels and tons. Beer barrels were loaded onto ships to make the journey to distant shores while spices, lace and silk, pottery and porcelain and Myrish glasswork were unloaded in much smaller quantities and escorted to tradehouses under guard. Silverwork was prevalent too, in unusually large quantities for any medieval city let alone one in the North.
It struck me then that White Harbor was probably one of the richest places in all of Westeros. At less than half the size of King's Landing, it seemed to have a disproportionately large trade traffic, much of it in goods of higher quality than I'd expected. While this was good and well for the North in general and the Manderlys in particular, it wasn't good for my goals. The price of simple passage to Essos would almost certainly be higher here than in King's Landing because not only would the number of travelers crossing over would be fewer, but also most ships would be exclusively merchant vessels rather than transports.
On the other hand, a woman of Valyrian looks would be less conspicuous here than in the capital; several people on the ship Featherball was flying over that very moment had the same pale skin and white hair as I did, if not in quite as intensely exotic shade as mine. It was the same ship that had unloaded decorative glassware to the local merchants, as well as several crates full of glass panes that were currently being inspected by city guardsmen and a fat guy with golden curls, a very official-looking robe... and a chain hanging from his neck. Hmm...
The scene gave me an idea and as I walked closer to the city's northern gates I examined its feasibility from various angles. If it panned out it would solve my cash problem not just for the trip but for the foreseeable future. Before I could second-guess myself into choice paralysis, I closed my eyes and brought up the vision of the Fourteen Flames. There had only been a single bandit in the hundred miles since the crossroad, a robber knight Featherball had caught extorting money from passing merchants. He'd died a quiet death in his sleep when his campfire had gone out, and along with his warhorse and some hunting through the past week I'd finally reached the next milestone.
I'd been saving the accumulated life-force for almost a week now, unable to make a decision. Putting it all into War to get the experiences of a seasoned knight had been inviting... but so had been half a dozen more options, including the all-around boost of Nobility, becoming good enough in Greensight to finally bond Featherball properly, or finally getting to speak Valyrian through Learning. None of those options would solve my immediate cash problem though, so I'd been procrastinating on making the investment. But now? If what I had in mind worked, the golden Dragon and two dozen silver Moons I'd gotten from the robber knight would pale in comparison.
Two flames burned brighter, one a fiery orange-red, the other the dull gleam of cast iron...
Finding a proper, unoccupied beach for my purposes did not take long. Much of the coastline directly next to White Harbor was taken up by the harbour itself of course and there was enough ship and boat traffic close to the city that trying anything magical there would draw too much attention, but with a pair of pigeons to serve as scouts while Featherball was busy I found a likely place before my annoying companion was back from business.
Said 'beach' was a few hundred yards of sand and pebbles below a thirty-foot cliff, with no land access, no nearby roads and no reason for anyone to come by boat. It being over ten miles on the east of White Harbor helped; even smugglers wouldn't use the place with far more approachable locations closer to the city proper. In short it was perfect, so without further ado I conjured a ladder and climbed down to it with nobody the wiser.
Conjuring objects of solid flame was one area where my Pyromancy had grown the most after the last milestone. Where once I'd been able to shape fire into simple, small, handheld objects, I could now extend my flames a significant distance and volume and give them more useful shapes. They weren't truly solid objects, of course. My magic held the flames together, giving them a semblance of solidity. A thirty-foot ladder I could actually climb was about the upper limit for both how far such magic could reach and the solidity it would allow; condensing and simplifying the shape would let me make the equivalent of a spear while making the construct as weak as cardboard would allow for a ten-foot wall but in both those cases there was a strain and the spell was quite tiring. Proper battle-magic was still beyond reach, if only just.
Letting the ladder vanish behind me, I conjured a small bucket and started filling it with beach sand via a conjured spade. Having tools on demand was so much easier than trying to do everything by hand, or having to carry a whole backpack of stuff I might only ever use once in a blue moon. Visions of apprentice Pyromancers from Old Valyria had revealed such conjured equipment to be a staple of basic stone-shaping, which made sense. Those people had worked with volcanic glass, and obsidian's melting point was higher than iron's. Nobody would waste Valyrian Steel on mere tools and apprentices wouldn't be able to afford it in any case, so they had to use something else that would not melt to shape the molten stone until they got skilled enough to shape it by magic alone.
I sat down on a boulder, letting the spade fade while having the bucket of sand float before me. Another advantage of conjured items was that the same magic that held them together could hold them in place. The ladder I'd used to climb down earlier could just as easily have let me climb into thin air, standing upright with nothing to lean against because hey, it was made of fire. Making it solid at all meant holding it in place with magic to begin with. Beyond the obvious applications in everyday life, the floating also had an advantage in my current project. Touching nothing but air and being solid flame to begin with, the bucket was an excellent insulator.
Using magic, at least when it came to Pyromancy, felt as fatiguing as physical exercise. Drawing upon my magic at about half my maximum output was the equivalent of a steady jog. Not just in tiredness but also in heat, my own body steadily warming up as I kept casting. The sand in the bucket began to sizzle and smoke, its water content rapidly evaporating... but rapidly was a relative term. Most spells didn't last very long at least when it came to casting them. Burning someone in a fight? A second of effort. Starting a campfire? Maybe a couple of seconds until the wood caught. Melting a handful of stone or metal? The work of a minute. Healing most injuries? Didn't take much longer. It was... not exactly easy to handle that kind of effort, but not particularly hard either.
Heating a dozen pounds of sand to their melting point was a longer-term effort. It was less about a burst of power and more about a constant moderate effort. Not a ritual - it wasn't anything that complex - but a steady, controlled output as the sand first sizzled and steamed, then started to smoke with tiny organic bits in it blackening and burning to ash and an acrid stench fouling everything, then a subtle reddish glow as the grains started to gleam and glitter brighter and brighter and began to melt.
The hotter the sand became the faster it lost heat to the environment even with how insulating the conjured bucket was. The speed its temperature increased quickly tapered off after the ten-minute mark, slowly inching upwards as I used magic not to heat it faster but to limit the heat loss. By the time it started to melt and bubble into a glowing orange sludge I was both sweaty and panting as if I'd been jogging the whole time, and my body felt uncomfortably warm as it channeled that level of magic for so long. A memory from the books came to me, of Melisandre maintaining multiple glamours at once when she disguised Mance Rayder into Rattleshirt and Rattleshirt into Mance Rayder to fake Mance's execution. After hours of keeping that up she'd felt almost like burning from within even with a focus crystal to help.
I wondered how I compared to the Red Priestess magic-wise. What I was doing was a hell of a lot simpler than glamour, but it probably required more overt power. Or perhaps not; I wasn't casting magic on other people, one of whom would be certainly fighting against it, screaming that he wasn't Mance Rayder as he was being executed with nobody able to hear his screams. And the rocks were within my reach rather than being manhandled by others, or in the middle of a normal pyre some distance away. On second thought, maybe I'd go through multiple further milestones before challenging the centuries-old mage to any magical contest.
After making sure the sand had been thoroughly melted to the consistency of warm honey, I conjured a ladle and started stirring slowly. This helped air bubbles move to the surface as the material slowly cooled into a mostly transparent, glowing orange mass. Once I was certain all of the trapped air had been removed, leaving a uniform mass behind, I started slowly leeching away heat while maintaining as even a temperature as possible while the mass cooled. According to my visions as both a pyromancer and a craftswoman, as even cooling as possible would prevent the formation of cracks. The experience of how to do just that was there thanks to the visions but the muscle memory was missing, leading to several mistakes I had to fix by reheating the mixture and starting the cooling process from the beginning.
In the end, my first attempt at glassworking took well over an hour for nothing more complex than a glass disc a bit over a foot wide and nearly six inches thick. Thanks to beginner glassworking skills from Craftsmanship and judicious application of Pyromancy, the whole thing ended with neither cracks nor bubbles nor an uneven mess, but it came with the understanding that complex shapes would be harder to manage.
Before trying for anything complex though, I would need a glass that wasn't a barely transparent brown mess.
xxxx
My second attempt was barely better than the first. On the thought that trace amounts of organic material, dust and other additives were the cause of the brown glass, I spent half an hour picking the cleanest patches of sand on the beach and putting them through a conjured sieve to boot before using them to make more glass. The result was a clear, dark yellow material almost like amber in coloration that in no way was of competitive quality compared to the goods Featherball had seen in White Harbor's market.
Speaking of the winged menace herself, she turned up that evening with a pair of giant crabs, one hanging from each talon. They looked fresh and juicy but not alive, which meant her finding them on a nearby beach or the White Knife's banks was highly unlikely.
"Let me guess," I asked her with a scowl. "You stole these from the fish market? You do realise we're trying to keep a low profile?"
She hooted derisively.
"No, stealing is worse than killing bandits. There's money involved." She hooted some more. "Right, I'm sure nobody noticed the owl with the five-foot wingspan raiding the largest market in the city." She clicked her beak and puffed up, obviously annoyed. "Yes, you were very stealthy in the swamps. A city of bright white buildings and streets full of people is not a swamp though."
She flicked her tail feathers and turned her back on me, then cracked the first crab's shell open and started to feast.
"Fine, you can jut stay away from me while I'm in the city. Nobody should know we're travelling together just yet." Though that was bound to change if Featherball kept raiding food markets in the future. But hey, that was future-Flann's problem. Current-Flann was too busy trying to make proper glass.
My third, fourth and fifth attempts recycled the dark yellow glass from the second attempt. I was pretty sure by now that the beach sand in the area just didn't have a high enough silica content to make clear glass. My first attempt to rectify that involved flattening the molten glass into a thinner disc and then spinning it rapidly for a good ten minutes; an ad-hoc attempt at centrifugal separation. It was partially successful, allowing the removal of dark brown slag and leaving behind a much clearer pale yellow glass. The other two attempts leaned more on magic, relying on Valyrian stone-shaping to tinker with the glass mixture and extract unwanted material.
This is where the difference between vision-experiences and actual skill were made clear. In theory, I should have been capable of pulling quartz, the primary component of volcanic glass, out of any mixture of molten stone with my level of Pyromancy. The reality was that the process was more of a trial and error, me mostly fumbling while trying to copy what I'd seen in the visions without any practice to back my theoretical abilities. There was still improvement, repeated efforts removing more and more impurities until a transparent pale yellow glass was the final result. It was good enough for artwork - slightly better than some of the glass statuettes and decorative cups sold in White Harbor's markets and far better than the yellow or light green panes of forest glass meant for the glass houses - but still fell well short of the few examples of Myrish glass Featherball had found, elaborate statuettes and clear mirrors that were as clear as Bohemian Crystal had been back on Earth.
More than a little frustrated at the sub-par results despite my access to bloody magic, I decided to tuck in for the night and keep working in the morning. I was too tired to pull off a strong heating spell by that point, in any event...
xxxx
"I'm a fucking idiot," I told nobody in particular as I held the grey-white lump of stone up to the sun.
For three days I'd been working with sand, repeatedly going through impurity extraction processes via both mechanics and magic, falling short of the clarity of Myrish glass time and again. Without access to lead oxide or raw materials of far superior quality than common beach sand, the best I'd managed was a pale yellow crystal that might catch a middling price for its high transparency but would not be anything exceptional.
"I should have never started with sand at all," I muttered and quickly gathered more of the greyish pebbles. From her perch on one of the rare trees sprouting so close to the waterline, Featherball lazily opened one eye, stared at me for a second or two, then went back to sleep. Ignoring the winged menace just as it ignored me, I filled my conjured bowl with similar stones and started heating them.
Lacking water content of any significance, they warmed up a lot faster than the sand had. Then they started to crack and splinter as they got hotter and hotter, spitting sparks as they did so. The more the heating continued the more the stones shattered, a few times even violently, much like glass objects would have when heated unevenly. That was only to be expected. After all, flint and glass had several things in common.
The sedimentary cryptocrystalline mineral that had once been used as both a weapons material and a way to start fires in the early stone age was a stone almost every traveller in Westeros was familiar with. Cheap and fairly common, it was still used for starting fires more often than any other method. What those people didn't know about flint was that it was almost pure quartz, well over ninety percent silica. The only significant impurities were water and calcium oxide, at less than three percent each. The heating process got rid of the small amount of water first, leaving behind a slightly translucent rock of tiny quartz crystals. Then, just as with the sand before, said crystals started to melt.
Unlike before, there was no other significant component in the mixture, just molten silicon dioxide. The melting point of quicklime was about a thousand degrees higher than that of quartz and while it was somewhat soluble to molten silicon dioxide I found drawing out a single impurity in limited amounts far easier than doing the same to half a dozen different materials making about half of the glass mixture. With the bits of pure white dust falling away, what was left was a brightly glowing transparent fluid; almost pure molten quartz.
It responded to my limited stone-shaping magic far better than anything else I'd tried it on before, letting me shape the stone almost as easily as I could my constructs of solid flame. Ancient Valyrian mages had made statues and other elaborate decorations out of fused stone; while the amounts of molten quartz I could manipulate were laughable compared to what they'd shaped into entire castles, bridges and other titanic edifices, my control of its shapes was just as good. At my mental command it stretched into a disc three feet wide and a quarter-inch thick, squeezed itself into a sphere, grew sharp angles and became a pyramid, then under the course of a minute assumed the crude facsimile of a dragon in flight.
Small details still eluded me and the process of magical shaping was not very quick, but there I had two advantages any glassblower would kill for; conjured tools that would remain undamaged by the heat, and a heat immunity that let me shape the softened material like clay with my bare fingers. Almost giddy at the breakthrough, I drained the heat off the molten material via magic, cooling it down in well under a minute.
Normal glass would have shattered. Fused quartz, having a much lower coefficient of thermal expansion, simply solidified in the shape it had been given with no issues. The result was a crystal clear solid, with better clarity than even Bohemian Crystal back on Earth, or the Myrish glass examples in White Harbor's markets. But those were not the only advantages. Grabbing the dozen-pound sphere, I slammed it against an equally-sized rock. The sandstone shattered under the blow, but the orb of fused quart weathered it intact. Compared to the glasses available in this tech level, fused quartz was about an order of magnitude stronger and tougher. Things made of it would not be nearly as fragile, which was always a plus but especially in the more dangerous environment of Westeros.
Having gotten my first great success after days of work, I took a break to rest, eat and plot. Now, what would be the most impressive thing to do with the best glass Westeros had ever seen?