Chapter 6: The Scholar's Fire, 270 AC

Chapter 6: The Scholar's Fire, 270 AC

The air in Oldtown, usually so placid, felt charged with a strange electricity on the day of the heist. A low, grey sky pressed down on the city, threatening a drizzle that never came, mirroring the coiled tension in Elias's own being. He was not nervous—that was an emotion for lesser creatures, for pawns like Pate—but he felt a keen, predatory anticipation. He was perched in the bell tower of a small septry across the square from the Isle of Ravens, a vantage point that gave him a clear, unobstructed view of the ravenry and the Archmaesters' quarters that spiraled below it.

He had Harys's face on, the face of the feckless merchant's son, but his eyes were ancient. He tracked the movements below with the enhanced senses of a hunter, his hearing, sharpened by the lives he'd consumed, picking up the distant clang of a maester's chain and the rustle of robes on stone. He watched as Archmaester Marwyn, a stocky, bull-necked man whose appearance belied his formidable intellect, left his chambers and headed towards the Great Hall for his afternoon lecture on the lineage of the Valyrian dragonlords. The trap was set. The bait was in place.

Elias's internal monologue was a cold, analytical stream, a commander watching a critical battle unfold from a safe distance. Look at him scurry. The little mouse, off to steal the dragon's cheese. He believes this is the most important day of his life, the moment his destiny turns. He is not entirely wrong. It is the day his life, his meager collection of memories and disappointments, becomes a footnote in my own glorious ascent.

He saw Pate slip from the shadows of the scriptorium, his movements jerky and furtive. The boy clutched a cleaning bucket, his official reason for being in this restricted area. He cast nervous glances over his shoulder before disappearing into the archway that led to Marwyn's rooms. Elias started a silent count. Pate had ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, before Marwyn's lecture concluded or an acolyte came looking for him. Every second that passed was a testament to the boy's terror.

Elias felt a flicker of something akin to pity, but it was the detached pity a scientist might feel for a laboratory animal subjected to a stressful experiment. Pate's fear, his greed, his pathetic hopes—they were all such predictable variables, so easily manipulated. It was this predictability, this slavery to emotion, that chained the rest of humanity to their mundane fates.

Finally, Pate emerged, walking too quickly, his attempts to appear casual utterly failing. He was clutching something under his robes. The notes. The mouse had the cheese. He scurried across the courtyard and disappeared into the labyrinth of streets leading back towards the city proper.

Elias did not move. He remained in the bell tower, a patient predator, allowing his prey a head start, allowing the boy's brief, triumphant euphoria to peak before the end. He waited until the bells of the Starry Sept began to chime the hour, then he descended, melting back into the crowds of Oldtown.

Their rendezvous was set for a crumbling, disused warehouse on the waterfront, a place that reeked of rotting fish and desperation. Pate was already there when Elias arrived, pacing back and forth, his face flushed with a mixture of sweat and exhilaration. He brandished a leather-bound folio of loose parchment.

"I have it!" Pate hissed, his voice trembling. "Right from his desk! He'll never suspect. Did you bring the scroll?"

"I did," Elias said calmly, his voice the even, reassuring tone of Harys. He held out the beautifully crafted, fraudulent scroll. Pate reached for it with a greedy, trembling hand. As their fingers brushed, Elias moved.

It was not the brutal, efficient strike he had used on Silas Marr, nor the subtle poisoning that had dispatched Tregar Ormollen. This was different. This was contemptuously simple. His hand shot out and seized Pate's wrist, his grip like iron. The boy's eyes went wide, his triumphant expression dissolving into confusion, then stark terror.

"What—?"

Elias twisted. There was a sickening, wet snap as the bones in Pate's wrist shattered. The boy screamed, a high, thin sound that was instantly cut off as Elias's other hand slammed into his throat, crushing his windpipe. Pate crumpled to the floor, gagging, his eyes bulging with disbelief and agony. He had gone from the hero of his own story to a dying animal in the space of a single heartbeat.

Elias knelt beside him, his expression impassive, and watched the life drain from the boy's eyes. He felt no remorse, no satisfaction, only a cold sense of finality, of a transaction being completed. As Pate took his last shuddering breath, the familiar, intoxicating deluge began.

The absorption was…meager. Pate's life force was a flickering candle compared to the bonfires of the others. His physical attributes were negligible. But his mind, for all its simplicity, contained a treasure. Elias was flooded with a detailed, intimate knowledge of the Citadel. Not the grand theories or the high politics, but the ground truth. He knew the secret handshakes of the novices, the guards' patrol routes, the location of hidden passages used by acolytes to sneak out after curfew. He knew which Archmaesters were kind and which were cruel, who was sleeping with whom, who was in debt to the Iron Bank. He felt Pate's lifetime of resentment, his envy of the high-born novices, his desperate, pathetic crush on a tavern maid named Rosey.

And there, buried amidst the mundane dross, was a glittering gem. A recent memory. A strange man with a hooked nose and a shifting face, an "alchemist" who had approached Pate just days ago, offering him a golden dragon for a maester's key. The memory was hazy, colored by Pate's fear and confusion, but the resonance of it struck Elias like a thunderclap. Jaqen H'ghar. Or one of his brethren. Here. Now.

The game is afoot in more ways than I knew, Elias thought, a flicker of genuine interest sparking within him. The Faceless Men were already moving pieces onto the Westerosi board. This changed things. It made his own mission, his own departure from their service, all the more urgent.

He pushed the thought aside for later analysis. He had the primary prize. He took the folio of notes from Pate's corpse, tucked it securely inside his tunic, and left the warehouse, leaving the body of the real Harys's killer to be discovered alongside his own pawn. It was a neat, if brutal, way of tying up loose ends. Harys the merchant's son would be blamed for the novice's death before disappearing himself.

Back in his room at The Quill and Tankard, with the door bolted and a flagon of wine at his side, Elias finally opened the folio. The parchments were covered in Marwyn's script: a jagged, impatient scrawl that was difficult to decipher, filled with esoteric symbols and diagrams in the margins. It was not a neat, ordered dissertation. It was the raw, unfiltered outpourings of a brilliant, obsessive, and possibly unhinged mind.

And it was the most beautiful thing Elias had ever seen.

Here, in these scattered notes, was the hidden grammar of the world. Marwyn wrote of the glass candles, not as magical artifacts, but as a form of trapped, ancient consciousness, a psycho-receptive obsidian that responded to blood and focused will. He theorized that the Valyrians did not simply command dragons with whips and horns, but engaged in a form of blood-borne telepathy, a sharing of minds that was both a partnership and a form of soul-bondage. There were detailed anatomical drawings of dragons, next to sketches of human circulatory systems, with lines connecting them, hypothesizing a shared magical biology.

He wrote of the Others, not as demons, but as a form of life based on a different principle, a "cryo-necromantic resonance" that was antithetical to the "pyro-vital" energy of life as it was known in the south. There were half-finished equations that seemed to blend mathematics with blood sacrifice, attempts to calculate the amount of life energy needed to power a single scrying. He wrote of the children of the forest, of skinchangers, and of the greenseers, describing them not in mythological terms, but as practitioners of a bio-spiritual magic, a deep communion with the life-force of the world itself.

Reading the notes, Elias felt the nascent god complex within him swell into a roaring fire of certainty. This was the truth. This was the source code.

Magic is not a gift from the gods, his inner voice boomed, no longer a monologue but a sermon delivered to his own soul. It is not a series of prayers and rituals to appease unseen forces. It is a science. A brutal, beautiful, and fantastically complex science based on the manipulation of the fundamental energies of life, death, and consciousness. The maesters, with their fear and their skepticism, are like cavemen refusing to believe in the sun because they cannot touch it. Marwyn… Marwyn is the first man attempting to build a chariot to fly there.

But he is still fumbling in the dark. He has the theories, but his methods are crude. He speaks of blood sacrifice as a fuel source, of life energy given willingly or taken by force. He understands the principle, but he lacks the engine. I… I am the engine. My ability to absorb life is not just a parlor trick, a way to gain skills and strength. It is the perfect, most efficient mechanism for harnessing this power. Every life I take is not just an addition to my being; it is fuel for the fire. I can power these rituals, I can unlock this science, on a scale that Marwyn can only dream of.

He had to test it. The desire was a burning thirst. Tucked into a pocket of the folio was a smaller piece of parchment containing a simpler ritual, one Marwyn had seemingly used to calibrate his own senses. It was a scrying ritual, a way to see a place one knew intimately, using a bowl of polished silver, pure water, and a few drops of the user's own blood.

Elias worked quickly. He took the silver washing bowl from his room, polished it until it shone like a mirror, and filled it with clear water from his pitcher. The final component was the catalyst, the fuel. His own blood. He took a small knife from his boot and pricked his thumb. As a drop of his own crimson blood fell into the water, he felt a strange sensation. The blood was… potent. It was not just the blood of one boy. It was the commingled life essence of five people: the original boy, the sellsword Marr, the merchant Vorro, the slave girl Lyraka, and the novice Pate. It hummed with a latent power that made the water in the bowl seem to shimmer.

He focused his will, drawing on the instructions from Marwyn's notes, pouring his intent into the bowl. He pictured a place he knew with absolute, photographic clarity: the sanctum of the House of Black and White, the great hall with its many-faced idols and the dark, central pool.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the surface of the water clouded over. The reflection of his room dissolved, replaced by a swirling grey mist. Slowly, an image resolved itself from the haze. It was grainy, indistinct, like a memory seen through a thick fog, but it was unmistakably real. He saw the towering statues of the death gods. He saw the still, black water of the poisoned pool. He saw a robed figure, the kindly man, kneeling in silent meditation.

A wave of pure, unadulterated ecstasy washed over him. It worked. It was real. He had reached out with his mind, powered by the fuel of his own life force, and touched a place hundreds of leagues away. This was a power beyond strength, beyond cunning, beyond anything he had ever known. It was the power of a god.

He held the vision for a long moment, then released his concentration. The image in the bowl dissolved, returning to a simple reflection of his own face—the face of Harys, but with eyes that burned with a scholar's fire.

He looked at Marwyn's notes, scattered across his table, with a new, hungry intensity. The theories were a start. The ritual was a proof of concept. But the notes were incomplete, filled with questions and frustrated dead-ends. Marwyn was on the verge of a breakthrough, but he was not there yet. To truly understand, to truly master this power, Elias needed more than the man's research. He needed the man himself. He needed the living, breathing mind where these theories were born, the intuition that guided the research, the lifetime of study that formed its foundation.

His objective, once so clear, had now been refined to a single, terrifyingly audacious point. He had to acquire Archmaester Marwyn.

Assassinating a powerful, paranoid, and magically-aware Archmaester inside the most secure intellectual fortress in the world was a task that bordered on the impossible. It would require a plan of unparalleled genius and subtlety. It was a challenge of a magnitude that made his previous accomplishments seem like children's games.

And Elias Stone had never felt more alive. He looked out his window at the Hightower, its beacon a defiant star against the encroaching night. It was no longer a library or a fortress. It was a mausoleum. And he was coming to collect its most prized treasure.