The shores of the God's Eye shimmered with a beauty that felt almost otherworldly. The lake stretched out wide beneath the autumn sun, its waters clear and smooth as glass. A gentle breeze carried the scents of pine and wildflowers from the forested banks, whispering through the tall reeds at the water's edge. Overhead, birds drifted lazily in circles, their cries carrying softly across the still expanse. Above it all, the sky was a flawless sheet of blue, not a single cloud daring to intrude. It was as if, with the end of Ironborn rule and the birth of the kingdom of the Heartlands, nature itself had been reinvigorated.
Harald stood at the edge of it all, dressed in clothes fit for a king and wearing the Aetherial Crown he had crafted after his adventure with the tragic adventurer Katria. His purple cloak fluttered lightly behind him. He stared out across the glittering waters toward the Isle of Faces—the island that had called to him from the moment he set foot in Westeros, one of the many nexuses of magic he sensed in this world.
He closed his eyes and concentrated. He could feel the roots of the weirwoods stretching beneath the water, beneath the soil, deep into the earth not only on the Isle of Faces, but everywhere. It was as if the trees were not many, but one: a single, vast organism scattered across Westeros.
Harald had thought on it often. He found the Old Gods more interesting than the others; he had theorized that they were an amalgamation, a collective consciousness formed of every greenseer who had ever lived and died. Greenseeing was said to be an ability possessed by the Children of the Forest and, later, by the First Men, and it was bound to the weirwoods.
Observing the almost hive-like nature of the trees, Harald had concluded that when a greenseer died, their mind did not pass on, but joined something larger. This hive mind of knowledge—thousands upon thousands of voices—was what the Children of the Forest and the First Men had named their gods.
Harald called this system of weirwood trees connecting the entire continent the Weirnet. He theorized it was a psychic lattice formed through the weirwoods. The worship of the Old Gods was simply ancestor worship.
He had plans to tap into this Weirnet; he needed to make a trip to the Isle soon.
The sound of massive, grinding footsteps shook Harald from his thoughts. He turned from admiring the pristine waters of the God's Eye and saw one of his ash golems lumbering past, its body a hulking mass of compacted soot and stone, glowing faintly with ember-veins beneath the surface. It carried a marble block the size of a cottage across its shoulders. The construct ascended the hillside where Harald's new castle was being built.
The hill itself had once been a modest rise overlooking the God's Eye, but Harald had shaped it with earth magic he'd learned from a wood-elf clan during his travels through Valenwood. He used it to raise its sides and widen its crown into a far more defensible structure. It was the perfect place to site a capital, overlooking the mystical God's Eye and the fertile lands that stretched around it.
Harrenhal's fall had given him access to many expert workers. Survivors of the sack, many of them master masons and castle-builders, now applied their skills under his command. They, alongside thousands of Heartlanders eager to serve their new king, toiled from dawn to dusk. And when night fell, the golems larger ones like the ash giants and smaller forms that could work more delicately continued without rest. In four short months, they had achieved what would normally take a year or more.
Harald had indulged himself in the design, drawing on memories from his two lives in two different worlds before his arrival here. From Tamriel, he borrowed the grandeur of the Imperial City's White-Gold Tower; from his first life on Earth, he recalled the soaring walls and graceful spires of Tolkien's citadels—Minas Tirith, Gondolin, and Numenorian cities. He made sure the walls would be of white marble, quarried from the mountain ranges near the Saltpans; with a bit of magic woven in, the castle would be indestructible and a thing of beauty when it was done.
Transporting stone had seemed a potential bottleneck until Harald used a form of magic he had always considered useless: a teleportation spell. The spell destroyed living things—people, food, animals—so he had never used it in Tamriel; but here it proved invaluable, as marble and granite could be moved safely. With it, whole shipments of quarried stone appeared at the worksite in moments, feeding the construction effort. It was unfortunate he could not do more with it, as it required soul gems for power, and creating and filling new ones was not something Harald was willing to consider; doing so would draw the gaze of the Ideal Masters here. It was also one of the reasons he had not summoned Durnehviir here, useful as the undead dragon would have been.
Harald walked further toward the rising castle, his eyes settling on the base of the hill where a settlement was forming. Tents had become cottages, and cottages were giving way to proper timber and stone houses. Roads were marked wide and straight, and Harald had already ordered plans for sewer systems, clean water distribution with aqueducts, and open market squares.
It would take years upon years for it to truly become a city.
He had many plans for his new kingdom. He wanted to connect the small stream behind the hill where his castle was being built, lengthening it and joining it to the Bay of Crabs to create a new waterway that would carry ships to the Narrow Sea. He dreamed, too, of linking the great Trident to the Sunset Sea, so vessels could pass between the two oceans with ease. Harald thought of it as a trade highway, a way to bind the world together with the Trident as its spine.
It could be easily done with magic and some hard work from his vassals.
But these were plans years from fruition. For now, more pressing matters demanded his attention. He turned from the waters and mounted his steed, riding back toward Whitemore, a small castle that had belonged to the fallen Justman kings. The castle had lain abandoned for centuries until Harald claimed it as his seat while his true capital rose upon the hill. Its halls now bustled with life again: lords and retainers, scribes and soldiers, all lending strength to the making of the new kingdom.
Inside, his council and court gathered daily—Lords Frey, Blackwood, Mallister, Tully, and Vance—serving as his advisers and counselors. Harald knew this was only the beginning. He was laying the foundations of a proper bureaucracy, one bound not to the whims of feuding lords but to laws, offices, and structure. For now, he used the men and resources his vassals provided, keeping the machinery of rulership turning until he could build something permanent.
One of the first challenges he faced was the coming winter. The Heartlands had been vulnerable to famine over the last two decades; Harren's cruel misrule was the cause. This was the first matter Harald set out to solve. Drawing on knowledge learned from a Dunmer alchemist in Skyrim, he brewed a potion called the Potion of Seeding, a concoction that forced soil to yield crops with unnatural speed. He ensured it was freely distributed among lords and smallfolk alike. Fields ripened in weeks instead of seasons. What should have been barren now burst with golden harvest. The potion could only be used once, but it did its job of averting famine. After winter, Harald could turn to other agricultural advancements; there was no need to rely on magic all the time.
Harald dismounted, and all around him heads bowed low. The banners of the Imperial dragon, the same sigil of Tiber Septim and the empire he forged fluttered proudly, though Harald's were purple and gold. He had chosen those colors with intent: purple, rarest of dyes, for emperors; gold, the metal of kings.
He handed his horse to a waiting stablehand, returned the salutes with a nod, and strode into Whitemore.
His eyes fell on the old sept at the heart of the courtyard though it was no sept now. It had been repurposed into the first church of the Covenant, the new faith born of Leobald's vision and Harald's sanction. The symbol of the religion was simple: a weirwood tree with nine branches stretching skyward, seven stars above—the Old Gods, the Seven, and the Nine Divines joined as one.
Leobald had convinced him this was the only way to bind the Riverlords into something greater, to make the lords forget their old feuds and come together. Harald had been cautious, but he could not deny the results. The Covenant spread like fire through dry reeds. The lords, eager for unity and for Harald's professed divinity took to it readily; the smallfolk, soothed by miracles of harvest and protection, embraced it all the more.
Harald knew the danger: the Faith of the Seven would brand this heresy, and other kingdoms might even invade. Leobald had told him of the holy callings the Faith had made before—crusades, as he remembered them from Earth. If war came, Harald planned to answer with fire and steel and perhaps by taking that kingdom for himself.
Harald could not deny that the Covenant was better than the other two religions. Leobald had shown him how the Faith of the Seven had grown corrupt. The religion of the First Men was not organized; too many interpreted it differently. The Covenant was different. It taught kindness, not only piety. It urged justice as well as mercy. It demanded compassion from the highborn and dignity for the lowborn. It proclaimed that labor was holy that tilling the soil and feeding the hungry were as sacred as prayer. Unlike the aloof Old Gods, it offered clear guidance. Unlike the Seven, it did not divide people, but taught that all men and women—all souls—were bound in unity.
The Covenant rejected cruelty as a tool of faith; where the Seven burned heretics and the Old Gods demanded blood sacrifice, it wove together the wisdom of many creeds while discarding the cruelties of both. For Harald, that alone justified it. This was a faith that could serve its people, from the poorest crofter to the proudest lord, without fear or division.
And, perhaps most importantly, the Covenant had a living symbol in him. He was also the head of the church, even though Leobald seemed its public face. That gave the crown great power perhaps too much but that was a question to be revisited in the future.
In the courtyard, twenty men clashed in pairs. They were part of his growing standing army one thousand strong, trained, armed, and loyal to him alone. Each lord of the Heartlands had been ordered to provide men for the venture, a show of unity under the new crown.
But armies, castles, and cities could not rise on faith and royal commands alone. Harald knew well enough that all things ran on coin. Under the Ironborn, the Heartlands' economy had been a plunder economy. To rebuild and grow required gold, and gold was something the kingdom did not have or rather, had only in small measure. The three known gold mines lay in difficult positions: one under his control another reason he had chosen this site for his capital and two more in the Pendric Mountains, contested by the Lannisters of Casterly Rock.
Harald found a way around this problem. Where other men and kings bent to limits, he simply broke them. In the hills nearby lay an iron mine rich with ore. For six months he had drawn from its veins and used the Transmute spell, a powerful spell that turns iron into silver, and silver into gold. With it, he fed an endless trickle of wealth into his treasury. As long as iron could be dug, gold would flow.
With that power, he remade the coinage of the Heartlands. Only the king would mint coins, and each would carry both a symbol of unity and a mark of his reign.
There would be three types of coinage:
The Gold Crown — 4.5 grams of fine gold. One side bore the Imperial Dragon Harald's sigil. The other, his own face. This coin was for kings, lords, and merchants.
The Silver Mark — 20 grams of pure silver. One side showed the sigil of the Covenant, binding faith and crown the king as both ruler and divine herald. On the reverse, the Imperial Dragon. These coins would be the lifeblood of the realm: wages for soldiers, trade for goods, payment for land and tithes.
The Copper Penny — 3 grams of simple copper. One side bore the Imperial Dragon; the other, a riverboat upon the Trident, emblem of the Heartlands' many rivers. This was the coin of the smallfolk bread, ale, tools, and toil.
For flexibility, Harald decreed that half-marks and half-pennies would also be struck. He made sure his new golden crowns were minted with a purity equal to the Lions of the Kingdom of the Rock, a quiet challenge, a statement: the Heartlands were no less than the Rock.
Harald did not want to collapse the value of gold with his use of Transmute. If he flooded the realm with too much, it would be worth nothing. So he hoarded most of it within his royal reserves. He was certain the Lannisters did the same with their own vast mines.
Trade, however, was another matter. Harald knew the other kingdoms would shun him; the Covenant's spread made him more foe than friend in their eyes. His enemies would call him heretic, charlatan, sorcerer. If the Stormlands, the Vale, the Rock, and the Reach barred their ports, he could not risk the disruption so Essos would become the kingdom's lifeline. He would buy ships, grain, arms, and craftsmen from across the Narrow Sea, and with his gold he could outbid any rival.
"Your Grace," came a familiar voice. Harald turned to see Lord Edmyn Tully, his chancellor, striding toward him, parchment in hand and worry etched on his face. Harald smiled faintly. Edmyn was well suited to this role; the chancellorship was a post Harald had created, akin to a prime minister. Edmyn was steady where others were rash, cautious where Harald was bold.
"Edmyn," Harald greeted. "You look as if you've just swallowed a lime."
The lord offered a short bow, then fell in step as Harald gestured for them to walk together. "I've received ravens from King Mooton."
Harald chuckled darkly. "Let me guess. He calls us heretics, enthralled by a sorcerer, our souls damned to some hell or another?"
Edmyn allowed himself a thin smile. "Yes, that and other things as well."
They passed into the long hall that now served as Harald's throne room. Once a banquet chamber of the Justmans, it now bore the banners of the Imperial Dragon and the Covenant's sigil.
"What other things?" Harald asked.
Edmyn lowered his voice. "Not from Mooton himself, but from his Cousin, the one we found in Harrenhal."
"The hostage," Harald said, arching a brow. "Go on."
"He tells us that Mooton and the other petty kings of Blackwater Bay are forming a confederation—an alliance to resist 'the heretic sorcerer-king of the Heartlands' and the Storm King."
Harald's smile faded. "I see. And Agrilac? Has he made his move?"
Edmyn nodded grimly. "Our spies say yes. An army is mustering near the Stormlands' northern border. He means to invade the confederation soon."
Harald shook his head. "And here I thought we had a few more moons of peace."
"What will you do, Your Grace?"
Harald hummed, lost in thought for a moment. "Let Agrilac attack."
Edmyn blinked. "But… Your Grace, I thought we were—"
"Yes, Edmyn," Harald cut him off. "We will take the Blackwater. But not yet. We need more time to stabilize the realm. Can we march now and claim it? Yes. But haste will only cause more issues."
They walked to the long oak table where a great map was spread. Harald pointed to the south, his finger pressing down on the Stormlands. "Let Agrilac conquer these petty kings of the Blackwater," he said. "Let him bleed and weaken them for us. This confederation will fight hard for its independence."
Edmyn frowned, then nodded slowly. "You believe he will not stop there."
Harald looked up to his chancellor. "We both know he will not. Agrilac dreams of uniting Storm and River once again the way his forefathers once did."
Edmyn's jaw tightened. "Then war with Agrilac is guaranteed."
Harald gave a small smile. "Exactly. The question is not if, but when. We will face Agrilac and take the Blackwater and more from him. Conquered that way, the lords and lands will be more amenable to my rule."
Harald continued, "And when the time comes, we must make sure the Vale, the North, the West, and the Reach do not interfere. If they unite against us, it will only cause more chaos."
He traced a finger across the map, circling the Vale. "The Vale is our greatest danger. Their lords will see the Covenant as blasphemy, and their septons will preach against me as though I were the Stranger himself. They need to be placated with diplomacy."
He moved his hand northward, over Winterfell. "The North must be soothed as well, though they will not be as dangerous as the Vale."
Straightening, Harald looked to Edmyn. "So,Lord Chancellor, we will give Agrilac his war. On our terms. When he comes, we'll break him and take what we want. But until then, we need to conduct some careful diplomacy."
Edmyn nodded. "What of the Isles, my king?"
Ah, the Isles, Harald thought. He had made sure Aeron Hoare lived and made him kneel. The Isles were semi-independent now, with Aeron sworn to the Kingdom of the Heartlands. Harald knew trouble would come from there soon enough and he counted on it. When the time came, he planned a final war against the Ironborn, adding the Isles properly to his realm.
"Have they broken my command against raiding?"
"No, Your Grace. They have not. They've been unduly silent."
"Then the Isles are not our concern for now," Harald said, ending the discussion.
Edmyn continued, "Prince Barthogan Stark will arrive soon, Your Grace. Last I heard, he'd reached the Crossroads. Queen Sharra has sent Lord Royce. The Rock, the Reach, and the Stormlands have all dispatched minor lords—courtesies, no more. But…" He paused. "What surprised me is that Lord Aegon Targaryen of Dragonstone has sent an envoy as well, a man named Orys Baratheon."
The Targaryens, Harald thought. Aegon and his sisters would not sit idle on their volcanic rock for long. Their dragons would cross the Narrow Sea, intent on conquest. That much was certain. But Harald only grinned at the thought, half amusement, half challenge.
"Make sure our guests are treated with the utmost hospitality," Harald said aloud. "Especially Royce and Stark."
Edmyn inclined his head. "Yes, Your Grace," he answered, and with that, the chancellor departed.
Alone, Harald strode to the only window in the chamber. Beyond its frame stretched his rising capital; farther still lay the God's Eye, its waters glimmering under the sun. His gaze lingered on the mist at the horizon, where the Isle of Faces lay.
Perhaps, when the Stark Prince arrives,I will leave for the Isle with him.
A Stark should stand witness when I make the Old Gods kneel before me.
.
.
.
The crown.
The Sigil.
The Unnamed Capital location.
The Next Chapter is called Harald v The Old Gods.