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Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
ASOIAF and all of its characters belong to GRRM
I own nothing but the original characters I make.
"Dialogue"
'Thoughts'
-Author notes-
Chapter 72: The Temple of the First Flame
Joffrey stepped into the darkness, and the world behind him seemed to fade into nothing more than a memory, as if the grey twilight of Asshai had never existed, as if the journey up the Ash River had been a dream from which he was only now waking.
The air inside the ziggurat was warm and dry, and it smelled of dust and old stone...the scent of ages, of centuries piled upon centuries, of things that had not been disturbed since before the rise of Valyria.
The glyphs on the walls glowed faintly, casting a dim, pulsing light that barely touched the shadows. They lined the corridor in ordered rows, their patterns repeating, their meanings lost to time.
Joffrey could feel their power still dormant but alive, humming against his magical senses like a distant heartbeat.
"Lumos, " Joffrey whispered.
A sphere of pale white light bloomed above his palm, rising to illuminate the corridor. The shadows retreated, but only a little.
The darkness here was thick and almost hungry. It pushed against the edges of the sphere, testing its limits, searching for weaknesses.
A long corridor stretched before them, its walls covered in carvings. The stone was the same seamless black as the rest of the city, but here the glyphs were larger and more intricate. They seemed to move in the light as if they were alive, shifting and changing as Joffrey watched, their forms never quite settling into a fixed shape.
"Stay close to me," Joffrey said. "Keep your weapons ready and your eyes open. We do not know what we will find here."
The Hound grunted, his greatsword already in his hand. Aggo and the other Dothraki formed a loose formation, their arakhs gleaming under the enchanted light.
Their footsteps echoed on the stone, too loud in the silence, each step a violation of the temple's ancient slumber.
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They walked deeper into the temple, and the carvings on the walls began to tell a story.
Joffrey slowed as he passed the first panel, his eyes tracing the images.
The work was crude but expressive...the product of a civilization that had mastered stone but had not yet learned to write.
Figures of stick-like humans knelt before something massive, something that filled the sky. Their arms were raised in worship, their heads bowed in supplication. Whatever they prayed to, it was vast beyond comprehension.
'Their god?' Joffrey thought. 'Perhaps...'
The next panel stopped him cold.
Two figures dominated the carving, their forms unlike anything he had seen in this world or the one before. They looked otherworldly, alien, and the carvings were extraordinarily detailed, far more so than the earlier panels, as if the artists had been granted a vision of these beings, a glimpse of something beyond mortal understanding.
The first was a creature of fire. Its body was roughly draconic in shape, a silhouette of obsidian-black rock crisscrossed with fissures of molten magma that glowed in its chest and face.
Great wings of pure flame spread from its shoulders, massive enough to cover everything in sight. Its head was a jagged maw, and its eyes were pits of liquid fire.
The second was its opposite...a creature of ice. Its form was a multi-limbed geometric impossibility, a crystal lattice grown into a hunched, mantis-like shape. Its body was composed of ancient black ice, so clear and cold that it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Its head was a faceted, diamond-shaped block with no eyes, only a single vertical line of pale blue plasma that leaked out like a silent scream.
'If gods have ever walked the surface of this world,' Joffrey thought, 'these must be them.'
The carvings continued. The two beings fought...not once, but many times. Mountains shattered beneath them. Seas boiled. The earth cracked and reformed. In one panel, the ice creature drove the fire creature into the ground. In another, the roles were reversed. They were equals, locked in an eternal struggle that had no beginning and no end.
Then, their final battle was depicted in great detail.
It was shown across three massive panels, the largest Joffrey had yet seen. The two beings clashed in a storm of fire and ice, and the world broke around them. Entire continents were shown as jagged fragments, islands where there had been land, seas where there had been mountains.
And when it was over, both creatures were wounded...gravely wounded, their forms diminished, their power greatly dimmed.
The ice creature retreated to the far north, to a land that became an eternal winter, where the sun never rose, and the cold never relented. The fire creature came to rest in a land that Joffrey recognized from the carvings.
The Shadow Lands.
The fire creature made a nest, coiling into a great circle in a vast underground cavern. From its body, a river of black water flowed...the Ash River, Joffrey realized, and from the blood oozing from its wound, other creatures began to emerge.
Small lizards first, then larger ones, then creatures with wings and scales and the ability to breathe fire.
Dragons.
The carvings showed them spreading across the world, their forms changing and adapting to their environments. Some grew large, some remained small. Some were taken by men and tamed. Others remained wild, ruling the skies above lands that had never seen a king. The fire creature's children spread far and wide, filling the world with their presence.
There were no more panels about the ice creature. The carvings said nothing of its children, nothing of what might have been born from its wounds. But Joffrey had a vague idea in his mind, a suspicion that he did not voice aloud.
The final panels showed primitive humans discovering the resting place of the fire creature. They knelt before it, their hands raised in worship, their faces filled with awe and terror.
And the creature...though deep in slumber, seemed to respond. Lines of light connected its body to the heads of the kneeling humans, and the humans began to change.
They grew taller. Their faces grew sharper, more angular. Their eyes began to glow with a faint inner light, and their hands crackled with power.
"They were given knowledge," Joffrey murmured, more to himself than to the others. "Power... perhaps magic. These were the first sorcerers of this world."
The Hound glanced at him. "What are you talking about?"
"I am talking about the origin of all things. Dragons. The Shadow Lands. Stygai. The black stone." Joffrey's eyes traced the carvings. "It is all depicted here."
The carvings showed the transformed humans producing buildings from nowhere, their hands weaving magic that shaped the black stone like clay. Towers rose from the earth. Cities spread across the Shadow Lands.
And at the center of it all, a great ziggurat, this very temple, was raised above the sleeping creature's nest.
"So that is how they did it. I was right." Joffrey muttered.
The first buildings of black stone were made with magic, some kind of conjuration spell, no doubt granted by this primordial being, used by those primitive men to shape their world.
The black stone of Asshai was different. That stone had been built by hand, brick by brick, then fused using dragon fire. It was an imitation of the method used in Stygai, a pale copy likely created by distant descendants who had lost the original magic.
But there were still questions in Joffrey's mind. What had happened to the people who built this place? And more importantly, was that primordial creature still here? Was that what he had seen when he touched the glass candle? Was that what had frightened the red priestess?
Joffrey noticed more panels ahead, but just as he was about to examine them, he heard it...a soft rustling sound coming from the corridor ahead.
The Hound heard it too, his greatsword rising. Aggo and the other Dothraki tensed, their arakhs ready.
"Something is approaching," the Hound said.
Joffrey raised his hand, and the light sphere brightened, pushing the shadows further back.
They saw them a moment later. Figures emerging from the darkness...humanoid, but not human. Their skin was grey and cracked, like old stone left too long in the rain.
Their eyes glowed with a dull red light, and their mouths hung open, revealing teeth that had been filed to points. They wore armor of a strange, dark material that gleamed like obsidian, and they carried long blades and spears made of the same substance.
There were six of them at first, then eight, then a dozen. They moved with a shuffling gait, their joints stiff, their movements jerky and wrong. They did not speak. They did not cry out. They simply advanced, their red eyes fixed on the intruders.
"Undead," Joffrey said. "Raise your weapons."
The Hound did not wait. He charged, his greatsword swinging in a wide arc that caught the first undead across the chest. The obsidian armor cracked, and the creature fell, its red eyes flickering. But it did not die. It rose again, its broken bones knitting together, its claws reaching for the Hound's throat.
"Cut off their heads!" Joffrey commanded. "It is the only way. And do not let them touch you."
Aggo's arakh flashed, and an undead head rolled across the stone floor.
The body crumpled and did not rise. The other Dothraki followed suit, their curved blades severing necks, spines, and anything that would keep the creatures from moving.
Joffrey raised his hand. He did not have time for swordplay. "Exanimis."
A beam of pale light shot from his palm, striking the nearest undead in the chest. The creature convulsed, its red eyes widening, and then it crumbled to dust. The dark magic that animated it had been purified and scattered.
He cast the spell again, and again, and within moments, the corridor was clear. The remaining undead lay in pieces, their obsidian weapons clattering on the stone.
The Hound wiped his greatsword on a scrap of cloth. "What were those things? Are they supposed to be the guardians of this temple?" He did not sound impressed.
"No," Joffrey said simply. "These were no guardians. They are nothing but victims of the dark energy that fills this city."
He knelt beside one of the fallen creatures, studying its armor, its weapons, the cracked grey skin. It had been human once, or something close to human. The features were still visible beneath the decay...a nose, a mouth, the hint of a brow. But whatever had animated it, whatever had given it movement and purpose, was long gone.
"These are not magical constructs," Joffrey said. "They were once human. They died here, in this place, and the death energy was so concentrated that it raised them again. Naturally."
"Naturally?" Aggo's voice was skeptical. "This was not done by some necromancer?"
Joffrey shook his head. "In places where many people have died...where death has soaked into the stone and the earth, the natural magic can become hungry. It can pull souls back from wherever they go and trap them in their own bodies." He rose. "It is not intentional. It is a sickness of the land itself. If we were to die here, we might become like them in a few decades."
The Hound looked around at the dark corridor, the glowing glyphs, the shadows that seemed to press close. "And the true guardians?"
"Further ahead." Joffrey's eyes glowed faintly. "If they exist, they will be more dangerous than these, much more. Keep your eyes open and be ready."
He chose not to say it, but the truth was that he was not worried about the undead or guardians. The only thing that worried him was the presence of those primordial creatures, and whether that uneasy feeling he had been having since he arrived in the city came from the one still resting in the ancient chamber beneath their feet.
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They continued deeper into the temple, stepping over the remains of the undead.
The corridor sloped downward, and the air grew warmer, though not warm enough to be uncomfortable. The heat seeped through the soles of Joffrey's boots, rising from the stone below.
He could feel it more clearly now...the pulse of something massive, something alive, somewhere ahead.
It was not a magical artifact or a treasure. It was a living being, its heartbeat slow and deep, like the rhythm of the earth itself.
He did not share this with the others. There was no point in frightening them.
The carvings on the walls changed as they descended. No longer depicting the history of the primordial creatures or the rise of the first humans, they showed something much darker. Figures in chains. Blood flowing from altars. Sacrifices made to a sleeping god.
"I see... they were trying to feed the primordial being. To wake it up," Joffrey murmured.
The Hound glanced at him. "Feed it what?"
"People, of course." Joffrey traced a carving of a hooded figure cutting the throat of a kneeling man. "They must have believed that if the creature woke, they would gain even more power. Or that the sacrifices themselves would grant them gifts."
They had tasted power and wanted more. Such was the nature of humans.
"It did not work, I take it," the Hound said.
Joffrey did not answer, but it was obvious that it had not. The extreme practices had led to pointless death and internal conflict, which had destroyed their entire civilization.
The remaining survivors had scattered across the world, and that was how Stygai had become the Corpse City.
"It is sad," Joffrey muttered to himself.
They continued.
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The corridor ended in a massive door of black iron, carved with the image of a dragon coiled around a burning sun. The glyphs here were brighter than any he had seen, pulsing with a light that seemed to beat in time with his heart.
Joffrey placed his hand on the door.
The metal was warm...warmer than it should have been, as if something on the other side was generating heat. He could feel it through his gloves, through his skin, down to the bone.
He pushed.
The door swung open without a sound.
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