Chapter 23: Blackwater, Green Fire, and Red Ink

Chapter 23: Blackwater, Green Fire, and Red Ink

299 AC

The air in Braavos was cool and carried the clean, sharp scent of the sea. In King's Landing, it was thick with terror. From the serene remove of his study, Damon could taste the fear on the wind, a psychic miasma that drifted across the Narrow Sea. Stannis Baratheon's fleet, a forest of black sails and fiery stag banners, had been sighted off Dragonstone. The largest naval force assembled in a generation was bearing down on a city defended by a child king, a drunken dog of a guardsman, and a dwarf. The final, decisive battle for the Iron Throne was hours away.

Damon's manse was a bastion of tranquility in a world on fire. He was in his war room, a chamber of polished teak and soft leather, its walls lined with maps that were updated hourly by a silent staff of clerks. Coded messages arrived from his fleet of swift ships, bringing him intelligence that was fresher and more accurate than anything available to the combatants themselves. He was not a king or a general, but he possessed what every king and general craved: perfect information.

He began the day with a final, pre-battle telepathic conference, his consciousness a ghost in the King's Landing office of his bank. Silas and the other directors were a knot of barely controlled panic.

"Lord Stannis's fleet will be in the bay by nightfall!" the Hightower director stammered, his mind a screech of fear. "The city will fall! We should begin moving our assets, evacuating…"

Silence, Damon's thought cut through the room like a guillotine, manifesting in Silas's voice as a sharp, commanding bark. "The Bank of Westeros does not evacuate. It capitalizes. This battle is not a threat; it is a liquidity event."

The directors fell silent, their fear momentarily replaced by stunned confusion.

Our course is clear, Damon instructed, feeding Silas the words. The moment the battle is concluded, regardless of the victor, we will issue 'Reconstruction Bonds' on behalf of the Iron Throne. The city will need to be rebuilt. The people will need to be fed. We will finance the recovery. Our grain ships are already marshaled at Driftmark, waiting for the signal to enter the harbor. They will relieve the starving city, and the Crown will pay us handsomely for every sack of flour. We will be hailed as saviors.

His lieutenants absorbed the cold, brilliant logic. They were not just bankers; they were disaster capitalists, and their master was about to oversee the most profitable disaster in modern history.

With the financial preparations in place, Damon turned his attention to the battlefield itself. He knew the lynchpin of the city's defense was Tyrion Lannister. The dwarf's brilliant, unconventional mind was the only thing standing between Joffrey's crown and Stannis's cold iron. Damon had been cultivating Tyrion for years; now, he would give his unwitting protégé the tools he needed to deliver a masterpiece of destruction.

He knew Tyrion's greatest weapon was the vast cache of wildfire, but that he struggled with the unstable substance and the secretive, erratic pyromancers of the Alchemists' Guild. Damon acted. An agent from his 'Duskendale Restoration Project'—a man with impeccable credentials as a master potter and engineer—had approached the Guild weeks earlier.

The agent had presented the pyromancers with a business proposition. "My company has developed a new ceramic firing technique," he had explained, showing them samples of incredibly strong, yet lightweight, clay jars. "Perfect for storing volatile liquids. We have also perfected a new type of pitch, one that seals instantly and is impervious to leakage."

The Wisdoms of the Guild, greedy and arrogant, had claimed the innovation as their own, eagerly buying the entire stock. They had no idea they were being handed a 21st-century upgrade in containment and delivery systems. The wildfire pots Tyrion would be launching were now more stable, less likely to prematurely detonate, and sealed to be perfectly aerodynamic. Damon was ensuring the wildfire trap would be devastatingly, horrifyingly effective.

As the sun began to set, casting long shadows across the city, Damon projected his consciousness into the Red Keep, into the heart of the fear. He sought out Queen Cersei. He found her in her chambers, already deep in her cups, her beautiful face a mask of terror. She was surrounded by her ladies, but her mind was utterly alone, adrift in a sea of dread.

Damon did not announce his presence. He simply let his calm, powerful consciousness be felt, a soothing pressure in the room, a silent counterpoint to her frantic thoughts.

"Your Grace," he whispered, his voice a disembodied thought that seemed to emanate from her own mind, a trick he had perfected.

Cersei started, looking around wildly. "Who's there?"

A friend, Damon projected. A servant of the realm. He focused on an image of his 'Royal Purity' lotion, the one thing in the castle she knew brought the king—and by extension, her—comfort. Be calm.

"They are coming," she whimpered, her thoughts awash with images of Stannis's cold eyes and brutal reputation. "He will kill my son. He will kill me."

He is a man of cold iron, Your Grace, Damon's thoughts intertwined with hers. He would show you no mercy. But your father is a lion. And the lion is coming. You must have faith in the lion. Hold the city. Hold your son. The lion will come.

He was not comforting her. He was managing her. He was reinforcing her resolve, ensuring she would not surrender the city prematurely and spoil the magnificent, bloody spectacle he had so carefully arranged. He kept her balanced on the knife's edge of terror and hope until the first warning horns blew from the battlements.

The battle began. Damon shifted his consciousness, leaving the Queen to her wine, and leaping into the mind of one of his paid men in the Gold Cloaks, a hardened sergeant named Polliver stationed high on the city walls near the River Gate. Through the man's eyes, Damon had a perfect vantage point.

The sight was breathtaking. Stannis's fleet was a forest of black masts and fiery banners, covering the bay from shore to shore. The sheer scale of it was enough to break the spirit of any defender. He felt the fear of the men around Polliver, a tangible, sour taste in the air.

He watched as the lone ship, Tyrion's masterstroke, sailed out to meet them. He felt the confusion of Stannis's commanders. And then he saw the flicker of green.

The wildfire explosion was not a sound Polliver heard, but a thing that happened to the world. A silent, emerald sun was born in the middle of the bay, a sun that consumed ships and sea and sky in a single, ravenous gulp. Through his telepathic link, Damon did not just see the green fire; he felt it. He felt the psychic scream of thousands of minds being extinguished in a single, horrifying instant, a wave of pure agony that washed over him, a sensation he absorbed with the detached curiosity of a seismologist reading a Richter scale. The bay was a cauldron of green hell, and the battle had just begun.

He watched, through Polliver's eyes, as Stannis's surviving forces, enraged and desperate, landed and threw themselves at the city walls. He saw Tyrion, a giant's mind in a dwarf's body, command the defense with a brilliant, desperate energy. He felt the courage of the Hound as he cut down man after man, and the cowardice of Joffrey as he fled the walls to hide behind his mother's skirts.

The battle raged for hours. The Mud Gate was on the verge of collapse, its heavy timbers groaning under the assault of a massive battering ram. The defenders were falling back, their morale about to break. Polliver and his men were preparing to flee.

From his study in Braavos, Damon acted. It was a tiny, surgical intervention. He focused his telekinesis on the battering ram below. Not on the ram itself, but on a single, heavy iron bolt that held its primary suspension chain to the frame. He focused his will, vibrating the bolt at a molecular level, introducing a microscopic stress fracture.

On the next swing, the bolt shattered. The heavy chain snapped, and the massive ram crashed uselessly to the ground, its momentum broken. To the attackers, it was a catastrophic equipment failure. To the defenders, it was a miracle. It bought Tyrion's forces the precious moments they needed to douse the fires and shore up the gate. Damon, the god in the machine, had tipped the scales.

Just as the defenders began to falter again, he felt it. A new army. A massive host, crashing into Stannis's unprepared rear flank. The combined force of the Lannisters and the Tyrells. The alliance he had brokered. Through Polliver's disbelieving eyes, he saw the banners—the golden lion and the golden rose—charging side by side. He saw a knight in magnificent, green-and-gold armor who could only be Renly's ghost, Ser Garlan Tyrell, spreading terror through Stannis's ranks. He felt the battle turn from a desperate defense into a brutal, one-sided slaughter. He felt the utter despair of Stannis's men as they were trapped between the walls of the city and the hammer of a fresh army.

The battle was over. The city was saved. Stannis's cause was broken, his fleet a collection of scorched timbers, his army annihilated.

Damon withdrew his consciousness, the screams and the stench of burning flesh fading, replaced by the scent of salt air and the gentle lapping of the canal outside his window. He was physically untouched, his heart rate as steady as it had been at dawn. He was emotionally unmoved. The battle had been a complex series of transactions, and he had been on the winning side of every one.

He walked to his desk and opened a new ledger. The page was titled, 'Blackwater Bay, P&L'. On the debit side, he noted the now-worthless loans he had extended to Stannis Baratheon. A significant, but acceptable, loss. On the credit side, the list was much longer. The astronomical returns from his now-cemented alliance with the victorious Lannisters and Tyrells. The value of the 'Reconstruction Bonds' that would now be issued, making the Crown's debt to him permanent and generational. The profit from the grain he was about to sell to the starving city at a 500% markup. The value of having his chosen hero, Tyrion, now hailed as the Savior of the City, a man whose respect he had already cultivated.

The red ink from the battlefield was already being erased by the torrent of black ink flowing into his books. Thousands of men were dead. A king had been brought low. A city had been scarred. But for Damon, the only sound that mattered was the quiet, satisfying click of a successful investment coming to term. His accounts had never been healthier.