Chapter 9: Blazing Saddles

Chapter 9: Blazing Saddles

"Oh, what a strange time of day for my husband to return from his travels." Helaena commented - her voice somehow nostalgic despite how much I managed to avoid her during her childhood - smugly, as I briefly submerged myself into the palatial tub in our chambers.

Another feather in our father's cap, piping water from the local hot springs into our castle. The water steaming hot and full of skin beneficial minerals. My wife's pale skin glows with health since our move, though that may just be pregnancy. Another one of those mysteries of life I'll never figure out. Helaena fucked like a woman who'd finally found her fix after too many years without a proper pleasing, and showed no signs of stopping any time soon. She put in many genuine and valiant attempts to drain my balls, but such a thing is not possible. 

She continued after I reemerged and swept back the rich green-blue water from my face, "You must have flown through the night to get here. A moonless night. What secret deeds have you done in the darkness this time, I wonder?" 

"Wonder, then, woman." I cast her a dismissive glare.

My father's incredible and generous bestowal of this new castle, this Blue Keep, took me by surprise like little else I can remember, and required adjustments on my end. Be proud, father, for you presented me with a greater puzzle than any knight on any of the tourney grounds I've defeated in the last two years. He had me positively scrambling to get my affairs in order in the capital, and even then, I needed to handle my most sensitive asset class personally, unable to delegate to my uncles or associates.

Helaena took my dismissal as encouragement and indeed she wondered aloud, "What could justify a Prince departing on darkest night? Did you perhaps move some bastards mother missed?"

"No." I denied as I relaxed in the tub and let the bath soak away my fatigue. 

Hot water continually filled the tub from a fountain that took up an entire wall depicting my name sake and his sisters in flowing robes amidst columns, reliefs, and arches standing above very scaled down versions of the necks and heads of Balerion, Vhagar, and Caraxes. The marble dragon mouths released streams of hot spring water that spread over several flats to create a series of gentle waterfalls. This was the kind of beauty we read about in ancient Valyrian scrolls, no longer modelled in miniature, but brought to live and given new form through the motif of our illustrious family. 

"No you did not move them, or no mother did not miss them?" she mused with a faint smile that turned into a pout when I simply responded, 'Yes.'

At some point my sister decided to augment her more approachable looks - compared to our older sister who mostly lost them due to the weight she packed on - with a personality, and now I must suffer for it. Her expressiveness came with a deliberateness Rhaenyra simply lacked outside of her shallow forced calm she employs when trading verbal blows with my mother. While I take great enjoyment from clawing out honest reactions from the elder, I am grateful that our father's lack of interest in our younger sister's life hadn't pushed her in other directions. Better a woman of low cunning and mindfulness than a willful vengeful arrogant whore. 

"Come now, brother, are we not man and wife, why keep secrets from me. Do you believe me the type to share them about in the embroidery circle?" she wheedled me verbally as she physically slid closer in the large tub, pressing against me as she stared up at my face while using my thigh for leverage, "Are your plans so feeble you dare not say them even to me?"

I gazed into my young bride's purple eyes, the manipulation put forth, so childish, so purposeful, completely ineffective in nature but the artistry in its deliberate execution efficacious upon my relaxing mind. A low brow provocation but underneath, an olive branch, an offer, entreating me to open myself to her, to greater intimacy, and to once again prove to the world that I am ready once more to sip from the bitter chalice of love, to courageously declare in truth that I am hers and she is mine. Such an act required as much deliberate thoughtfulness as the offer itself, and after a time searching my heart I came to the conclusion.

"No."

It's funnier to not tell her. 

As my denial rebuffed the woman, my mind drifted back to my Uncle on that night so long ago. His beatific expression as he chose to withhold his hard earned wisdom from the family and instead enjoy the moment and the act of the keeping. Anyone with the desire to could easily order the legwork done to expose my licentious ways, and indeed they did, but for that one glorious night he entertained himself, soley for himself, and I knew that I too could feel that joy. It served no greater purpose, instead it served the greatest purpose: my amusement. 

"This is why you have no friends." she thought to counter me with slander. 

"I've one." I corrected her, causing her to raise her brows in surprise, "Jasper Wylde." I nodded in fond remembrance as my sister-wife snorted, "The only man who get's it." 

"What?!" she shrieked her incredulity, "Have you ever even talked to the man?"

"No." I shook my head, revisiting all those conversations we never had, "That's the best part."

Iron Rod and I are two sides of a coin. Both of us father a lot of kids. He does so in the marriage bed, and I do so out of it, but now I do it in the marriage bed too. A whole new chapter in our quiet friendship. Where once we were like two ships passing in the night, now we are two ships passing in the night, but with even more in common. 

When she recovered from her laughter, she began again, talking, "I thought you were going to say our father, and felt so bad for you. This is so much worse. I love it!" 

"We are father and son, king and prince, friendly but not friends." I explained to her, "Put him to the test and he would reveal the truth of this." 

Our father was a man of great focus, staidness, and steadfastness. My mother wasted her time trying to persuade him with arguments logical and ethical, yet my father swayed not a bit in the face of their obvious validity. No matter the obstacle, he remains firm in his convictions. 

"I can tell you are having another one of your episodes about how great a man our father is, and before he made all of this…" she gestured in the general direction of everything around us and continued, "I always thought you were mad. Apparently you simply saw the man for who he could really be, rather than what he presented to the rest of us." 

"You, mother, Rhaenyra, how could any of you possibly understand him." I grunted, "You're women." 

Before my sister could rally against my latest affront, I departed the bath and set about another day as the newest lord in Westeros, lord of vast and empty lands, rife with hostiles. And I mean rife. My new and excellent home exists just down the mouth of the Torintine River, on a promontory like the one supporting Sunflower Hall, and while I see the poetry in House Targaryen serving as a shield against foreign enemies and my father's goal of putting a strong deterrent up against the very active Dornish raiders and pirates that plague the region, the small peace we have right now isn't because all is going according to the King's plan. 

Most people are too stupid to understand others, and get by projecting their own thought process onto everyone around them. That's why the Dornish look down on House Targaryen. Despite our dragons we are weak of heart, and frail of wrist. If they had dragons, they would destroy their enemies and take everything from them. My namesakes failure, his disgusting quitter mentality, his inability to wage proper war framed the family in their minds. His pathetic son doubled down, the reign of my great grandfather reinforced the frame, and my father's gilded it. To the average Dornish lord's mind, we Targaryens are spineless, cockless, feckless cravens. I am simply a boy of the line, and they smell opportunity. 

Oh how they will wail when the turn tables and I do unto them as they crave to do unto me, when I tear down their keeps and rape their wives and daughters, when I cast them into the wilderness and hunt them for sport. What will their sunbaked monkey scrotum brains conjure when I show them the truth of Fire and Blood? I eagerly await the coming days of play, but for now a man must work. 

My fief, Dragonsreach, came with few Smallfolk native, but my father had mobilized a vast number of working men for the multiple grand construction projects, men who supported their families building the Blue Keep and its accompanying structures. They are honestly the dullest people I have ever had the displeasure of meeting, as if summoned from the aether to toil and provide single word answers as often as possible. Thank all that is good for the men and women who came down with me from the Crownlands, drovers and ranchers who manage my herds, the herds that formerly supplied the Dragonpit at great profit. Without them I'd be completely lost amidst this slack jawed horde. Every man an everyman and every woman a plain Jane, and not a worthwhile thought in any of their heads. Its a mystery on par with the oily black stone how these people possibly completed a work as meritorious in artistry as my new home, and every day I led them, immersed myself in their dullness, my soul came out the lesser for it. 

Such is the price a man must pay for progress. Though the draining hardship of working closely with the smallfolk of Westeros - many of which it matters not how often you teach them left from right, for when you tell them to step right they will always step left, and when you tell them to step left, you never know what the fuck they will do next - I soldiered on for the sake of piling up gold dragons. I'd all the experience I need to maximize the profitability of a region let alone one as verdant, temperate, and well positioned as Dragonsreach. With my unique knowledge of currently untapped and underutilized markets, it should all be easy street, but it's easier teaching dogs rightly than these people. I faintly remember the idea of schools for the public. What a fool I must have been to think of such a thing. I like to believe it came from someone else, like a virus, for surely I am not natively capable of such stupidity. 

Eventually I managed to put together a system when I stopped trying to treat them as smallfolk and instead treated them like menial slaves, assigning a minder to every ten head to keep them toiling all the livelong day. Every day. I believe they may be some kind of subspecies that traded human intelligence for vast endurance, for they never seemed to tire either mentally or physically from the tasks assigned to them, and so long as the commands are kept simple and clear, they do good work. I hate them, and I love them for though I truly believe that without my leadership these people would simply sit down and starve to death, never have I encountered a breed of humans so pliant and obedient. If they showed even an ounce of the problem solving skills required for combat, these people would trounce the Unsullied in sheer suicidal unbreakable moral, but those are an idle fantasy, for these people are simple folk, people of the land, the common clay of my new home: morons. 

By these morons I shall build my arsenal. 

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A long time ago I stopped doing authors notes explaining my stories. People didn't engage with me about it and eventually it just felt like I was talking to a wall, trying to explain why what it just read is great. I just started doing essays at the end of my stories explaining some of the goals of the work, my mindset going in. I don't believe I explained the ending of Path of the Hungry Bear, and by those few who cared to ask about it, here I am pulling back the curtain. 

For those of you, and I'm sure there are many, with a clear understanding of the Holy Trinity, the ending of PotHB and the start of this are obvious in their construction, for at that final scene, Jorah had completed his path, and assembled his Unholy Trinity. Instead of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost one in essence and three in personhood bound in eternal love, we have a dark inversion found in Jorah, Jorah Jr, and the demonic power created by the vast ocean of magical and religious lives destroyed both at the event and long before, Three in essence seeking to become one person in an evil version of the Passion in which instead of the Son sacrificing himself according to the designs of the Father, we instead have the father sacrificing himself to empower and take over the son to ascend beyond his frail humanity. 

In that is the premise of the story, because at that moment Jorah was both the man who died and the god who rose. Aegon is the Jorah-man, he is not the Jorah-god. Aegon is the mortal nature of Jorah, rejected in the process of apotheosis, and instead of re-embracing that nature or letting it die, the Jorah-god incarnated it into a parallel universe, and according to his nature he did it using existing infrastructure and better than anyone else before him.

The premise of this story has been something I'd worked on for months, and never felt right about it, then GothicJedi dropped 'The Black Wolf', and though I don't care for it, the Valmar Game of Thrones CYOA he used for it caught my interest, and was the vehicle to drop mortal Jorah into a new story that I'd waiting for. Jorah became Aegon's ROB, doing this for his own amusement and the metaphysics of not letting an aspect of himself die. Aegon knows nothing of this, and thinks that his ritual failed to make him a god, but instead reincarnated him with lots of perks and cool knickknacks. He will not discover any of this until he meets his real Besto Friendo in the sequel: 'Worm: The Lizard Daddy that Replaced Armsmaster' 

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