Title: The Unconquered Market

Title: The Unconquered Market

Year and Month: 103 AC, 7th Moon

My father was dead. The weight of that reality was a constant, a foundational truth upon which my new reign was built. His absence was a void in the Red Keep, a silence in the council chamber, a ghost in the memory of every lord and servant who had known his long, steady rule. In my moments of quiet reflection, often on the high battlements of the castle overlooking the city I now commanded, I found myself analyzing the user feedback from my previous life's reading. The text had made an error, a ghost in its own machine, suggesting a conversation with my father after his passing. A logical impossibility. My own memory, my own ledger, was clear: I had watched him die, I had watched his pyre burn, and I now sat on his throne. The past was a closed account. The future was the only book that mattered.

The first six months of my reign were an exercise in corporate restructuring. I solidified my control over the Small Council, transforming it from a body of advisors into an executive board tasked with implementing my directives. Lord Corlys, the Sea Snake, proved to be an invaluable, if perpetually ambitious, COO for my naval operations. Lord Beesbury, the Master of Coin, quickly learned that my knowledge of his ledgers was absolute, and his performance improved accordingly. I was building a new machine, one based not on the feudal loyalties of the past, but on the cold, clean principles of efficiency, growth, and return on investment. The Seven Kingdoms—or more accurately, the Six Kingdoms united under the Targaryen crown—were my enterprise.

And there was one major market, one entire region, that remained stubbornly outside my control, a persistent drag on the balance sheet and a source of constant, low-grade military expenditure: Dorne.

The seventh and unconquered kingdom. For a century, my ancestors had tried to bring it to heel. Aegon the Conqueror, with Balerion at his command, had burned their castles, but he could not break their will. The Dornish simply melted away into the deserts and mountains, emerging to strike back when the dragons were gone. Subsequent attempts at conquest had been costly, bloody failures. The established policy of my father's reign had been one of containment—a heavily fortified border along the Dornish Marches, a state of perpetual, simmering hostility, punctuated by raids and skirmishes.

To my Small Council, this was the natural state of affairs. Dorne was the enemy. The Dornish were treacherous, stubborn, and alien. The "Dornish problem" was a military one, a matter for the marcher lords of the Stormlands and the Reach to handle.

I saw it differently.

I saw a century of wasted resources. I saw a massive, untapped market for goods from the Reach and the Westerlands. I saw a potential trading partner whose ports could open up new routes to the Summer Isles and the far East. I saw a persistent security risk that drained money into border forts instead of productive infrastructure. The Dornish problem was not a military failure; it was a catastrophic market failure. You do not conquer a market with fire and blood. You absorb it. You make it dependent on you. You control it through its economy.

I called a special session of the Small Council to address this single issue. I had spent weeks prior in the library, not reading histories of the failed wars, but analyzing a century of trade reports from the border towns, shipping manifests from Planky Town, and spy reports on the political structure of the ruling house of Sunspear. My user feedback was correct here too; there was no "Young Dragon." That Daeron was a ghost of a future I was actively rewriting. The current ruler was the Prince of Dorne, a man named Qoren Martell, known to be cautious, proud, and deeply suspicious of the Iron Throne.

I entered the council chamber and took my seat at the head of the table. The Conqueror's crown felt comfortable, a familiar weight.

"My lords," I began, my voice cool and even. "We are here today to discuss a matter of foreign policy. We are here to solve the Dornish problem. Permanently."

A ripple of interest went through the room. Lord Boremund Baratheon, the Lord of Storm's End, who was attending council as a guest, leaned forward, his eyes alight. His house had been fighting the Dornish for a thousand years. The prospect of a final, decisive war appealed to his stormy nature.

"Your Grace," he boomed, "The Stormlords are ready. Give the command, and my banners will be the first across the border. We will finish what the Conqueror began."

Lord Corlys nodded in agreement. "My fleets can blockade their coast from the Stepstones to the Sea of Dorne. We can starve them out. With dragons, we can burn Sunspear to the ground."

I let them speak, letting them lay out the conventional, tired, and utterly failed strategies of the past. I listened patiently, my face an unreadable mask. When they were finished, a silence fell as they waited for my judgment, for my decision on which hammer to use.

"No," I said simply.

The single word fell into the room with the force of a physical blow. The lords stared at me, confused.

"No war," I elaborated, my voice cutting through their confusion. "No blockade. No fire and no blood." I rose from my chair and walked to the great map of Westeros on the wall. "For one hundred years, we have treated Dorne as an enemy to be conquered. We have failed. We have wasted gold and men in a futile attempt to impose our will. This is because our fundamental strategic premise is flawed. Dorne is not an enemy to be conquered."

I paused, letting my gaze sweep over each of them. "It is a customer to be acquired."

The silence that followed was one of pure, profound bafflement. Lord Beesbury looked as if I had just suggested the treasury be run by singers. Lord Baratheon looked personally insulted. Only Corlys Velaryon seemed to grasp the edges of my meaning, a flicker of intrigued calculation in his eyes.

"Your Grace… a customer?" Grand Maester Allar stammered.

"Precisely," I said, turning back to the map. "The Dornish are proud. They will never bend the knee to a foreign king. To ask them to do so is to guarantee conflict. So, we will not ask. We will not speak of fealty. We will not speak of submission. We will speak of the one thing all men, from kings to camel drivers, understand: profit."

I laid out my strategy. It was a multi-pronged assault, but one waged with commerce, not catapults.

"Phase one: Infrastructure," I began, pointing to the Dornish Marches. "This border is a wall. We are going to turn it into a gateway. Lord Beesbury, you will fund the expansion and paving of the roads leading to the two main passes into Dorne: the Prince's Pass and the Boneway. We will build new, fortified trading posts on our side of the border, complete with inns, storehouses, and exchanges. We will make it easier and safer to trade with Dorne than ever before."

"But Your Grace," Lord Baratheon protested, "That is helping them! We will be building roads for our enemies to march on!"

"On the contrary, my lord," I countered smoothly. "We will be building roads for our merchants' caravans to march on. Roads carry goods both ways. We will be creating an economic artery. And once their economy is dependent on that artery, we will control the heart."

"Phase two: Economic Incentives." I turned to Lord Beesbury. "You will draft a new trade proclamation. Any Dornish merchant who brings his goods to our new trading posts will be offered a preferential tariff rate, twenty percent lower than the rate for merchants from the Free Cities. We will make it more profitable for them to trade with us than with anyone else. We will flood their markets with affordable grain from the Reach, with fine textiles from the Westerlands, with iron from the Stormlands. We will sell them everything from wine to wagon wheels."

"At the same time," I continued, my voice hardening slightly, "Lord Corlys, your fleets will increase their patrols in the waters off the eastern coast. Not a blockade. A 'piracy suppression campaign'. You will make it… inconvenient and expensive for Tyroshi and Myrish trading ships to do business with Dornish ports. You will not attack them, but you will inspect them, delay them, and ensure they pay every toll and tariff. We will make trading with our rivals difficult, and trading with us easy and profitable."

Corlys smiled. He understood this language perfectly. It was a subtle, deniable trade war.

"Phase three: The Diplomatic Overture." This was the final, crucial piece. "Grand Maester, you will pen a letter to Prince Qoren Martell of Sunspear. It will be a letter of… condolence for my father's passing and an announcement of my ascension. But its true purpose will be to open a new chapter. The letter will not mention fealty. It will not mention the past wars. It will state my belief that a century of conflict has been unprofitable for both our houses. It will propose a formal Trade and Navigation Treaty, to be negotiated by our envoys. It will speak of mutual prosperity, of secure borders, of a new age of cooperation."

I looked around the table. "We will offer them peace. We will offer them wealth. We will offer them respect for their sovereignty. We will ask for nothing in return, except the opportunity to do business. We will weave our economies together so tightly that in a generation's time, the idea of a war between us will be as absurd and self-destructive as a man setting fire to his own granary."

The council was silent, processing the sheer audacity of my plan. I was proposing to end a hundred-year war not with a bang, but with a balance sheet. I was treating the unconquered kingdom as an emerging market.

"It is… unconventional, Your Grace," Lord Beesbury finally said, his cautious mind struggling with the concept.

"It is genius," Corlys Velaryon declared, his voice ringing with genuine admiration. "Sheer, cold, brutal genius. Why bleed them with swords when you can bleed them with gold? Why burn their castles when you can own their markets?"

Lord Baratheon still looked unconvinced, his warrior's pride wounded by the lack of a proper fight. "And what if they refuse, Your Grace? What if they see this as weakness and raid our new roads?"

"Then our new trading posts will be forts," I replied calmly. "And the Gold Cloaks I station there will be more than capable of handling a few raiders. If they refuse this offer, they will be seen by their own people as the reason they remain poor while their neighbors to the north grow rich. It will sow dissent within their own borders. It is an offer they cannot, logically, refuse."

I turned and sat back down on the throne. "This is the new policy. This is the King's will. Implement it. Now."

The meeting was over. I had single-handedly pivoted the entire foreign policy of the Seven Kingdoms, launching a campaign of economic conquest that was more ambitious than anything Aegon had ever dreamed of.

Later that evening, as I stood on my balcony overlooking the city, I felt a sense of profound clarity. My father and the kings before him had viewed the world through the lens of history, of honor, of glory. They saw crowns and swords, oaths and fealties. I saw something different. I saw a global marketplace. And in that marketplace, I was the majority shareholder, the chairman of the board. And Dorne, the stubborn, unconquered kingdom, was about to receive a tender offer it could not refuse. The era of fire and blood was over. The era of contracts and commerce, my era, had truly begun.