Pre-Chapter A/N: Here we go with another chapter, coming in right on time. Next three chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
XXXXX- LAENOR VELARON, DORNE, LATE 120 AC
Dorne was a harsh land. That much was obvious just thinking about it. Most of it was a desert, and the people here had adapted for living in it well. Warring in it, as well. This was only the sixth night in the deep deserts as the army journeyed towards Sandstone, the seat of House Qorgoyle, and every night after the second was met with the same thing. The same sound.
The Qorgoyles must have had a number of skilled drummers in their employ. Of course, they were far enough away that the sound was only grating to the ear rather than deafening. But it was enough to affect sleep for most, and every group that had gone out to find the source of the sound had either disappeared, as with the smaller groups that had come in the beginning, or found nothing, as had happened whenever I followed them in a larger company. They were good at packing up and disappearing into the desert.
And this was just the first of a million small annoyances. There were caltrops buried deep in the sands. Deep enough that if the wind was blowing, which it always was, and enough time passed, the sand would be blown away enough that the horses would find their feet pierced by them. Now they had to have people move ahead of the main convoy sweeping the sand.
Then there were the supplies. Icarus was not a stupid man. Even if he thought me stupid enough that I could not see that he wanted to kill me. He was still not a stupid man. His army was well supplied and provisioned. Even more so as ships had come into the Torrentine laden with supplies for the journey through the desert. But any opportunity to replenish those supplies was denied them. Every well they passed was poisoned. Somehow the Dornish could tell from just smelling the water, even if it smelled perfectly normal to me. It was nothing unforeseen. What was less foreseen were the saboteurs that kept being smuggled into their camp with the goal of poisoning their own water.
The first had been caught by a stroke of luck. Now even their own people were not allowed near the general water stores, having to receive predetermined amounts at predetermined intervals from a small group of trusted stewards. It slowed the march, and it pissed the men off. Pissed-off men were better than dead men, of course. When they were on your side, that is.
I rose from my tent, more than irritated with the noise now. Jordayne met me outside. Almost like he had foreseen it.
"How will you find them from the sky?" he asked.
"Dragons see better than humans give them credit for. I won't find them. Igneel will," I said, lying through my teeth. Sure, Igneel had better eyes than any human. But not good enough to spot a man under cover beating a drum from the sky. Maybe if we flew low, but flying that low exposed the squishy human on his back to arrows. His eyes as well. Best not to risk it. I would work a spell instead.
When I reached Igneel, he had already risen. He was better at blocking out sounds than I was thanks to his sensitive ears. Having ears like his and living anywhere close to civilisation meant that sooner or later you had to learn to zone out stuff if you wanted to sleep. Figuring out where the sound came from by following it would have been the best choice, but there was something, either with the wind or with the sand, or maybe even the instrument that was being used, that made it impossible to truly narrow down the source of the sounds.
I climbed onto his back, and I truly did mean climb. Igneel was big enough now that I had to use his scales as handholds and footrests to reach high enough to be able to grab on to the saddle to pull myself onto his back. When I was secure in my position, he shot into the air, more than eager to bring the annoyance to an end. We rose and rose until we were nearer to the clouds than we were to the ground.
I reached for the Valyrian steel dagger that I had on the saddle and formed a small cut on the flesh of my arm. I wet my hands with the blood, letting as much flow onto my fingers as I could manage before the wound stopped bleeding—another benefit of my bond with Igneel. I brought the blood up to my eyelids, and whispered the chant in High Valyrian.
It was more a prayer than a spell in truth, but weren't all spells prayers? The only difference being that you prayed to magic rather than any god or gods in particular.
"Light the dark, let me see the unseen," I whispered thrice in my mother tongue, pulling on my bond with Igneel.
When I opened my eyes, it was like it was daytime. Not only that, but I could feel the blood on my face heating up. It would heat up until it evaporated, and when it did, the spell would have run its course. Igneel went lower. As low as he needed to until I could see the ground perfectly clearly. And when I did, I was able to spot them in a matter of seconds.
And it was a them in truth. There was more than one group with the drums. Multiple people covered by tarps and wearing cloaks of the sandiest brown you could imagine. Let's give them hell, brother, I whispered in Igneel's mind.
"Dracarys," I roared, and Igneel's roar followed mine. One by one, we destroyed the groups, burning large tracts along the sand. Some of it turned to glass from Igneel's flames. Not a lot, but some of it. When we finished there, we began flying towards the camp, only for Igneel to seemingly change his mind and turn. He heard something. Something that should not have been. We flew together as one in the direction of Sandstone, and before we were even halfway there, I saw them. A long caravan of people.
People that were heading away from the direction that Sandstone was in, and deeper into the desert. There were only two possibilities. Either the Qorgoyles had expelled their smallfolk to prepare for a siege, as a lot of noble houses did in such situations, or they were in this caravan escaping as well. They knew Igneel was here, knew that he would destroy the castle or at least breach it easily. Having smallfolk around could make it easier to defend in a storming—human shields and whatnot. So the second option was the more likely one. Jordayne was wrong, it seemed. He had been so sure that the Dornish lords would either fight or bend the knee once he came with a dragon at his back, and he was sure they would not run.
Certain that they would not take the risk of withdrawing into caves that he knew like the back of his hand. Certain, but wrong. I watched them for a while longer, before I decided on a course of action. The castle would be empty and trapped to high heaven, most likely. We would lose men in taking it, but fewer than we would in a storming.
But all we would gain would be an empty castle. The supplies were in those caravans. Those caravans that were headed to the tunnels in the Red Mountains, most likely. And we needed those supplies. I could stop them, but the only way to do that would be to burn most of them. And even then, I would have to wait with them to hold them captive and find some way to signal Icarus to bring some actual men. Dragons couldn't arrest people or hold land.
They were tools of destruction as far as war was concerned, and not particularly delicate ones. So that left me with one choice. To destroy.
"Left, my friend," I whispered to Igneel, feeding him my thoughts of what I wanted us to do. He was eager. Starfall had given him a taste of what it was like to let loose after all his growth and training. And he wanted more. He wanted to do it again, to show the world and himself his power. We flew over the convoy of caravans and I smiled internally as they all looked up. There was fear in them. Igneel could smell it. But we let them be and kept going. They must have thought themselves lucky.
They wouldn't think so for long. Their convoy stretched far. Very far. The very front of it was only a few kilometres from the Pass. They would see what was about to happen.
I pulled at the wound in my arm, opening it again to gather some more blood. The spell was beginning to run its course. This one I worked was different, but from more or less the same body of work.
"Reveal the hidden, give light to the dark, show me the way," I said, and as I reached the mountains, spotting Skyreach in the distance, certain parts of the mountain began to glow with red lights the colour of blood. There were footprints as well, and horse tracks that stretched towards the hole. So that answered the question of whether this convoy was the first. It was not. Jordayne's scouts had failed something fierce.
The Red Mountains were littered with entrances like that one. There were so many that there was practically no hope for Igneel and me if our goal was to shut off all the openings with our flame in one go. The tunnels had been built partly with that purpose, to make sure that there was no way for the dragons to trap them in there when they began their hiding. But that didn't matter if they weren't in hiding yet. I didn't have to close every entrance. Just shut everything large enough for large amounts of supplies to pass through. I would allow them to use their tunnels, but only if they were going to use them as tombs. There would be no comfortable retreat for them.
Igneel and I began at the first opening he saw. He focused his flames internally for a few seconds before he spread open his massive maw and bathed the world with blue flames that hit the stone and turned parts of it to sludge. It dripped down under concentrated heat and pressure until the liquefied stone had covered the entrance. We did the same with every entrance that my gaze could spot. We found more and more of them the deeper we went into the mountain range.
Some were squeezed so close between two mountains that there was no way for Igneel to fly low enough to reach them. For those, we caused small landslides by blowing up some rocks up here, and letting them crash to block the path. While we carried out the closing of the larger tunnels, it struck me that there was every chance that there could still be supplies in the tunnels from when the Martells had ruled this kingdom and maintained the tunnels.
That meant I had to be even more thorough. Igneel roared his appreciation as we went through the work of closing every single tunnel opening we could reach. We burned most of them closed, and where the entrances were either too massive to efficiently close like that, or too remote to reach, we used our flames to cause controlled explosions along the bodies of the mountains to create landslides to either block routes or to block the entrances themselves.
The Dornish were thorough. I could see why Aegon had not done this when I was still only halfway through when the sun began to rise. For one, he didn't have a spell that could have shown him all the holes to plug. For another, Igneel was massive, yes, but he was thankfully still smaller than even Vhagar had been during the Conquest. This meant he could squeeze between the mountains and into the passes better than the dragons Aegon had available to him could ever have managed. If we had Sunfyre here, this would have been even easier, with his size allowing him to actually reach the ground in some places where the pass became too thin for Igneel and me to manage. But then Sunfyre would be tired as well if we asked him to do this much burning and flying in one night.
The sun finished its rising, and was burning overhead when Igneel was finally too tired to continue. Even with my fire stoking and spurring his own, there was only so much that we could achieve together. I had replenished the spell to reveal the openings to me two more times, and even now the blood that burned across my eyes was running its course to the end. It was now that I straightened and decided enough. We had done more than half of the Red Mountains so far. We could continue tomorrow with some ease.
The Qorgoyles would not manage to find a place to hole up in before we returned, and even if they found one, they would be fools to. Not when it was clear what we were doing and what we had done. So I turned about on Igneel's back and flew towards the camp. An hour of flying and the large organism was in view once more. It was clear enough that there had been some sort of attack. The fact that the camp had not packed up and begun moving yet being the first sign. The second being the smoke rising from certain parts of it. By the time I landed, I could put more signs together.
Some sort of ambush. Deep in the night. The signs of it were too fresh for it to have been any earlier. It had been effective as well. Large swathes of the camp had been on fire. How strange. If such a force had been lurking, then there should have been some sign of them when I had taken to the skies. And if not, then where had they come from?
I found Icarus in his tent. Deep in his cups already. His brother sat before him, looking exhausted. They both looked exhausted. One was markedly drunker than the other, though.
"What took you so long?" Icarus called when I entered. I paused for a second, misliking the tone. I said nothing, stepping in and then dragging out a chair for myself from its position pressed against the desk. When I sat, he had managed to find enough of his wits—and even more wine—about him to avoid pissing off his only hope.
"Where did the riders come from?" I asked.
"East. We managed to track their retreat to some extent. Fowler men, I would bet my life on it," Oberon said. Interesting. Skyreach. We weren't even heading for them yet, having deemed Sandstone the more pliable threat. The Fowlers were stubborn and would be best approached with a pincer, Jordayne had said. We would wait for Yronwood to stir, Jordayne had said.
"I see. And Qorgoyle was escaping to the mountains. That is what took me so long," I said. Jordayne burst into laughter at that, reaching for his goblet again. Enough. I grabbed it and pulled it out of his reach. He looked at me askance.
"Enough. The drunkenness is endearing when we are winning. But things are well on their way to going to shit. I have a dragon, but only one, and Dorne seems keen on teaching you a lesson. Sober up and find your way out of this noose," I said, and then very pointedly chugged down the wine in the goblet, and took the pitcher with me as I left.
My tent was one of those that had survived the attack, thankfully. I did not even want to think of what I would have done if it had not. I would probably have gone to bully one of the sellsword captains out of theirs. It was said they'd kill their own mothers for some gold. A tent for me to sleep in should be easy then.
When my head hit the pillow, I had to spend more time than I had expected trying to lull myself to sleep, but even that hard-won sleep was easily lost.
Noises from outside the tent woke me up. I stepped out to find that the sun had reached its zenith. Considering I'd gone to bed some hours after it rose, this was not a good thing. Not a good thing at all. I didn't even feel rested. And worse still, looking around told me that the noise had come from the camp being packed up. Jordayne wanted to move? In this heat? Was he mad?
The magic in my blood allowed me to walk around the desert like it was any regular place, but I knew no one else was having as good a time as I was. Even keeping our travels to only early mornings and late evenings didn't stop the men from sweating buckets during the day. Thankfully, I hadn't changed out of my riding clothes since last night. Sleeping in them was a mistake, but at least it was one that meant I didn't have to go back to my tent to change before I could find the source of this insanity.
When I reached his tent, Jordayne was supervising it being packed up. He looked more sober, at least.
"What is going on? Why are we moving?" I asked.
He turned to me, shocked. Shocked why, though, I wondered for a second.
"The Qorgoyles are fleeing, as you said. We must catch them before they reach the mountains. I had hoped no one would dare take to the mountains, but we must deal with it now," he said. I nearly facepalmed as I went over our conversation from earlier and realised I'd forgotten to tell him.
"If that is the cause, then cancel the advance. There is nothing to worry about. The Red Mountains are closed to them. I flew through them with Igneel and we have sealed all the tunnel entrances for many kilometres. Half the mountain, really. We will continue tonight, but after I get some rest," I said, and then without waiting for his stunned face to form a coherent response, I turned around to return to my bed. I could feel a headache forming.
A/N: I love experimenting with the magic here. All of it is, of course, based on sacrifice in one way or another. Why Laenor is able to do so much is because he has literal King's blood in his veins. Blood of the ancient storm Kings and Blood of Valyrians. Next chapter comes on here by Sunday night. Next three chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), you can support me there and read them early.