Chapter 35: Into the Dragon’s Maw
Chapter 35: Into the Dragon's Maw
297 AC, Month of the Sun's Tears
The journey from Pentos to Volantis was a descent into the ancient, wounded heart of Essos. Alaric chose not the swift passage of the sea, but the slow, winding path of the Rhoyne. He chartered a flotilla of broad-beamed river barges, elegant vessels with silken awnings and carved wooden prows, creating a stately procession that was part diplomatic mission, part military expedition. This was a deliberate choice. The sea route was for merchants in a hurry. The river was for conquerors and historians, and Alaric was both.
As their flotilla moved south on the immense, placid river, the world changed. The rolling hills and olive groves of western Essos gave way to a landscape of deeper, more profound antiquity. They passed the ruins of Ghoyan Drohe, its shattered towers draped in creepers, and the Sorrows, the haunting, mist-shrouded ruins of Chroyane.
Ser Damon Flowers stood beside Alaric on the deck of the lead barge, his hand resting on the pommel of Red Rain. The grizzled knight stared at the fog-draped city, at the silent, grey figures of the Stone Men on the banks, and made the sign of the Warrior.
"A cursed place," Damon growled. "The Rhoynar fought the dragons and lost. This is what happens when you anger the gods."
Alaric looked at the same scene, but saw something entirely different. He saw a case study. "They did not anger gods, Ser Damon. They fought a technologically and magically superior military force. The Valyrians didn't win because of divine right; they won because they had a weapon of mass destruction and the sorcery to counter the Rhoynar's water magic. This place is not a monument to the wrath of gods. It is a monument to the consequences of a failed strategy."
Prometheus was working silently, its sensors, routed through a series of arcane devices Alaric had built and disguised as navigational tools, were scanning the ruins.
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He was harvesting data from the ruins of a civilization. As he stared at the city where Prince Garin the Great had been made to watch his people suffer, Alaric felt a profound sense of connection, not to the victims, but to the victors. He felt a kinship with the cold, pragmatic ambition of the Valyrians who had unleashed this horror to secure their dominance. It was an act he understood completely.
It was here, looking at the legacy of the dragonlords, that he most keenly felt the truth of his own blood. He was not one of them. There was no drop of ancient Valyria in his veins. His was the blood of the First Men, tied to the cold earth and dark waters of the Riverlands. His weirwood-like surname was a testament to that. His quest to infuse his line with the essence of the dragon was not a reclamation of a lost heritage; it was a hostile takeover. He was attempting to graft the power of fire onto the blood of earth, a dangerous, unnatural act of arcane bio-engineering. It was the ultimate expression of his ruthless ambition—to seize a power he had no right to, and make it his own.
Their arrival at Volantis was like sailing into a history book. The sheer scale of the city was overwhelming. The Long Bridge, a wonder of the world teeming with the commerce of a continent, groaned under the weight of a thousand daily lives. And beyond it, looming like a promise and a threat, was the Black Wall. A colossal, seamless fortification of fused dragonstone, built by the Valyrians themselves, behind which the Old Blood, the pure-blooded descendants of the Freehold, lived in insular, decadent splendour.
Alaric established his base of operations with his usual meticulous care. He used his letters of introduction from Magister Presto to lease a sprawling manse with high walls and lush gardens in the wealthy merchant district, just outside the Black Wall. It was a statement of power and intent. He was not here as a supplicant to the Old Blood; he was establishing his own, rival court. The Onyx Legion, in their black plate, became the silent, disciplined guards of his new palace, their presence a constant, unsettling reminder to the Volantene nobility that a new predator was now hunting in their jungle.
His three great projects began at once, each feeding the other.
His business, the overt reason for his presence, moved first. Nervo, now a master of Essosi commerce, formally established the Volantene branch of Blackwood Mercantile. They did not attempt to compete with the Old Blood's control of the slave trade, a market Alaric found both morally distasteful and economically inefficient. Instead, he targeted the river trade. He used his immense capital to build faster, more secure barges and offered lower rates and guaranteed delivery times, backed by the fearsome reputation of his legion. Within months, he had shattered the local consortiums and seized a controlling interest in the flow of goods up and down the great Rhoyne. The Old Blood, secure behind their Black Wall, barely noticed the Westerosi upstart dominating the trade of the common folk—for now.
His family, his dynasty, was a distant but constant focus. Ravens and fast courier ships kept him connected to Westeros. He received regular reports from Lynesse. His son, Tyber, was proving to be exceptionally bright, already grasping complex concepts of history and lineage that his tutors presented. His daughter, Cassia, was quiet and watchful, and a recent letter from her governess noted with some confusion that the girl seemed to be able to calm animals—horses, dogs, even the half-wild cats in the castle's courtyard—with just a look.
Alaric read this with a cold, predatory satisfaction. The infusion was taking hold. The dragon's blood, the spark of magic, was expressing itself in his children, subtly altering them, elevating them. He sent back gifts and instructions. For Tyber, he sent a set of beautifully carved cyvasse pieces made of ivory and obsidian, along with a book of strategies. For Cassia, a silver locket with a tiny, almost invisible warding rune etched inside. For Lynesse, a casket of jewels so magnificent it would make her the envy of the Volantene nobility she was now entertaining. He was managing his family like a portfolio, ensuring his assets were protected and continuing to grow in value.
But his true work, the work that consumed his nights, was magic. His status as a great lord and a maester of the Citadel granted him access to the famed black libraries of Volantis. He spent his days within the Black Wall, a guest of the city's rulers, poring over ancient, crumbling scrolls. The libraries were a treasure trove. He found texts that detailed the intricate social structure of Old Valyria, treatises on their fused-stone architecture, and, most importantly, fragmented but priceless texts on their blood magic.
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While he hunted for knowledge in the libraries, his agents hunted for his primary target in the city's underbelly. The rumour of the Targaryen cadet branch was their focus. After weeks of tracing old property records and bribing ancient, wine-sodden scribes, his agent finally brought him news.
"The family you seek, my lord," the agent reported, his face pale with fear of his master, "they were known as the House of the Green Flame. A distant offshoot of a lesser Targaryen line. They fell into poverty two centuries ago. The last direct descendant, a woman named Daella, died in a debtor's slum almost fifty years past."
"And the heirloom? The egg?" Alaric asked, his voice dangerously quiet.
"She sold it, my lord. To pay for passage for her daughter out of the city. She sold it to a slave master from Yunkai, a man named Grazdan mo Eraz, in exchange for a small bag of gold and passage for her child to Lys."
The trail was cold, half a century old, but it was a trail. It pointed east. To Slaver's Bay.
At the same time, Alaric made a breakthrough in the libraries. He found a partial text, a fragment of a scroll copied from a Valyrian original, titled On the Purification of the Blood and the Quickening of the Ember. It was not a manual for hatching dragons. It was something far more valuable to him. It was a theoretical treatise on a ritual used to "cleanse and elevate" a bloodline, to make it more receptive to fire magic, to awaken the latent "ember" within. The ritual required three key components: a dormant dragon egg, a conductor of "true steel," and a catalyst of "kindred blood."
It was the instruction manual for the very process he had been trying to invent. He had been working with brute force and intuition. This text provided the theory, the underlying principles. It confirmed his methods and opened up new avenues for refinement.
He sat in his study in the Volantene manse, the two pieces of the puzzle before him. A theoretical text describing a ritual of blood infusion, and a trail, however faint, leading to the essential reagent—a dragon egg, last seen in the possession of a slaver from Yunkai.
His path was clear. His time in Volantis, while profitable, was drawing to a close. He had gleaned what he could from its libraries and established his commercial dominance on the river. Now, the hunt led him deeper into the east, into the brutal, decadent, and chaotic heart of the slave trade.
He felt no moral compunction. The cities of Slaver's Bay—Astapor, Yunkai, Meereen—were, to him, not pits of human misery, but simply new markets. They were places where everything, and everyone, had a price. He was sure that a lost Valyrian artifact, even one as priceless as a dragon egg, could be located and acquired if one had enough gold, enough cunning, and a complete lack of scruples. Alaric possessed all three in abundance.
He began his preparations for the next stage of his journey. He would leave a larger contingent of the Onyx Legion and a trusted lieutenant to manage his Volantene operations under Nervo's long-distance command. He himself would travel east, but not as a great lord with an army. That would attract too much attention. He would travel as a wealthy, eccentric merchant, his true power masked, his small entourage of guards belying the immense force he had at his command.
He stood on his balcony, looking out at the endless, teeming life on the Long Bridge. He had come to the oldest and proudest of the Free Cities and had bent it to his will, siphoning its wealth and plundering its secrets. Now he would travel to the lands of the slavers and the pyramids, not to free anyone, but to hunt for the key to his own apotheosis. The serpent was moving, leaving the river behind for the promise of the desert, its coils tightening around the secrets of a dead empire.