Title: The Unseen Enemy

Title: The Unseen Enemy

Year and Month: 101 AC, 3rd Moon

The first year of the new century dawned gray and sorrowful. The death of my mother, Queen Alysanne, had cast a long shadow over the realm, a shadow from which my father had never truly emerged. He was a king in name, but his spirit had fled with her. He was eighty years old, a frail, grief-shrunken man who now ruled as a ghost from within his own solar. The governance of the Seven Kingdoms rested on the broad, capable shoulders of my brother Baelon, the Hand of the King, and on the silent, secret counsel I provided him and my father.

This arrangement, a warrior prince guided by a shadow prince, had proven remarkably effective. Baelon was a superb executive. He was decisive, charismatic, and inspired loyalty. He was excellent at implementing strategy, but he was not a strategist himself. That was my role. I fed him policy, I outlined priorities, and he, in his capacity as Hand, executed them with an efficiency that made the realm prosper. We were, in corporate terms, the perfect CEO-COO partnership.

I was now nineteen, a man grown. My public persona as the quiet, scholarly prince was unshakeable. I was respected for my intelligence, admired for my martial skill with my Valyrian blade, Ledger, but I held no formal office. I sought none. My power was far greater in the shadows, my influence more absolute for being unseen. The stability I had engineered was holding. My long-term plan, the slow, patient march to the throne via actuarial inevitability, was proceeding exactly on schedule.

But I knew a storm was coming. Not a war of men, which I could predict and manage, but a war against an enemy that could not be seen, could not be reasoned with, and could not be fought with swords or dragons. The histories of my past life had warned me of it: the Great Spring Sickness of 101 AC. A plague that would sweep through King's Landing, killing tens of thousands.

The second part of the storm was more personal, more specific. My brother Baelon, the Spring Prince, the Hand of the King, the pillar of the realm, was destined to die this year. Not from the plague, but from a simple, mundane burst belly. A stitch in his side while hunting. The irony was brutal. While I would be fighting a war to save his city, I knew I could do nothing to save him. His death was a fixed point, a necessary, scheduled event in my path to power. I had to prepare for it, to manage the transition, and to steel my own heart—or what was left of it—against the act of watching my brother die.

The first reports came in the third moon, as the city was shaking off the last of the winter chill. It began in the squalor of Flea Bottom. A fever, a rattling cough that quickly turned bloody, a swift and agonizing death. Grand Maester Allar, a cautious and unimaginative man who had replaced Elysar years ago, dismissed it as the usual winter flux, made worse by a wet season.

I knew better.

I did not need Balerion's eyes to see this threat. I could feel it in the city's data. I had my own agents, a small, discreet network of servants and merchants I had cultivated over the years, who fed me information. They reported the rising death toll, the way the sickness was spreading from the slums towards the wealthier districts, following the paths of commerce and desperation.

While the Small Council debated the cost of grain, I was in the library, drafting a crisis management plan. I was a modern mind fighting a medieval plague. I knew the enemy was not bad air, or divine punishment, as the Faith would soon claim. It was contagion. It was filth. It was proximity.

The crisis came to a head when the plague breached the walls of the Red Keep itself. A cook, a laundress, then a squire to a household knight. Panic erupted. Lords began to flee the city for their country estates. The council was paralyzed. Grand Maester Allar recommended prayers and the burning of cloying incense. My brother Baelon, a man of action, ordered the Gold Cloaks to quell the riots that were beginning to break out as food became scarce. His response was tactical, not strategic. He was fighting the symptoms, not the disease.

That night, I requested an emergency session with my father and Baelon. They met me in the solar, their faces grim. Baelon was frustrated, his warrior's mind ill-equipped to fight an enemy he could not see. My father was terrified, the thought of another death in his family making him tremble.

"This is not a winter flux," I began, my voice calm and authoritative. I unrolled a large, detailed map of King's Landing I had commissioned. "This is a plague. It spreads from person to person. Every man who flees the city now is a potential spark carrying the fire to the rest of Westeros. We cannot contain the fear, but we can, and must, contain the sickness. To do that, the city must be locked down. Now."

"Lock down the city?" Baelon balked. "A quarter of a million people? That's impossible! We'd have riots, starvation!"

"We will have riots and starvation regardless if the city's infrastructure collapses," I countered coolly. "Which it will in less than a fortnight if the current infection rate holds. We cannot be reactive. We must be proactive. We must wage a total, systematic war."

I laid out my plan. It was a strategy born of my knowledge of epidemiology and public health from another world, adapted to the resources of this one.

First, Quarantine. I drew lines on the map, dividing the entire city into a grid of small, manageable districts. "You will use the Gold Cloaks not to chase rioters, but to enforce a strict quarantine. No one moves between districts. Each district will become a self-contained unit. This prevents a fire in one corner of the city from spreading to another."

Second, Sanitation. "The plague thrives in filth. The Dragonpit will become a great incinerator. I will have Balerion provide the flame. You will command the Gold Cloaks to organize corpse-disposal teams. Every body is to be wrapped in linen soaked in lye and brought to the pit for immediate, complete incineration. There will be no mass graves to poison the water. Furthermore, you will enforce public sanitation. The streets are to be washed with lye and saltwater. All public wells will be treated."

Third, Resources. "The greatest cause of panic and riots will be the lack of food and clean water. We will seize control of every granary and warehouse in the city, under the King's authority. The food will be rationed. You will use the City Watch to distribute daily rations to each quarantined district. This will be the most difficult part, but it is essential. If people believe they will be fed, they will be more likely to obey the quarantine."

Fourth, Information. "You must control the narrative. The Septons will preach of the Stranger's wrath. We will preach of the King's protection. Every day, criers will announce the King's measures, the number of rations being distributed, the work of the sanitation crews. You must give the people hope, and the belief that order, not chaos, is in command."

I finished, the silence in the room profound. I had just outlined a public health response more advanced than anything this world had ever conceived. I had laid out a plan for martial law, for resource seizure, for a city-wide logistical operation of immense complexity.

Baelon stared at me, his mouth slightly agape. He was not looking at his little brother, the scholar. He was looking at a commander, a strategist whose vision dwarfed his own. "Aeryn… this is… it is a plan for waging a war."

"That is what this is, brother," I said. "A war. And this is how we win it."

My father, who had been listening with a rapt, fearful intensity, looked at me. His eyes, for the first time in years, held a flicker of the old king, the man who had built roads and codified laws. He saw the cold, brutal logic of my plan. He saw that it was their only hope.

"Do it," he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. "Baelon… do as your brother says. All of it. Use the full authority of the Crown. Spare no expense. The Prince's plan is now the King's command."

For the next two months, King's Landing became a city under siege from within. Baelon, empowered by a clear strategy, was magnificent. He was a born commander of men, and he threw himself into the task with a ferocious energy. He personally oversaw the Gold Cloaks, his presence on the streets a reassuring symbol of order. The quarantine was enforced with brutal efficiency. The city was divided, its arteries clamped shut.

My part was largely unseen, but critical. From the sky, Balerion and I became the ultimate logistical tool. I could spot illegal gatherings from a mile up, directing patrols to break them up. I could see where refuse was piling up, where the quarantine was failing. My most important, and most terrifying, role was at the Dragonpit. Each night, a grim procession of carts would arrive, laden with the dead. And Balerion, his great head lowered into the pit, would unleash his cleansing fire, turning the plague's victims to sterile ash. The sight of the black dragon's fire roaring into the night sky became a symbol for the city: it was the King's wrath, burning away the pestilence.

I also managed the resource crisis. Working from the ledgers in the library, I coordinated the distribution of food, ensuring that no district was missed, calculating the burn rate of our grain reserves, and dispatching riders to the Crownlands to organize new supply chains. I was the Quartermaster General, the head of logistics, the unseen brain behind Baelon's very visible brawn.

Slowly, painstakingly, the plan worked. The infection rate, which had been climbing exponentially, began to plateau. Then, it began to fall. The quarantine held. The city, though starving and terrified, did not collapse into anarchy. We were winning.

But as the Great Spring Sickness began to recede, the second, more personal tragedy I had been waiting for struck.

It happened on a quiet afternoon. The crisis had largely passed, and Baelon, exhausted but triumphant, had gone on a hunt in the Kingswood to celebrate, to feel the wind in his hair for the first time in months. He returned complaining of a stitch in his side. He laughed it off as a pulled muscle.

I knew better.

That evening, a page found me in the library. The Prince of Dragonstone had taken to his bed. The pain had worsened. Grand Maester Allar had been summoned. I felt a cold knot tighten in my stomach. This was it. The clock was striking the hour.

I went to my brother's chambers. My father was already there, his face a mask of renewed terror. Baelon was pale, sweating, his hand clutching his abdomen. He tried to smile when he saw me.

"Just a cramp, little brother," he grunted. "Too long behind a desk, not enough time in the saddle."

Maester Allar diagnosed it as a blockage of the bowels. He prescribed milk of the poppy for the pain and sweet-smelling poultices. It was useless. I knew it was his appendix, a burst organ that was now flooding his body with poison. An ailment that, in my world, could be fixed with a simple surgery. In this world, it was an inescapable death sentence.

I could do nothing. I could not explain what an appendix was. I could not guide a maester's knife. My knowledge, so powerful in saving a city, was utterly useless in saving the one man who stood between me and the throne. To intervene here, to reveal a knowledge of human anatomy that no one in this world possessed, would be to expose myself completely. It would be a catastrophic breach of protocol. My long-term strategy depended on the plausible deniability of my "gifts." This was a line I could not cross.

So I stood there, a silent, grieving brother, and watched him die.

It took two days. He was delirious with fever at the end. My father never left his side, holding his hand, his face a landscape of utter desolation. He had lost his heir. Again.

Baelon died just before dawn on the third day.

The city that he had just saved awoke to the news that their hero, the Spring Prince, the Hand of the King, was dead. The grief was immense, a cruel counterpoint to the relief of the plague's end.

I stood beside my father's throne as the lords of the court came to offer their condolences. He was a statue, a man hollowed out entirely. His mind, his heart, his will to rule… it had all died with Baelon.

He looked at me, his last living son. The fear was gone from his eyes. The awe was gone. All that was left was a vast, empty weariness, and a terrifying, absolute dependence.

I was the only one left.

The Great Council my father had once feared would be needed to choose between Aemon's line and Baelon's was now moot. The Unwritten Treaty I had forged was a relic of a future that would never happen. The path was now clear. There were no other viable claimants. Only me.

The plague had been the unseen enemy of the city. But I had been the unseen enemy of fate. I had fought one war in the open, saving thousands. And I had won another in the shadows, simply by standing still and letting the remorseless logic of the timeline do its work. The Prince's Ledger was now the only one that mattered. And on its final page, there was only one name left in the asset column. Mine.