Chapter 11: Larys Strong I View contentPersianPrince69699/11/2025Add bookmark#16116 AC
There were always secrets in King's Landing – too many to count, too small to matter, until one day they didn't. Larys Strong had learned early that secrets were like weeds: left untended, they could strangle a garden; tended properly, they could feed a man for life.
He moved slowly through the eastern gallery of the Red Keep, cane ticking softly against the tiles, the faint limp that came with him everywhere turning his every walk into a challenge. The court swarmed around him – servants, guards, maesters' boys carrying parchments – and not one of them truly saw him. That was his gift. A man overlooked could hear more than a man feared.
He had spent the morning in the armoury yard, where two squires argued over a dented breastplate that once belonged to Ser Thaddeus Fossoway. The red apple Fossoways accused the green apples of stealing it; the green apples insisted it had been "misplaced" after the last tourney. Larys smiled and let them quarrel. Later, he would have the thing quietly returned to its owner – for a price. Fossoway pride was easily bruised and easily bought.
Earlier still, he'd spoken to a rare Qarthene merchant whose shipment of saffron had been "accidentally" impounded by the customs men on House Rosby's payroll. For two gold dragons, Larys had promised to find the paperwork that would free it. For four, he would forge new paperwork altogether. Rosby's captain of customs would receive a small purse to lose the correct records at the right time. The saffron would flow again, and both men would owe Larys more than they knew.
These were small games, yes – low fruit. But from small grafts grew mighty trees. A man who knew where the debts lay owned more power than a man who swung a sword.
He paused beneath the arch of the inner stair and watched two maids gossip by a window. They spoke of a knight from the Vale – young, handsome, freshly maimed in the melee. Ser Alard Corbray, struck by his own cousin's lance when the tilt went wrong. The poor fool would walk with a limp now. "Like Larys Clubfoot," one of them said, laughing softly.
Larys smiled faintly. "Not like me," he murmured once he had passed them.
The corridors thickened with nobles as he neared the Great Gallery. Music spilled faintly from within – a harpist plucking some Rhoynish air – and the scent of crushed sweetbay magnolia leaves drifted through the open windows. The day's heat still clung to the stone, the kind that made tempers thin and tongues loose. He liked such days best.
Everywhere there was talk. Of Lord Mooton, whose bastard son had stabbed a Braavosi sellsword in a gambling house. Of Lady Fell, whose husband had drowned hunting ducks in the Blackwater. Of the Dornish envoys, still stranded by "ill winds" that suspiciously followed any ship flying their colors. Of House Wendwater's ledger short ten thousand gold dragons – a mistake that could ruin them if the crown demanded repayment.
Every morsel is another coin in his invisible purse.
But what truly mattered, what made his blood hum, were the larger whispers – the ones that climbed the marble stairs to the royal chambers.
Rhaenyra Targaryen, princess and heir, bedding Ser Harwin Strong, his own brother. Gods help him, the whole Red Keep knew and pretended not to. The boy bastards – Jacaerys and Lucerys – bore the Velaryon name but none of the sea lord's face. Driftmark was raising sons that smelled of Harrenhal.
He should have been ashamed. He wasn't. Shame was for men who wasted opportunities. He wondered how far that rumor could travel if properly encouraged.
And before that, before Harwin, there had been talk of the Kingsguard – Ser Criston Cole, the untouchable knight, nearly seduced by the princess's honeyed words. The queen's handmaidens whispered that Rhaenyra had begged him in her chambers; the Septon claimed she had confessed to an "unmaidenly conduct." The truth mattered little.
He counted these stories as a merchant counts potential profits. Harwin's bastards were worth a hundred purses of gold each if handled right; Criston's near-fall from virtue, perhaps ten. Together, they could buy him a nice title, or at least a pretty small castle with a few villages full of happy serfs somewhere in the Reach.
Not yet, though. He wasn't fool enough to spend his treasure before the right buyer appeared. For now, he hoarded knowledge, polishing it until it gleamed. One day he'd trade it for something greater than coin – a chair in the council, perhaps, or the means to shape the kingdom from behind its curtains.
But before any of that, he needed a solid patron. And today's walk was toward a potential one. The second most-talked about princess of the realm – Viserra Targaryen.
Oh, and there were many things to talk about. On the verge of womanhood, young princes already caught glances of many men not only in the Red Keep, but across all of the realm. She was of average height for a woman grown and promised to get even taller. Slender and evenly built, her figure was marked by balance rather than excess. The lines of her body were smooth, unhurried – the movement of one accustomed to being watched. Her posture was relaxed but upright, suggesting self-assurance.
Her face was oval, with clear skin of a fair tone – the kind that should burn easily in the sun, but this had never happened to her, no matter how much she spent flying so close to it. The forehead was smooth, the brows finely shaped, giving the upper part of her face a calm intelligence. Her cheekbones were soft but distinct, lending quiet structure without sharpness.
Her eyes were large, almond-shaped, and burned with purple fire. They were set slightly wide, which only painters and sculptors could catch, and their gaze was direct, steady, often softened by the faint narrowing of her eyelids when she smiled. Her eyebrows were dark, naturally arched, and clearly defined, completing the balance of her expression, and giving her face some contrast.
Her nose was straight and proportionate, with a gentle curve that suited the symmetry of her features. Her lips were full and well-contoured, the corners tending slightly upward, which gave her face a habitual warmth, even in stillness. When she smiled, the effect was vivid – her entire expression seemed to open outward, alive with ease and brightness.
Her hair was thick, smooth, and of a silver tone; in movement, at night it caught shades from pale gold to honey. It was usually worn simply, without ornament – parted naturally or falling in soft waves.
Her neck was slender and long, the skin even; her shoulders modest in width, her arms graceful, the hands small but firm. The proportions of her figure – narrow waist, rounded hips – were classical, the sort often compared to sculpture, though without coldness. There was warmth in her form, a sense of vitality contained within restraint.
Altogether, her appearance carried a quiet completeness – the harmony of features that, though not dramatic, left a lasting impression. One felt that she belonged equally to light and to shadow: her beauty did not insist on itself, yet it remained vividly in memory.
She stood there, without company looking out of the window into the city. Larys bowed as deeply as his leg would allow.
"Princess," he said, voice silk over gravel. "It gladdens me to find you without the usual swarm of flatterers. The corridors breathe easier."
Viserra turned her head slightly, the movement smooth, feline. "I fear we haven't been introduced."
"Larys Strong, my lady," he said, hand on his chest. "At your service."
She inclined her head. "Viserra Targaryen. With what might I help you?"
They began walking. Her steps slowed – almost imperceptibly – to match his uneven pace. He noticed. He said nothing, but in the quiet of his chest, he thanked her. Small courtesies mattered; they revealed more than grand gestures.
"The court seems… restless these days," he offered. "Too many lords with nothing to do but trade jabs with each other. I fear the Red Keep may soon float away on hot air."
Viserra's mouth curved faintly. "Gossip is the only hastilude most courtiers can win at."
"Ah, but they're creative sort," said Larys. "Did you hear? Ser Tyland Lannister claims Lord Beesbury has been shorting the royal taxes. Beesbury insists it was only a clerical oversight. I daresay that's the first time in history a Lannister has cared about someone else's numbers."
Viserra chuckled softly. "And what of Lady Mallister's latest scandal? I hear she tried to hold a septon's sermon in her bedchamber."
"I did," said Larys. "A novel act of piety, if not prudence."
They shared the kind of smile that was polite enough to mean nothing and precise enough to mean everything.
Larys tapped his cane lightly on the floor. "You see, the court notices everything, even when it pretends not to."
Viserra's gaze slid toward him. "Are you going to say you've noticed my sister, Master Strong? Because if so, we'd best stop here."
He raised a brow. "Oh?"
"The King made his decree clear," she said lightly, though her words were sharp beneath. "Anyone who questions the legitimacy of my sister's children loses their tongue. I'm rather fond of mine. It's useful for tasting fresh fruit… Myrish wine… and conversation. I'd hate to see it gone."
For the first time, Larys's laugh escaped him – low, genuine. "Then I shall guard my own tongue as well. I've grown attached to it over the years."
"Good," she said, and the faintest glimmer of amusement crossed her features.
They walked in silence for a few paces. Aenyx's shadow drifted briefly over the window light as it passed above the Keep, the faint thrum of wings echoing like distant thunder.
Then Larys leaned slightly closer, his tone dropping. "Of course, there are other matters the court whispers of. Stranger ones. You've heard none of them, I take it?"
Viserra's glance was sidewise, wary but not surprised. "That depends. What matters?"
"Ah." His voice took on the conspirator's rhythm, calm, intimate. "They say a drunk guard swore he saw a man of green skin wandering near the godswood at night. They say the fellow vanished when challenged – as though swallowed by the roots. The maesters claim he'd drunk too much, but…" He shrugged. "Too many stories begin that way."
Viserra said nothing, her expression composed.
He continued. "Then there's the matter of the missing children. Servant boys, scullions, even an altar boy. Vanished these past months. The city's watch blames cutpurses and hunger, but the number grows. And the cells beneath the Keep – well, the gaolers claim sometimes a prisoner's chain is still warm, yet the man it held is gone. Doors locked, keys accounted for."
She stopped walking.
The light from the high window struck her hair, turning it to molten silver. When she spoke, her voice was mild but cold. "Are you in the habit of frightening royal daughters with wet-nurse tales, Master Strong?"
He inclined his head slightly. "Forgive me. A habit from the lower halls. I forget not everyone delights in scary tales."
Her eyes narrowed. "You don't forget."
He gave her a thin, approving smile. "And you, Princess, weigh. Which means we might be of service to each other."
Viserra didn't answer. She turned to the window beside them. Outside, the city lay spread in haze and shadow – a hundred thousand lives tangled below, gulls wheeling above the bay.
"I'm leaving soon," she said, eyes still on the city. "For Lys. Then Volantis. The king believes my mother's family can serve as a bridge to the Free Cities. The Stepstones have rotted into a stalemate – Corlys holds a few rocks, the pirates and rogue mercenaries hold the rest, and no one remembers why they're dying there. The Triarchy thinks it's won. Dorne has stopped paying its share. And my uncle Daemon…" She hesitated, then smiled faintly. "My uncle has gone to Pentos with his new bride."
Larys's eyes narrowed a fraction. "The Lady Laena Velaryon."
"So they say."
"Fortunate for her, perhaps less so for Pentos."
"Perhaps," Viserra said, turning back to him. "But the war will end soon. Or fade, which is the same thing. And when it does, I imagine the king will have less patience for whispers."
"Then we should talk before that patience returns," Larys said.
"Or after," she countered, and began walking again.
He followed. "When will you return?"
"When the world grows tired of me."
Larys smiled. "That may take a while."
Viserra glanced at him, the faintest curve of humor at her lips. "Then it seems you'll have time to polish your crumbs."
She reached the turning of the corridor, where light and shadow crossed like blades. For a moment, she looked back at him – poised and still.
"Until I return, Master Strong," she said. "Try not to go missing from your cell."
Larys bowed. "If I do, Princess, I promise to haunt only those worth the visit."
Chapter 12: Caranthir Ar-Feiniel II View contentPersianPrince69699/11/2025Add bookmark#21116 AC
The wind smelled of salt and heat, the taste of the Narrow Sea rolling under silver wings. The dragon glided low enough that its shadow brushed the waves – a long, serpentine specter outlined in reflected sunlight. Aenyx's scales shimmered with faint hues of pearl and frost; his second pair of wings beat in counter-time to the first, catching the sea breeze in a strange pattern.
On his back, the girl they called Viserra Targaryen rode with the ease of one born to it. Her silver hair streamed behind her like molten silk, her back straight, eyes fixed ahead on the eastern horizon where a scatter of distant lights marked Lys.
Inside, Caranthir watched the world in silence.
He no longer bothered pretending wonder at the flight – the thrill of air and speed had long since dulled. The dragon, though magnificent, was still flesh. It breathed, it hungered, it tired. But the bond between them was something more. When his thoughts stirred, the dragon's heart followed. When he looked down, Aenyx's head tilted likewise, two gazes aligned upon a world too frail to deserve them.
Below sprawled the coastal roads of the Stormlands and the wracked fingers of Shipbreaker Bay – fields, hamlets, torches, dust. Humans, toiling like insects around their hives. Each flicker of light was a pitiful attempt to claim any meaning. He studied them as a naturalist studies a nest of vermin – with curiosity devoid of pity.
He had walked among them for more than a decade now, smiled, spoken their clumsy tongues, mimicked their behaviour. He had almost perfected the art of passing as one of them. Yet every action was still a small humiliation.
Their kind thinks the soul lives in the heart, he thought. Of course they would. Bloede dh'oine in their ignorance mistake motion for meaning.
When he'd first opened his eyes in this flesh, he had marveled briefly at the sensation – texture, taste, the ache of hunger. Now he understood it as a chain. A prison built to move through a lesser world.
The Valyrians, though… they had almost escaped that prison. He had realized it years ago, in Volantis, when he had first slipped into the endless libraries beyond Black Walls. There he had read fragments no maester in Westeros would ever see – the private tablets of dragonlords, obsidian archives half-burned and half-erased by time. The glyphs were wrong for human hands, spiraled in fractal symmetry, requiring three perspectives to read fully.
Not human writing. Not a human species.
The revelation had struck him with cold certainty.
They were not of this sphere.
They had come with the Conjunction, as his kind had once done in another world – not many, only a remnant stranded here, forced to breed with the local stock to survive. But their first generations had remembered what they were: a ruling species, a master race. They had built Valyria not as men build, but as gods do – in fire and crystal logic. Their dragons were not beasts; they were engineered extensions, living vessels of will. Symbiotic dominion.
And then… dilution. Decay. The bloodlines softened, the full symbiosis broke. They grew sentimental, human, impure. It disgusted him to think of it. The dragonlords had enslaved millions, and yet in the end, they had enslaved themselves too.
He would not repeat that mistake.
When Aenyx's wings flared over Lys, the city bloomed beneath him – a lattice of white marble bridges, domed palaces, and canals gleaming under torchlight. The air shimmered with fragrances and songs, masking the stench of the lower docks. From above, it looked immaculate. From within, it was rotten.
Lys had always been a whore dressed as a queen. Beautiful, yes, but beauty bred for sale. Even its language sounded like seduction. He learned it from this body's mother.
He felt the dragon's mind brush against his own, restless from the proximity of so much noise.
"Easy," he whispered in High Valyrian. His voice was smooth, melodic, perfectly human. "They will stare, but they will not touch."
Aenyx snorted a puff of steam and circled down toward the landing tower, used as an elite brothel since the days of Doom. Yet her grand-uncle purchased it for their family not so long ago. When they touched the stone, the attendants ran to their places, bowing low, eyes wide at the sight of her.
Her. Always her.
The fiction persisted.
"Princess Viserra!" cried the first servant on duty. "By the Seven and all the gods of the Narrow Sea, Lys welcomes you home!"
She dismounted lightly, her special rider-gown flowing like water. Every movement practiced, every glance warm and composed. Behind her, Aenyx folded his wings with grace and lowered his head. The dragon's presence silenced the dock – even the whores along the nearest balconies stopped mid-song.
Caranthir gave them the smile they expected – radiant, sincere, touched with the divine aura they saw in all Targaryens. Inside, he felt only contempt. These were men who sold their daughters for money and their sons for power. Their loyalty lasted as long as their appetites.
But the act had to be flawless. Always flawless.
Maerano Rhaelys awaited her at the palace steps, wrapped in flowing silk of indigo and white, his hair bound with gold filigree. He bowed low before her, though not so low as a servant.
"Your Grace," he said in perfect High Valyrian. His eyes glimmered with moisture. "To see a dragon above Lys again… it is to see our ancestors' dream fulfilled. You have done what all of us only dared to wish."
Viserra – Caranthir – inclined her head with the grace of one acknowledging worship. "It was your blood that dreamt it, great-uncle. I only made it thanks to your efforts and generations of those who came before."
He saw the pride bloom in the old man's face, almost childlike. Maerano Rhaelys had been First Magister once, one of the last men in Lys to speak the old Valyrian fluently. In family tradition, he had spent his life chasing relics of that lost greatness – scrolls, sigils, shards of dragonbone carved into furniture. To him, Viserra's visit was not political. It was a prophecy fulfilled.
As they walked through the opulent corridors of his estate, courtiers whispered behind them. "The girl of the flame," someone said. "The silver daughter of the dragon." Another murmured, "They say her blood burns hotter than fire."
Caranthir allowed himself a quiet smile. How eager they were to mythologize. Humans needed things beyond them the way children needed mothers – to feel safe in their smallness and insignificance.
They dined under high arched ceilings painted with the conquests of old Valyria. Golden light shimmered across crystal glasses, reflecting off the dragon-shaped ornaments that adorned every column. Maerano spoke of Lys's prosperity, of trade routes reopened since the Stepstones had quieted, of how Volantis grew restless but cautious.
Viserra listened, her face a calm mask of empathy. Inside, Caranthir analyzed.
Volantis – expansionist, greedy, but fractured. Lys – soft, rich, perfectly placed between ambition and seduction. Myr and Tyrosh – perpetually jealous, perpetually vulnerable. They were not states. They were bodies asking to be dissected.
"My brother must be proud," Maerano said warmly. "The King of Westeros smiles upon you, I hear. And the smallfolk adore your dragon. There are songs of you in the inns from Winterfell to Oldtown."
"Songs fade," she replied, soft but steady.
"Said like a true dragonlord! Indeed, let the small people have their tales!" he said and laughed to his own joke.
Dragonlord. The word lingered in the air like incense. Caranthir let it roll in his mind with quiet satisfaction. It fit him – perfectly, naturally, as if the world itself had waited for someone worthy to wear it again.
He stayed by the balcony after the feast, watching the moon's reflection tremble across the water. Beyond that horizon lay the Basilisk Isles, festering in the southern fogs – a scattered kingdom of fever, pirates, and ruin. But among them lay Gogossos, the city that haunted every scrap of Valyrian record.
The maesters called it a graveyard, but the truth was older. The Womb of Monsters – so the dragonlords had named it themselves. It had begun as a penal colony of Valyria, a place to which their outcasts and criminals were sent: failed sorcerers, dangerous alchemists, bloodmages who had gone too far even by Valyrian measure. There, far from the Freehold's heart, they built their laboratories into the stone and began their unsanctioned work.
They called their creations experiments. The rest of the world called them abominations. Human flesh fused with beast, wings sewn to bones, scales grafted to skin. And though the Doom came and the Freehold burned, Gogossos endured – thriving for a short time, trading in flesh and fear until the black plague from Sothoryos swept through its harbours. It did not cleanse the city; it merely thinned it. Nine of every ten died, the tenth was left changed. The survivors were said to look like abominations.
Caranthir planned to go there before Volantis – a detour of a few days, but perhaps worth centuries. If the Valyrians had left even fragments of their laboratories, their obsidian archives or their surgical vaults, he could test the truth of his theory. The dragonlords had not been men who mastered magic; they had been designed for it. Perhaps kin to his own kind – the Aen Elle or Aen Seidhe, or the Night Courts of the Vampires – or something wholly apart: a fire-born species spawned here through the same Conjunction that had scattered the spheres.
He would learn which.
And perhaps he would find some wealth, enough to begin laying down his future plans. Gold, gemstones, relics – some probably remained buried under the city's ashes. And, should he find one of the old blood forges intact, he could start rebuilding the craft they had forgotten.
The sailors' tales of Gogossos spoke of twisted guardians – chimeras of horn and feather and scale. If their forms matched those of the cockatrices and basilisks he remembered from older worlds, his conviction would be absolute. The Conjunction was real.
Aenyx stirred below, coils shifting, eyes like mirrors. He had felt the spark of his rider's intent. Their minds brushed – images passed between them: dark towers, pools of green fire, the taste of old blood.
Caranthir's lips moved, and the words came in the crystalline cadence of the Aen Elle tongue: "Bâl'thel, Melethraen. Caedh anor."
The dragon blinked, slow and knowing. Caranthir turned his gaze toward the sea. Award ReplyReport49PersianPrince69699/11/2025Add bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 13: Caranthir Ar-Feiniel III View contentPersianPrince69699/11/2025Add bookmark#22116 AC
The Basilisk current ran warm and sluggish, a fever in the sea. Aenyx skimmed its skin without effort, pearl scales taking the greenish light and breaking it into knives. Far off, low pirate hulls shouldered through haze – patched sails, red lanterns swaying like infected eyes. They saw the dragon and broke in panic, keels slewing, oars splashing in terrified unison. Caranthir did not even count them. Vermin scattering when the hawk casts a shadow.
Gogossos rose from the vapors by degrees: first the stump of a tower shaped like a claw, then the black teeth of collapsed walls, then the thing itself – city and scab, glossy where jungle crept down with wet leaves, matte where ash ate the stone. The air thickened with rot and orchids. Smoke drifted without a source, as if the island exhaled old furnaces.
He took one slow circle and saw movement in the streets: pale shapes darting between toppled colonnades, torch-points worming along old causeways, something hunched and many-limbed dragging a net of bones. He noted them as a surveyor notes errata on a map. The landing tower he wanted still stood on the harbor's inner rim – a spire of fused black dragonstone, its flanks crazed with ancient heat-ripples. Once, dragons had folded themselves to its ledges like cloth. Now, strangler-vines wrapped the crown.
Aenyx came down the lee side, talons clanging once on the lip. The sound went nowhere. Inside the tower the air ate noise; even the dragon's breath seemed swallowed before it left his mouth. Caranthir slid from the saddle. The stone under his palm was cold – not merely cooled by wind, but empty of sun, as if it remembered a deeper temperature and refused the day.
He paused in the hush. No gull-cry, no insect. Only the slow click of Aenyx's throat.
The tower's lower arch had been sealed clumsily long ago – chunks of broken lintel mortared with slag. He set his hand to the ruin and felt the seams, the age-soft fatigue in the joinery. This would not take much.
He breathed in, tasting copper that did not come from his own veins. Not here. Not now. The final price his victims in King's Landing paid did not go in vain. Remembering the rituals he touched a bag on his hip. The blood had to be very young for its creation – untangled by vice, still bright with that particular sting of first breath and milk. He had learned, in the past life, that certain works asked less for quantity than for a note in the blood's music. Pure timbre. The maesters would have called it nonsense; men always did when their weak reasons failed them. He had fed the sigils until they held, and he had hidden every trail. Which was why Larys Strong's idle catalog of missing boys and warm chains had interested him more than it should have. A useful nose on a useful hound – or a hound to be drowned later. He had not decided yet.
He lifted his left hand and drew a short, curt figure in the air. Aard – but pared to its bone, a simple repelling pulse, no flourish. The glyph kindled on his skin like frost drawn in reverse; the tower's face shivered.
"Býthir."
The air went concussive and inward, then outward. The patched masonry blew – not as shrapnel, but as tired gravel giving up its pretense. A gust of dust and old bat droppings whirled past him. Inside: night. Not darkness as men meant; this was simply the unlit. His pupils spread to thin silver slits. The world came back in charcoal layers: stair-curl, lintel-scar, rafter shadow.
He stepped through.
The first room had been a waiting hall once; benches fused to the walls still held the impressions of long-extinct patterns. Aenyx's outline filled the doorway behind him, then withdrew. Caranthir took the spiral stair up, testing weight, hearing mortar groan and then acquiesce. On the fourth landing he found the keeper's niche – hooks for harness, a rack for iron spikes, a niche of oils. Rancid shadows clung to the flasks. Nothing worth taking.
But the fifth level gave him what he wanted. A little chamber half fallen inward, the far wall laced with creepers that had forced their way through stone. On a squat pedestal lay a thing the color of coal that had just seen rain: a glass candle. Unlit. Whole. He lifted it and felt the faintest grit under his skin, like static finding a path. He smiled. Not because it would work – he doubted it had sung to anyone in this world since the Doom – but because it could, which meant its lore might still be read. He slipped it into the bag at his hip.
The bag yawned more than it opened; something like breath came out and then went in again. A door was not a metaphor. It was a door. Beyond the mouth, a cool dim lay – stone shelves, lampstand, the beginning of the private vault he'd carved in the Red Keep's underbelly and smothered under layers of misdirection. Glutted on small lives, the portal held without complaint. It would need feeding again, soon. Children's blood kept the hinge supple in a way nothing else did.
He found books on the next level. Ten, which in a place like this might as well have been a hundred. Two had rotted to edges and lint. Three fell into slices at a touch, laminae of knowledge dissolving into filth. But five kept their spines. He smelled the scripts before he could read them: fish-oil ink, obsidian dust, a binding resin that had petrified into sugar. He slid them, one by one, into the bag's manageable night.
In a lower store he found a map. Not a map, exactly: a journal with a folded folio tucked inside. He knelt and turned it out carefully. The vellum had gone translucent in places. The hand was neat, clerkly Valyrian. Landmarks: a temple with a many-mouthed brazier; the Hall of Flesh-Shapers; the bank-vaults at the plaza's root; the Colonnade of Wings; the Canal of Ashes. Little notes in the margin: beware the wells; the seventh stair is false; the west culvert breeds stinging fog. He admired the writer without liking him.
He descended, passed again through the soundless entry, and stood a moment with his hand on Aenyx's jaw. "Stay." The dragon obeyed out of understanding, not training.
The streets took him. The jungle had made an agreement with the city – creeper for cornice, fig-root for column, leaf for lintel – and the city had signed without reading. He crossed under the broken arch of the Colonnade of Wings. Carvings along the tilt showed dragons with tails braided into scripts. He ran his fingers along the scale-work and felt an old vibration as one feels a cathedral through the pews.
They found him at the Temple of Fire and Flesh. Seven, maybe eight, the first knot; blades of bone, a trident that had started life as a pitchfork. Their torsos were netted with scars, their teeth brown. They came at him in that half-lope of men who have learned to charge and hesitate at the same time.
He did not waste a word.
He planted the Yrden sign with a flick of his wrist – runes sketched in pale light on the temple flagging. The lead attacker crossed the boundary and slowed, not because the world had changed, but because his body forgot how to insure muscle against will. Caranthir stepped in as gently as a dancer stepping to a new measure and cut. The castle-steel sword kissed the man's throat and kept moving. Two steps to the side; a thrust into ribs; a pivot under a spear, weight on the ball of the foot, a small Aard to the knee – bone powdered, a square of light, a fall. He named nothing, he counted nothing. He simply adjusted until the floor stopped moving.
Eight, he thought after, looking at them as he wiped the blade on a strip of rag someone had once worn as a sash. The sword sipped, and he felt his reservoir ease a little, like a dry pool darkening by a finger's breadth where a trickle finds it. Not even a percent of what he was, no. But less insultingly small than it had been that morning.
He went through the temple. The brazier at its center had been shaped like a flower that never stopped blooming; channels led from its petals to gutters in the floor. On the walls, shallow bowls – ablution cups – still smelled faintly of rendered fat. In one of the side chapels, iron fittings were fixed to a stone slab. He touched the holes where pins had been driven. The old use was clear. He had learned it long ago in places humans did not know how to pronounce.
Outside, the wind moved without sound. He followed the journal's direction along a cracked canal where ash had piled and hardened like snow and then been broken by roots rising. Twice he saw movement on roofs – two-leg silhouettes, hunched and quick. Once a net fell in front of him and hissed where it touched the flagstones. The fibers had been resin-soaked – adhesive enough to snag a man by his boots. He walked around it.
They learned, then. The ambush at the Grand Library tried earnest cunning. Twenty this time, split on two flanks, a wedge of five to drive him, a hook of ten to meet him when he turned, and five with throw-hooks on lines above, eager to pull him off his feet like fishermen landing a sting-ray.
He let them arrive.
The first wedge broke on Quen – a skin of force that shimmered once and then was simply there. A bone knife snapped. A stone axe rebounded and numbed its owner to the elbow. Caranthir stepped through a gap they had left him and took a throat, then an eye, then a knee from behind while its leg still believed it could bear weight. The hooks came down; he answered with Igni, not the roaring wave he would have preferred but a clean sheet of white flame that burned the lines without touching the hands that held them. The men yelped as cords curled into black lace. Panic rippled. He wrote another Yrden by the library's threshold and lured the hook-crew across it. In their slowing he saw their thoughts – why is the air thicker here, why do my feet forget – to which he provided the correct reply: two short cuts and a long one.
When it ended he counted quickly and without attachment. Nineteen. No – twenty. One had fled limping, then bled out behind the library's fallen lion. His blade pulsed once – not a light, not a sound, simply a pressured hum against his palm – and what it drank sat properly in him.
The library itself had collapsed inward in one great sigh. Galleries leaned on galleries in the way old men lean on each other. He climbed because the map said the catalogue lay on the second balcony, and because the temple had made him curious about how this place had turned bodies into knowledge. Most of the shelves held rulings on debt, trade, ship-hull measurements, slave inventories. On one row, however, the titles changed: On the Constraint of Fire, Tablets of Wing-Bone, A Record of Canal Temperatures Before Binding, Notes on the Humors of Drakes. He laughed once softly, genuinely. Even their science could not resist the urge to call everything by household nosology. Humors. Still: he had a lead. He slipped what could be carried into the bag. Three books survived enough to be worth risking transport. The bag took them without complaint.
The bank stank of coins. Not of money – of metal warmed too often by hands. Its vault doors had been opened by men without imagination: wedges, burned edges, smashed pinions. Inside, he found copper fused to copper where a fire had tried to refine wealth into sculpture and failed. Small caches had escaped: a jar of rings, a fist of signet stones in a cloth that had once been purple. He took all he deemed worthy of anything.
They came for him again in the Canal of Ashes – not the ferals, but pirates who had seen his descent and wanted to be the men who took a dragon's girl and the dragon's girl's gear. These had real steel, not bone; two carried tower shields that might once have seen a city fight; one wore a rust-mottled breastplate with a Baldur hammered on the boss. They tried to talk first – shouted in cracked Volantene for him to lay down the sword and jewelry. He lifted a hand as if indulgent and Aard-pushed the front rank sideways into the canal. Ash looks soft until it isn't. It took them like a bog; their boots sank and found not bottom but deeper ash. They flailed. The rear rank balked. He went right, where their shieldline had left a gap for confidence, and stepped. Two cuts in the shadow of a shield, one up under a helmet rim, one across the back of a knee where the plate had been strapped on a drunk day and never adjusted. He kept his face gentle. He never gnashed teeth; never hissed. Work, done well and finished. When a man with an axe bigger than his confidence tried to swing through the bind of a fallen comrade, Igni kissed the haft and it burned in a clean line, hand to elbow. The scream annoyed him only because it was loud.
They broke. He let three go and took seven. The sword took its stipend from each. The ash spat once where a shield sunk and then lay flat again, the surface unchanged.
By dusk he had killed fifty-two. He did not list them because he loved neatness. He examined himself. No cuts; a bruise on the left forearm where a thrown stone had been heavier than it looked; ash on his boots; blood on his sleeve that was not his. The well inside him had risen by a thumb-width. Perhaps four men's worth of what he could accept, if the metaphor pleased him – which it did not. He was still, by any true measure, an animal faking speech. But the animal's tongue had stopped stumbling.
He returned toward the landing tower by a different way, following the journal past a line of old slave-pens. Children had once slept there in rows – he could tell by the scale of the rings hammered low in the walls. Human minds would have shrunk from that thought and called it monstrous. He recognized a laboratory when he saw one. Gogossos had never pretended to be kind. That was what made it useful.
Near the pens, someone finally tried clever. The alley narrowed between two collapsed porticoes. When he stepped into it, a sluice up on the right vomited down a syrupy fog. It smelled of overripe fruit and quicklime. The journal had warned him of something like it: the west culvert breeds stinging fog. He marked that the journal's writer had known the island's breaths intimately enough to name each. He stepped back and traced Yrden in the threshold, then a Quen with a second finger. The fog hit the ward and slowed, as water domes in a clear bowl. He waited while it ran its temper out against his patience. When it thinned, he walked through the ghost of it. His eyes watered slightly. Nothing else.
The tower waited as he'd left it: cold, soundless, dignified in its ruin. Aenyx had coiled. His eyes opened as Caranthir touched jaw to scale. He smelled of dust and the city's old sorrow.
On the tower's crown he looked west and watched the sea go from foul green to hammered lead. Pirate hulls moved far out. Inland, the city pulsed. Far-away torches wriggled in the streets like worms after rain. From somewhere, a horn bleated a note that had once been a call to order and was now only a habit.
Caranthir folded the map again, slid it into the bag, and let his mind sort the day's gleanings. Disappointment and confirmation arrived together. He had not seen a cockatrice, nor a basilisk worth the name, nor any griffin that could not be explained by a starving cat and a seagull judged from a bad angle. Yet the architecture sang of a people who bent blood and bone with arithmantics. The dragonstone tower still held cold like a memory. The glyphs in his head answered to this place like a tuning fork shaken near its kind. Proof, then – not of fairy tales, but of the method that made them.
He looked down at his hand. The knuckles were unburdened by age. The nails were clean. The ear beneath his hair kept its point. That pleased him as much as anything tonight. He had walked a bad city and it had not rubbed off.
He set his palm to Aenyx's neck. The dragon made a low sound that lived between purr and an incinerating furnace. Caranthir answered without voice, a brush of thought. Hunger; flight; the memory of high air. The dragon gave back agreement as heat.
Night in Gogossos was eerily silent. Even the waves broke softly against the poisoned shore, as if the sea feared to wake what slept beneath the ruins. Caranthir sat in the upper gallery of the dragon tower, a lamp guttering beside him, the journal from the day's haul open across his knees. The air smelled of iron and fungus, the pages of rot and oil.
He had arranged his trophies on the stone bench beside him: the glass candle, ten half-rotted books, the torn map, a rusted stylus still sticky with tar. He read the scrawled notations on the map again, tracing the ink lines with one long finger. Temples, vaults, canals, bridges… and here – the shaded quarter of the Magisters' Ridge, where the wealthiest blood-lords of Gogossos had lived before the Doom.
If any secrets remain, he thought, they are there.
He closed the journal, whispering a word that sealed it against the damp, and leaned back against the cold wall. The tower's silence pressed close. Below, Aenyx slept in a coil of moonlight, his breath fogging the courtyard in rhythmic clouds.
Dawn came pale and fungal, a light that seemed to crawl out of the ground rather than fall from the sky. Mist thickened the alleys; shapes moved behind it and vanished again. Caranthir descended from the tower, his dragon watching with one unblinking eye. The locals – those he had not slain – kept to the cracks now. From the rooftops came the occasional glint of a spearhead or a flash of eyes, but no one approached.
He crossed the Canal of Ashes where the water was black and still, climbed the broken terraces of the Ridge, and entered what had once been the city's richest quarter. Mansions rose like mausoleums – arches intact, mosaics eaten by mold, fountains dry and filled with bones.
The first few villas yielded nothing. Looters had been thorough. In one, he found an empty vault still reeking faintly of whale-oil where pirates had melted open the safes years ago. In another, a collapsed colonnade revealed frescoes of dragon-riders crossing a jungle sea – bright wings flayed to ghost colors by time.
The third house, however, still resisted the centuries. Its gate bore the carved sigil of a serpent swallowing its tail. The wards were weak, but there. The runes over the lintel had been written in a dialect he recognized from Volantene tablets: blood glyphs, meant to blur the mind of trespassers. He muttered a counter-phrase in Elder Speech, and the letters faded like dust shaken from silk.
Inside, he found a chamber that smelled of wax and long-cooled incense. The library lay in half-darkness – shelves warped, yet the bindings still whole. Someone had sealed the room with oil and fireglass. He brushed the soot from one spine and read the title in the old glyphs:
The Taming of Sothoryos.
He carried it to the window, opening the pages with care. The script was minute, fevered; the margins crowded with diagrams – serpents dissected, human spines grafted to alien bone. As he read, a thin smile curved his mouth.
The author wrote of a major experiment, that the Freehold itself was deeply invested in – "The cleansing of the southern continent, where pestilence and savagery abound."
Valyrians, in the height of their confidence, had resolved to remake the land itself. They bred creatures in the vaults of Gogossos – amphibious, scaled, venomous – and sent them across the sea to wage war upon nature. Basilisks, wyverns, swamp-drakes, beasts that could devour a village and still hunger. Biological conquest, the author called it. A war of flesh.
They had meant to tame Sothoryos the way they had tamed the Fourteen Flames – through patience and blood. But the Doom had come first.
Caranthir read until the ink blurred under his eyes. So that was why he had found no beasts on the island – Valyrians had drained them away immediately after creation, turning them into weapons. And somewhere to the south, across that steaming green hell, their spawn might still crawl.
He found a folded map in the book's back pages – a hand-drawn chart of the northernmost reach of Sothoryos. It marked river deltas, ore veins, fertile flats, even an active volcano where "fire-stone fit for dragonforging and dragon-mances" could have been. The marked territory was small by the scale of continents – perhaps the size of House Manderly's holdings – but it was enough.
He closed the book gently. One day, he thought, that land will serve me.
The next mansion lay farther up the ridge. Its outer walls had fallen, exposing half the rooms to the sea. Inside, only salt wind and gulls nested. Yet beneath a cracked statue of a dragon-headed maiden, he found a lever cunningly hidden in the marble's folds. He pulled it, and the floor groaned.
A trapdoor sighed open, exhaling centuries of stale air.
The stairway below led to a treasure vault – a modest one by Valyrian measure but untouched. He found a chest of filigreed bracelets, rings set with tourmalines, earrings of twisted gold. No coins, but the jewelry alone would fund a merchant fleet. He swept it all into his bag; the portal shivered faintly as it swallowed the load.
In the last villa he entered that day, luck turned again. The house had burned once, but a corner tower remained, its stairs leading down instead of up. At the end of a short corridor, he struck a hollow patch of wall. One push with Aard, and the plaster disintegrated to reveal a hidden room.
The air inside was dry and metallic. Chests – six in all – were stacked to the ceiling, filled with round gold and silver coins. The gold pieces were smaller than Westerosi dragons, stamped with a serpent coiled around a sunburst. He weighed one in his palm and did the arithmetic: perhaps half the worth of a dragon apiece. He counted by weight, not number – roughly a thousand gold, twice as many silver. Six hundred dragons' worth, by his estimate.
But the treasure was not what made him pause.
Resting atop the central chest was a sword – broad, dark, its edges rippling with the light of forged shadow. He drew it half from its scabbard. The steel sang low, unmistakable. Valyrian. A greatsword, two-handed, balanced as if the metal had memory of the air. The runes along its fuller read simply:
Laekoron – Song of Ash.
He turned the blade once, watching how it drank the light instead of reflecting it. A worthy companion. He sheathed it and placed it into his bag.
He spent the rest of the day cataloguing what he had found, moving like a scholar through a graveyard. The city's remaining inhabitants watched from afar but did not approach. Wordless fear had replaced their fury. Once, a trio of them appeared on a roof, bows raised; a single flare of Igni across the parapet was enough to send them diving for cover.
By sunset, the ridge was silent again. He returned to the dragon tower, arms heavy with plunder, and spread the day's discoveries before him.
The book of Sothoryos. The map of the southern lands. The Valyrian sword. A heap of ancient gold and gems.
He set them down as if arranging offerings for an unseen god. Aenyx stirred below, sensing his return. The dragon lifted his head and gave a low, resonant croon. Caranthir descended and laid a hand along the creature's neck.
"Soon," he said in High Valyrian, "we will test these wings beyond the sight of men."
The dragon's breath warmed his face, smelling faintly of roasted fish. Caranthir turned southward, where the horizon was a smear of green and thunder. Somewhere beyond it lay Sothoryos. He imagined its jungles burning, its beasts kneeling in servitude, its tribes reshaped into tools. He imagined Aenyx's shadow crawling over that wild shore, and the Elder tongue spoken there – his tongue, not man's.
Plans nested within plans. Lys and Volantis would come first, the soft cities of silk and honey; Sothoryos would wait, as all lesser worlds must. That night, in the tower that still refused sound, he wrote a single line in his own tongue on the back of the Taming of Sothoryos manuscript:
Eithel aear, eithel goth.
Then he sealed the book, fed the bag a single coin's worth of his blood to keep its hinge alive, and closed his eyes. The tower held its breath around him, cold and watchful.
Tomorrow, he would leave. Award ReplyReport52PersianPrince69699/11/2025Add bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 14: Auron Greyjoy I New View contentPersianPrince696910/11/2025NewAdd bookmark#28Thanks to Sylaise, they have pointed out to me that Fossoways did split up after the Tourney at Ashford, but since I have already written a lot (I have up to chapter 21 at hand now) in this story they will be split up before that. I have never read about Dunc and Egg, neither the books nor the comics. My main knowledge of the geography of the region with Notable Houses comes from an AGOT mod for Crusader Kings 3, so sorry if stuff is out of lore and inaccurate sometimes. Martin did a titanic work with populating the world, so I probably don't know half the things that exist.
117 AC
They said the salty taste of the sea never left an Ironborn's blood, even when drowned in wine and merry. But here, in King's Landing's great tourney grounds, the sea was far away. All that roared now was the crowd.
The same crowd seethed like a living tide behind the palisades – banners snapping, horns blaring, vendors shouting for wine, roasted boar, silk favors, anything to feed the fever. From the high dais, the King and his court watched beneath a canopy of black and red. Viserra Targaryen sat beside him, her hair pale as moonlight and her eyes half-lidded, as though she already knew who among them she would crown.
Auron Greyjoy watched her, and the world fell quiet.
He was not a man given to soft thoughts. He had slit throats in the Stepstones before he'd grown a full beard, taken ships from Triarchs and pirates alike, and earned his knighthood, a rare status among his people, in blood and smoke. But when he first saw her – years ago, at the victory feast in the Red Keep – she had undone him as no blade ever had.
That night had been all gilt and splendor: Daemon Targaryen drunk and laughing beside Corlys Velaryon; songs of victory; the scent of roasted swan and royal elk. She had walked past him in crimson silk, and Auron, the sea-born killer, had felt small.
He had been fifteen then, towering over men but still with a boy's eyes when he joined the war. By the time he turned seventeen, he had blooded himself in two dozen battles and was knighted by Daemon himself on a black beach strewn with bodies.
"Rise, Ser Auron of Pyke," Daemon had said, sword dripping with gore. "Knight of Black Wave."
Auron had risen, drenched and grinning, with blood drying in his hair. Now, two years later, he meant to rise again – higher still. King Viserys's words still echoed through the realm:
"Whosoever wins the grand melee shall have the hand of my daughter – Princess Viserra!"
The challenge had drawn every breed of beast in armor from Oldtown to the Wall. Gold, fame, and the chance to wed into the blood of dragons – there was no greater bait. The lists were full, and the gods themselves might have wagered upon it.
Later in their books maesters will call this grand tourney "A Month of Trials". They made a city out of tents. Pavilions bloomed along the Blackwater's north bank in a thousand colors – lion gold, trout silver, rose green, falcon blue – while King's Landing choked itself half-senseless on wine, wagers, and whores.
The first week saw the jousts. Trumpets. Splinters. Forty lords could afford three destriers; four hundred could not. Still they tilted: Ser Harrold Hardyng took the emerald plume prize; Ser Lymond Hightower unhorsed seven straight before a Florent broke his teeth; Ser Tyland Lannister proved better with a ledger than a lance. The purse went to Ser Criston Cole by a hair – his lean ash spear turning two great saddles light as thistledown. The smallfolk drank it all like rain.
The second week was for the archers. Caltrops of applause. String-song. Notch of the Trident – a barefoot riverlander – split two shafts on the butts, then lost to a Stormlander boy who shot clean through a horn cup at sixty paces. A Karstark woman strung a northern yew and made southrons swear never to laugh at furs again. Gold changed hands; pride did too.
In the third week, the King decreed a week for the commons: mummers on wagons, Braavosi rope-walkers, a Myrish puppet of a dragon that belched real flame and singed the wigs of three lady Hightowers. Jugglers, lemon cakes, lewd songs about crabs on the Stepstones. The city laughed until it hurt.
But there was only one week that mattered. The week of melee. King Viserys's herald made the rules plain:
"By the will of His Grace, King Viserys of House Targaryen, and in honor of his blood, the Princess Viserra, this melee shall last seven days straight to honour The Seven who are One, and the seven days of Creation!
Three thousand knights shall be numbered into three hundred companies of ten. On the first day, the companies shall be set by threes into the lists; a hundred bouts shall be fought, one after another, and from each bout one company only shall win the iron token of the crowned dragon and advance.
On the second day, of those a-hundred tokens, one company may purchase the King's mercy by sealed gold and pass untried; the other ninety-and-nine shall be matched by threes in thirty-and-three bouts, yielding thirty-and-three victors.
On the third day, the last royal mercy shall be sold, and the remaining thirty-and-three shall be cast by threes into eleven bouts; thus shall twelve companies stand at eventide.
On the fourth day there shall be no buying of favor: first four bouts of three shall choose four companies outright; thereafter, the nine left shall be granted a short repose and pressed into one great scramble together, whence the first six companies that keep six men within the ropes at horn's call shall join the former four, and so make ten.
On the fifth day those ten companies shall meet all at once within the great field; when but twelve knights in any liveries remain standing within the bounds, they shall be named champions.
On the sixth day, those twelve shall draw lots and answer one by one in one-against-one, victor advancing, till two remain and the last combat decide the prize.
On the seventh day His Grace shall proclaim the winner before the court.
Only blunted arms shall be borne; no man may slay, nor strike the yielded, nor step beyond the rope and claim the fight. Yield, be cast out, or be taken by the marshals – thus are men unhorsed afoot. Take heed: the buying of the King's mercy is permitted on the second and third days only, to the highest sealed bid paid in good gold before the dawn."
The tourney field had been pared to a clean, hard rectangle – rope and chalk and trampled grass – so every eye could see, and every steward could swear to what he'd seen. No grand melee chaos yet; that came later. Three bands enter, one band leaves with the iron token stamped with a crowned dragon. Then the ropes were lifted, the chalk redrawn, and the next match rolled on. For most engagements, they were brief, lasting only five to ten minutes due to the overwhelming difference in the parties' skill and armor.
Auron watched four of the early morning bouts from the rail, measuring the thing the way a shipmaster watches a tide. He wore no kraken gold or salt-sprayed finery – just battered plate over thick-byrnied mail, a blunted long-hafted warhammer in his fist. Seven feet of ironborn, all reach and hips and ugly economy. At his shoulder, his ten were quietly binding straps and murmuring tactics.
They were a ragged lot, but they'd earned their bread in places where banners didn't reach. Ser Doran Pyke – no kin, only a man who'd bought his knighthood in Tyrosh and kept it with stubborn work; Hobb the Mire, a reed-thin spear from the Neck with frog-bright eyes; Maelys Waters, a Bastard of some harbor-town with wrists like springs; Old Tom Quill, one-eyed archer turned billman; Ser Wayn of Fairmarket, whose oath had more notches than his shield; two Andalimark sellsword-knights from Pentos who'd learned to swing cudgels like oars; and a pair of brothers from Crackclaw Point who never spoke, only moved where Auron pointed. No lord would claim them. Auron did.
He watched the Fossoways fight – red apple against green, each with their own ten, making a show of it. They traded knockdowns like courtesies until a young green-apple sworn-knight slipped in and hooked a red captain's ankle; the red man fell, rolled at once, and dragged the boy after him over the rope. Double ring-out. Both eliminated. Their uncles bellowed, the crowd laughed, and the herald scribes kept their calm neat columns. At the end, Mootons advanced without much fight.
"The Reach will pay to skip a day," Maelys Waters murmured. "Mark me."
"Let them." Auron spat into the grass, glanced up at the royal seat. Viserys looked warm and pink as a ham; Lyonel Strong sat granite-still; Queen Alicent immaculate, hands folded; Princess Rhaenyra glinting in black and red with a smile that never reached her eyes. And there – silver hair bright and soft as a moonlight – Viserra. She leaned forward on the rail, eyes on the fighting, not on the faces. Auron felt the old foolishness stir in his chest.
"Band Thirty-Four! Bracken – Blackwood – Greyjoy!" cried the herald.
The smallfolk cackled. Even the gods liked a jest.
Auron tugged down his sallet. "We keep the rope. We don't exist till they've cut each other. When we move, we move all at once."
They stepped between the ropes to whistle and jeers. The Bracken ten formed a blunt wedge – big men, bull-necked, heavy on clubs and shields. The Blackwoods screened out wide, spears forward like a boar's brush, two archers at the back with blunted shafts that still raised ugly welts. The judges' poles, capped in dyed leather, pointed down. Silence fell like a sheet.
"Begin!" The horn cut the air.
The wedge came straight for the Blackwood line and hit it with a noise like barrels rolling down a stair. Spearheads skated, but mass did what steel could not; two Blackwoods went onto their backs. The archers snapped shots at the Bracken flanks; one arrow smacked a shield, another stung an ear and made a big man curse and swing wild. The first Bracken shove faltered, but the second line came in and crushed the gap.
Auron held his ten on their heels, just outside the circle of chaos, feet like stones on wet planking. Old Tom Quill flicked a glance at him. Auron kept his left hand down – Not yet. The Crackclaw brothers were already slinking the long way around, ghosts near the rope.
The Blackwood captain – wiry, scar-nosed – saw Auron's idle ring and spat rage. He jabbed three men toward the ironborn, hoping to force a third front. Hobb the Mire parried one spear with the butt of his own and stepped away, yielding ground invitingly. The Bracken wedge pressed, and the Blackwood captain cursed again, wheeled back to his feud. Both bands wanted the other extinct more than they wanted the token.
"Now," Auron said.
They struck like a hammer sliding down a nail. Maelys slid under a Blackwood spear and cracked the man's knee with his cudgel; the Crackclaws hit a Bracken rear-shielder and shouldered him into his own captain; Hobb's spear glanced off a helm and hooked a second man's ankle, and that was the loose thread. Auron stepped into the seam with a long stride and drove his warhammer headlong into the butt of a Bracken shield, not to break it, but to break the man behind it. Air left him in a rush. Auron pivoted, hips first, and let the long haft do its work – thunk under a rib, thunk across a thigh, a shove with the tail of the hammer to send a staggering Bracken over the line. The horn peeped acknowledgement: ring-out.
"Hold the rope!" Ser Wayn barked, exactly on cue, bracing with Old Tom to keep their backs secure. A Blackwood lunged for the gap; Auron booted him in the chest and felt ribs flex under the blunted toe-caps. The boy toppled backward into his own archer, who fired by reflex and smacked his captain in the cheek. The Blackwood line hiccuped. The Brackens howled glee and piled in stupid, which is what Auron wanted.
"Turn it!" Auron snarled, and his ten did, as one. They peeled left and let the feud tangle like fishing lines in a squall. A Blackwood spear-point kissed Auron's pauldron; he answered by shouldering into the man and letting gravity do the rest, pinning him under mail and weight until a Crackclaw heel nudged the wriggler over the chalk. Horn.
Two Brackens drove at Hobb, trying to bully him out between them. He sank, eel-slippery, twisted, and both went past, shoulders clapping together. Maelys cracked one in the kidneys; the other spun into Ser Doran's shield and looked astonished to find its rim in his teeth. Yield, that one mouthed past blood. The judge's pole tapped his helm: out.
It went ten minutes, maybe twelve. The archers burned their quivers and descended into the scrum with blunted short-staves, swinging wild and catching their own more often than not. A Blackwood tried to dog Auron's lead arm; Auron caught the forearm in his free hand and closed, heard the small bone go with a soft pop, felt the man go slack and ease him the courtesy of falling. A Bracken bull came roaring with a two-handed cudgel; Auron stepped in, under the blow, and hipped him neatly over the rope into the sawdust. Horn. Someone laughed, delighted and shocked by the neatness of it from a man so large.
At last, with six Brackens on their knees and four Blackwoods tasting dirt, both captains looked up and understood what had been done to them. Rage made them brave; shame made them sloppy. They struck at each other anyway. Their men tried a last knot of courage, and Auron's band unpicked it. Ser Wayn hooked a shield with his blunted bill and yanked a Bracken into Hobb's spear-butt; Old Tom feinted low, then banged a Blackwood ear so hard the lad sat down and began to cry, more from surprise than pain. The Crackclaws took wrists like fishermen take eels and walked men gently backward till their heels kissed chalk and went beyond.
Horn. Horn. Horn.
Silence, then a noise like spring ice breaking on a river.
The judges conferred; the herald stepped in, voice bright: "By rules of ring, yield, and fall – Greyjoy! Present!"
A steward came with a small iron disk. Auron caught it in his great fist. It was heavy, cold – crowned dragon stamped deep, edges crisp. The man bowed. The smallfolk booed the Brackens and the Blackwoods with the same spirit. Up on the royal lodge, the king thumped the rail, pink with pleasure. Princess Rhaenyra clapped slowly, amused; Queen Alicent smiled a small diplomatic smile. Viserra did not smile. She watched Auron's ten files out together, war-hurt and tidy, as if she were counting them.
Auron put the token away and let his lungs ease.
"Water," he said, and they drank like men who had crossed a sandbar. Maelys flicked sweat from his lashes and grinned. "One," he said.
They stood to the side and watched the day unfold while they cooled. The crowd got its fill of old grudges. Starks and Karstarks drew Boltons and tried to put them out by clean wrestling; a Bolton back-heeled a Stark out of the chalk with an almost delicate hook and took a blunted spear haft across the jaw for his elegance. The Tully band met Freys and a Vale ten; the Freys tried to bargain in the ring, grinning, hands spread, and the Vale men pushed them all into the Tullys like grain into a millrace. Horn. Laughter. Jeers of "Cross the river, then!" from men who'd never seen the Twins.
The Lannisters turned up in late afternoon, shining like they indeed shat gold. Their captain – a pale, cruel-mouthed knight in gilded half-plate – didn't waste time. He split his ten into two fives and let the other bands smash each other in the middle, then cut off retreat with precise, pretty footwork. When a man tried to yield, they ringed him and forced him over the rope like merchants forcing a debtor to the quay. The crowd booed and gasped and clapped anyway. When the horn blew, the Lannister captain took his token without looking up so much as once to the commons. He looked to the royal dais only. He looked at Viserra and smiled like a promise. Auron watched and filed away the tick in the left wrist – an old hurt – how he compensated on backhands.
By the time the light of the day vanished and the shadows consumed the earth, the herald's voice was a rasp and the scribes' fingers were cramped claws. But the math held. A hundred matches had marched by, not all clean, few pretty, none gentle. A hundred tokens had been given.
Auron's ten walked back through the press, sweat turning the dust to paste on their throats. A boy with half his front teeth gone held out a cracked tankard for Auron to sign; Auron marked it with a thumbprint of blood instead. The boy gaped at it like a saint's relic.
"Tomorrow," Maelys said, as if to himself, "men start buying their health."
He looked once up at the hill to the Red Keep, where torches were flaring along the galleries and the last glow found silver hair at a high rail. Viserra leaned out a little, as if scenting a change in wind. The iron token on Auron's belt felt heavier than its weight and fainly pulsed. He went on without looking back. Day One had been the easy tide. Day Two might bring the reefs. Award ReplyReport38PersianPrince696910/11/2025NewAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 15: Auron Greyjoy II New View contentPersianPrince696911/11/2025NewAdd bookmark#33117 AC
At dawn of the second day, the heralds' horns sounded across the King's Field, and the banners of the hundred surviving companies rose against the pale sky. The first day's dust had not yet settled, but the court hungered for spectacle, and the gold-cloaks had already marked out the lists anew.
Then the royal herald, crimson and gold in his tabard, mounted the wooden platform before the pavilions and cried with ringing voice:
"By His Grace's command, the second day begins! A hundred companies hold their iron tokens, and the first mercy of the crown shall be sold to the highest bidder. Whosoever pays most to the King's coffers shall pass this day untested and hold their strength for the morrow. Let all noble houses bid as they dare – gold for glory, coin for favor!"
At once the shouts began – stewards waving purses, heralds of lords crying sums that grew wilder with each yell. "Three hundred dragons for House Redwyne!" "Five hundred for the Florents!" "Eight hundred for the Manderlys!" And from the Reach rose the richest voices of all: "One thousand! Eleven hundred! Twelve!" The bidding raged till even the King laughed upon his seat. When it ended, it was House Tyrell that claimed the royal mercy, their gold counted at twenty hundred dragons – a fortune given for a day's rest and the surety of the morrow.
The herald struck his staff thrice.
"The crown is paid, the mercy granted. House Tyrell passes untried. Ninety-and-nine companies remain, and these shall fight in thirty-and-three bouts, three upon three, until but thirty-and-three tokens remain. By dusk, thirty-and-four shall stand – including the Tyrells, who bought their peace."
So the lists began anew. One match ended and another followed, dust and noise without end. The king watched, the rich shouted wagers, and the smallfolk roared themselves hoarse. Rivalries burned brighter than the noon sun: the Atranta Vances laid open the ones from Wayfarer's Rest, though both swore the Seven after; Vyrwels and Kydwels met, each forgetting there were others on the field until both their banners lay trampled in the mud; Roote knights struck at Darry men even after the horn sounded; Florents and Hightowers made an alliance only to break it mid-battle.
In one ring, a roaring company of northmen – bears and wolfsheads mixed – faced Forresters and Whitehill both, the bout ending in a mire of bruised men and laughter. From the Vale came the Royces and Corbrays, whose bronze and silver gleamed brighter than the southern steel, though the latter's pride was wounded when a hammer of the Stormlands struck him sprawling.
And through it all, the Ironborn knight Auron Greyjoy and his rough company fought as if they had been born for it. With his reach and strength, Auron split ranks apart, his warhammer rising and falling like the tide. He took no allies, only victory – waiting while proud houses tore at each other, then crashing upon the weakened like a storm. By sunset, his company still stood whole, their token glinting in his great hand as he raised it toward the king's box.
Thus ended the second day. The Tyrells rested rich and untouched; thirty-three other bands, tested and bloodied, bore their crowned tokens to the marshals' table. And the herald's voice carried once more over the field:
"So end the second day of the melee! Thirty-and-four bands remain! On the morrow, another royal mercy shall be sold, and the field shall be halved again. Rest well, brave men – your glory and your ruin draw near."
The dawn of the third day came hot and bright, the air over the King's Field still heavy with the dust and sweat of the last two. The crowd was larger than before; traders had doubled their prices, minstrels sang verses of yesterday's upsets, and already tongues wagged about who might buy the crown's final mercy.
The herald, gleaming in red and gold, rode to the center of the lists and raised his staff. His voice rolled like thunder over the stands:
"By decree of His Grace, the third day begins! Thirty-and-four companies bear the crowned token. This day the second and last mercy of the crown shall be sold! Let those who would buy glory in gold speak their price!"
At once the roar began. Tyrell stewards, still flushed with their easy passage, started at a thousand dragons; Rowans doubled it out of spite. The Redwynes, not to be outdone, shouted three. Then the great lords of the west and south rose in earnest: the Hightowers, the Manderlys, the Velaryons. Finally came the lion's roar – Lannister of Casterly Rock, through his gilded herald, offering ten thousand golden dragons, more than some minor lordships were worth. The field went still at that. The herald struck his staff upon the earth.
"The crown accepts the lion's gold. House Lannister shall rest untried this day!"
A murmuring spread through the pavilions – wonder, jealousy, mockery. Ten thousand dragons bought one day of idleness; the King smiled thinly, for his coffers had not been increased so much in a single day since his coronation.
The herald continued:
"Now the field remains thirty and three. They shall be drawn by threes again – eleven matches, each to yield one victor. At dusk, twelve companies shall stand: the eleven by valor, and one by purchase. Let the matches begin!"
The first fights came quick and bloody – dust clouds rolling, the ringmasters' horns blaring every quarter-hour. The Reachmen fought with discipline, the Vale men with grace, the few Dornish present with poison tongues and faster hands.
When the sixth horn blew, Auron Greyjoy's band was called to the field again. His company met two western banners: House Reyne of Castamere and House Lefford of the Golden Tooth – cousins in blood, rivals in wealth, both glittering in red and gold. The Ironborn looked like crows among peacocks.
"Stay close," Auron told his men, voice rough as gravel. "Let them fight their pride first."
And they did. Reyne and Lefford charged each other almost at once, each seeking to prove which of the West's cadet houses deserved the lion's respect. Maces rang, helms split, and the sands turned to smoke under their trampling. When both lines faltered, Auron's command came: "Forward!"
They struck like reavers boarding a ship. Auron himself waded through the fray, the haft of his weapon smashing down helms and shoulders alike. A Lefford knight swung a morningstar at his head – he caught the chain mid-swing and tore it free, backhanding the man into the dust. Another tried to flank him, and Auron's fist caught him under the chin, teeth flying.
When the horn blew, only the Ironborn stood upright. The marshals raised their banner – Auron Greyjoy's company victorious.
As the sun climbed, tempers frayed and armor smoked. The Caswells fought with Tyrell men-at-arms supporting them from the stands, though the marshals pretended not to see; when a Caswell knight's helm came off, he spat at the Tyrell pavilion before yielding. The Arryns beat back two Dornish bands, the Velaryons triumphed with the aid of silvered polearms, and House Tarly earned the loudest cheers by fighting through both Redwynes and Merryweathers despite being outnumbered.
By sundown, the field was littered with dented helms and broken shields. Thirty-three companies had become eleven, and one golden lion rested smugly in his tent.
The herald's voice, hoarse but proud, rose again as torches were lit along the stands:
"So ends the third day! The King's favor is sold, and twelve companies now bear the crowned token – valor's eleven, and one bought in gold. Rest well, champions, for the morrow brings no mercy, and the field shall burn till only ten remain!"
The crowd cheered, wine poured, and in the deepening dusk, Auron cleaned his weapon beside his men.
The morning of the fourth day broke beneath a low, red sky – a dawn that promised neither mercy nor peace. Only twelve companies now held the crowned tokens: the eleven who had fought their way here, and the gilded Lannisters, proud purchasers of the crown's final favor.
When the herald mounted his place, the hush that fell across the King's Field was not reverence but exhaustion. The week's dust hung thick; the cries of the injured drifted from the healers' tents like smoke. Yet the stands were packed – all of the court and city came to see who would remain when the dust finally settled.
The herald's staff struck thrice against the boards, and his voice carried like iron:
"Hear now the command of His Grace! Twelve companies remain. This day, the field shall yield ten only. The first four matches will see twelve chosen by the lot – four companies victorious, eight cast down. Then, when the sun stands high, the remaining eight shall enter the lists together – a grand melee, all against all. Six companies shall emerge to claim the King's favor and enter the final field!"
A roar of the crowd answered him. From his high seat, King Viserys raised his cup and smiled thinly.
The lots were drawn, and fortune, as ever, played favorites. In the first bout, the Arryns faced Velaryons and Goldwynes – a tangle of banners blue, silver, and wine-red mixed with gold. Steel rang on steel, sea against sky, until the Arryns' discipline and highborn training carried the day.
The second match brought the Tyrells, better-rested and gleaming in green, against Tarlys and Roxtons. The Reach lords fought like cousins feasting on each other's bones, and even the Tyrells' fresh arms and deep coffers could not help – they were all swept by the Tarlys military prowess, earning cheers and curses in equal measure.
The third, between Lannisters, Starks, and Mallisters, was a spectacle. The Northmen fought like wolves cornered in a pen; twice a Lannister fell to a hammer-blow before the Mallisters joined the fray, eager to humble both lion and wolf. In the end, the lions roared loudest, golden helms gleaming under the noon sun.
And in the fourth match, Auron Greyjoy's Ironborn were drawn against the Royces of Runestone and the Dondarrions of Blackhaven.
The Vale men stood proud in their rune-etched bronze, their captain shouting for honor. The Stormlanders answered with thunder, their purple lightning bolts crackling across banners, voices booming for glory. Auron said nothing. His men tightened grips on hafts and shields, faces half-hidden behind iron and salt-crusted mail.
At the horn, the Vale charged the Stormlanders – bronze against storm. Spears met hammers, round shields clanged, and the air filled with curses and oaths to gods old and new. Auron waited – patient, cold – then broke forward when both sides began to tire.
The Ironborn struck like raiders in a night raid. No wasted moves. No words. Auron's axe, that he switched to instead of a warhammer, crushed a Royce helm flat, and the giant Greyjoy took another man in both hands and threw him bodily into a Dondarrion. He fought like he'd been born for the melee's chaos, not the court's pageantry.
When it ended, only the Ironborn stood unbroken. Auron's chest heaved once, twice – then steadied. The marshals handed him another iron token.
"Greyjoy advances," the herald cried, and the crowd, half in awe and half in fear, roared back.
By midafternoon, the four victors – Arryns, Tarlys, Lannisters, Greyjoys – stood apart, each company gleaming and blooded in equal measure. The remaining eight defeated teams, still fit enough to fight, were granted one final chance in a grand melee – a furious brawl where six would live to join the ten.
The King himself signaled the start. Trumpets blared. The field erupted.
When it was done, the sun was sinking red over the Blackwater, and the day's count stood: Ten companies still held the King's tokens – the finest in all Westeros.
The Arryns, the Lannisters, the Tyrells, the Tarlys, the Starks, the Royces, the Velaryons, the Dondarrions, the Mallisters, and Auron Greyjoy's Ironborn – around a hundred left from three thousand.
The herald raised his voice one last time that day:
"Hear His Grace's command! Ten bands remain. Tomorrow they shall meet in a single field – no allies, no mercy – until only twelve knights stand unfallen. Those twelve shall enter the final ring and fight alone before the eyes of gods and men. The hand of the Princess awaits the last to yield!"
The crowd erupted into thunder. Coins flew through the air. Wine spilled like water.
And Auron Greyjoy, sweat-streaked and smiling faintly beneath his salt-crusted helm, looked toward the royals – where Viserra Targaryen sat beside her father, veiled today and watching. He could not see her eyes, but he felt them on him all the same.
Tomorrow, he thought, the lions, the wolves, and flowers will wither. Tomorrow, the sea will take the crown.
And only Lyonel Strong, the ever watchful, had noticed that the princess was murmuring something behind the veil.