Chapter 15: Stannis Visits

If the Mountain's ambush had taught me anything, it was that I needed to improve my capacity to block archers. Developing a new shield spell and better survivability enchantments moved up in importance. But those were difficult; something easy was going around King's Landing and bonding every source of Red Mana I could find.

Rhaenys' Hill, Visenya's Hill, and two from the Dragonpit gave me a total of eight Red bonds, double what I had started the week with. Then I took a few days to visit the Alchemists Guild. They were more than happy to have me visit; Robert was not a fan, and they needed every bit of help they could get at court.

Although they weren't willing to teach me how to make what the called the substance, known to the rest of Westeros as wildfire, they did let me use a small amount of it. I even got them to show me a comparison, one teaspoon of recently created substance versus one of the older, aged stuff. I used Blue to accelerate my thoughts and activated Mage-sight to look deeply into the structure of the wildfire. It was more than just chemical; the rites and spells they used to make it gave it a subtly woven pattern of Red. That pattern was weak in the newer liquid, but grew thicker and stronger with age as it slowly fed on available ambient mana.

It was clear that the Alchemists had some knowledge of true magic, and I wanted it. Just that small glimpse, a few minutes of flame, had taught me how to create a much more efficient and deadly evocation, a wildfire bolt that only needed a single Red mana and a Colorless to kill. I could even pump more colorless mana into it, turning into a massive fireball. Or, with a slight twist, I could make a wildfire flamethrower, again with only a single Red needed to spark the flames then make them hotter, larger, with more Colorless mana to back it up. In short, a teaspoon of their knowledge was enough to make me a dangerous if crude pyromancer.

I had no idea what gains my spellcraft would make if I could get more of their knowledge, but I wanted to find out. Unfortunately, while they were happy to share the lesser mysteries, really just antiquated but quite clever methods of chemistry, especially after I proved my own reasonably advanced knowledge on the subject, they kept the knowledge of their magic locked up tight. I bonded their Guildhall while I was there, gaining another Red and a Blue mana source, and began to plan how to gain access to their knowledge.

And then it came to me. It seemed that as soon as I was properly free, rather than taking a vacation, that I'd be starting to make paper and print books after all. And the Alchemists, with their ability to make small industrial scale amounts of acids, alkalis, and other chemical substances, were just the people to help me.

I continued to do the tourist thing though as printing and paper were for the future, paying a visit to the Great Sept. I visited and bound the library there, for a Blue mana, and the Sept itself was enough of an object of veneration to grant me a pair of Whites.

I was preparing for my trip to the Kingswood, where I planned to pick up some more Green mana before performing another series of personal cultivation upgrades and experiment with my magic, when I was given some worrying news by Arya.

Her first recounting of events was hurried, confused, even a little panicked. But I got her some water, hit her with a bit of White for calm, some Blue for memory, and went through everything with her until I had all the details.

During one of her escapades, something involving searching for a cat, but then running from the prince and princess, then being lost in the tunnels, she heard a pair of people speaking. She didn't recognize them, not even when I helped her recollection with a bit of Blue, but one of them was somewhat familiar, likely from within the Keep. The other sounded foreign, though Arya was too young and inexperienced to tell from where.

The fat foreigner was trying to get the familiar one who at the very least looked like a guard to delay Lord Stark's investigation of Lord Arryn's death, preferably by killing Ned. Apparently he was getting close to some truth, something that they hoped to use but that might be lost if Ned uncovered the secret. The bastard boy and a book, both within Ned's knowledge, were defined as essential clues.

They talked about a princess and a khal, and how they would not move until their child was born; from that I understood they meant Daenerys, who had recently married or was about to marry Khal Drogo. They were worried about Renly bringing Margaery Tyrell to court and helping her seduce Robert. I could see why; this would firmly bind the Tyrells to the Crown, and leave the Targaryen pretender with only Dorne's support in the event of an invasion.

What Arya had heard about this plot was both good and bad news. The existence of the plot, the reach of it; that was bad. But the fact that apparently the conspirators were looking at an ever-more precariously balanced tower of cards, that they feared being defeated by the actions we were already taking; that was good. Until the conspiracy was vanquished though we needed to take certain measures.

Arya and I spoke to Ned, and we improved the security again. All laundry was done only by Winterfell servants, food prepared and served by Winterfell servants. All non-Winterfell servants were forbidden from the Hand's Tower, and Togo and I went along looking for and locking off any secret passages. At all times outside of the Hand's Tower either Togo or I escorted Ned, and Arya and Sansa were only allowed out in the presence of their direwolves and at least a pair of armed guards. Similar measures were taken for the king, but with Baratheon loyalists substituted for Starks.

Then two days later, Stannis Baratheon decided to finally come back to King's Landing. Though he had a seat on the small council as the Master of Ships, I hadn't yet met the man, not in the three or so months that we'd been in King's Landing. His ship was sighted in the morning, and he was on time to make the afternoon meeting of the council.

It was mostly business as usual except for three things.

First, Robert was present. After I cured him of his poison and restored some of his vitality, he had been spending less time drinking. After seeing the tournament his martial spirit had been kindled and he spent much more time in the yard training. Far less unfit and more energetic, he had started to attend the small council meetings at least semi-regularly. I think that the fact that things were going well with the realm, and that his terrible fucking shrew of a wife wasn't there to bother him helped.

Second, Varys smelled of fear to Togo's senses.

Third, Stannis asked Lord Stark, Renly and Robert for a talk afterwards.

I looked to Ned, to see whether I should come inside a smaller study with them or guard the door.

Robert rolled his eyes at me. "You may as well come, Odysseus," he said. "I think that if you weren't loyal I'd be fucked anyways, and I know how you worry these days when Ned's out of your sight!" He laughed a bit, to show that there were no hard feelings with the mockery.

Stannis gave me a considering look, then nodded himself. "Yes. And it was his actions more than any's which gave me the freedom to broach this subject," he stated.

Stannis was a bit of an odd duck. He was tall and strong, the sort of man that might be seen as handsome in the Seven Kingdoms if it weren't for the fact that his face was locked into a permanently dour and grim visage. He was obviously uncomfortable in social situations, even more so if they involved women. Honestly, I thought he might be a bit Asperger's. That or he had a negative charisma score.

Robert had the Lord Commander as his kingsguard for the day, so he joined us too.

The six of us went to a room that the king was relatively sure was secure. Togo and I checked to make sure, then I left him outside to ensure there weren't any eavesdroppers.

Stannis looked somewhat faltering, as if he wasn't quite sure how to say what he wanted to. "There's no easy way to say this. I know why Lord Arryn was killed, what secret he died to protect," Stannis stated.

Robert was suddenly immensely serious. Arryn had been like a father to him. "Well, speak then," he ordered.

"It was Cersei Lannister," Stannis spat out finally. "She was unfaithful, Robert. None of the children are yours."

And suddenly it all clicked. Genetics. I hadn't been thinking of fucking genetics, too happy trundling along through this fantasy land to stop and analyze the way I should. What were the odds that the children of a blonde woman and a man with black hair are blonde? Not just once but three times?

Robert's face was white with rage.

"This is the secret," I said as everyone turned to me. "Arya overhead someone talking in the tunnels beneath the dungeon the other day. About how Lord Stark had the book and the bastard, and would soon figure things out. That it would have things falling apart much too soon, too soon for Daenerys or some future child with her husband Khal Drogo to press a Targaryen claim. If this had come out at just the wrong time, if Joffrey and Tommen had already been married into great houses, allied with them, if the king was too old to have more children… the realm would have burned in the fires of war."

"Who," Robert growled. "Which traitor slept with my slattern of a wife!"

Stannis looked him straight in the eye. "Her brother. Jaime Lannister."

I dodged out of the way as Robert stood up, heaved and flipped the massive solid oak table over in his rage. The thing must have weighed four hundred pounds. He stood there panting for a moment.

"Incest," he snarled. "That fucking bitch was going to put the product of incest on my throne! Ned, draw up a proclamation. I want her here with all haste to stand trial for her crimes."

Renly decided that then was a good time to stoke the flames a bit. "And what of the children?" he asked slyly. I interrupted. I may have been a cruel bastard sometimes, and put more blood on my hands since coming to this land than I had ever expected, but I wanted no part of sentencing children to die.

"Joffrey's a little shit, but the other two are pleasant enough," I said. "As Your Grace may recall, I have some small achievements in medicine. I could make it so that your future heirs need never fear a pretender from those three, and we could announce that fact; unlike one of the surgeons they wouldn't even need to feel any pain. Joffrey should take the Black, while Tommen may join either the Citadel or the Faith. Myrcella might join the Faith as well, or retire to Lannister lands if Lord Tyrion will have her."

Ned nodded. "That would be an honorable solution, Your Grace."

Robert had sunk back into his chair, exhausted. "Very well. Make it so. Was there anything else? Because I find myself in a sudden need to get drunk and fuck a whore who doesn't claim to be my wife."

Renly and I both nodded, so I gestured at him. "Please, my lord, proceed," I offered.

"Thank you. I don't know if it's too soon, but we might want to consider who you might take next to wife. Margaery Tyrell is young, beautiful, pleasant, and likely able to have a number of children. Furthermore, she would weld Highgarden close to the throne which can only help our cause against any future Targaryen pretenders."

Robert looked at his brother as if Renly were mad. "I haven't even executed the last one yet, and you're already trying to marry me off again, brother?" he asked incredulously.

Ser Barristan interjected. "I've heard the same of her, and it's worth at least bearing in mind. Still, there's no need to make such a decision today, and in fact any agreement should have the wedding at least five or six months after Cersei's execution for propriety."

Robert turned to me. "Odysseus. Please, tell me you're not trying to get me married off too."

I grinned. "No, Your Grace. I'll leave that in the capable hands of your brother," I joked. "I was more worried about the identity of the conspirator within our walls."

Robert nodded. "I had forgotten about that. Do you have a suspect?"

I grimaced. "I do, but little evidence."

Robert's eyebrows raised. "Well, out with it."

"Varys, Your Grace. He isn't far enough off of the physical description of the guard that Arya gave to remove him from suspicion, and there are precious few who are well placed enough and have enough contacts to know so much about what is going on. He has numerous foreign contacts, and supported the Targaryens despite Aerys' madness. We have only his own word that he is true now. Either he is a leader in this conspiracy, or he has turned a blind eye to it, or his whisperers have no word of it. Of those possibilities, I do not believe in his ignorance."

Robert mulled it over for a bit. "I find I agree with your arguments. Does anyone disagree?" he asked. No one spoke up. "Very well. Then, Ser Odysseus, I charge you to hunt him down. Bring him in alive if you can, but better dead than supporting the fucking madmen who believe themselves dragons."

I nodded, and with that our meeting ended.

Immediately after, Togo and I left to track down Varys. His scent trail didn't leave in the direction of his quarters. It seemed that he had decided the game was up, or at least that he would absent himself on "important business" until he knew which way the wind blew. He was good; he switched clothing, added different layers of scent, moved through secret passages and tunnels. It might have worked against a normal hunting hound.

It was totally ineffective against Togo.

Togo trotted after Varys, and I jogged after Togo, and soon enough we came to him. He had taken a secret passage out of the Keep, and was on a narrow path that went by the water.

He heard me, and looked up in resignation. "Ah, Ser Odysseus. You know, I thought that if anyone would catch me it would be you."

"Surrender, Varys," I offered. "Don't make this harder on yourself than it has to be."

He smiled bitterly at me. "Really? That's the best you can do? You and I both know how this ends, Odysseus. With me screaming and screaming as my secrets are torn from me one-by-one."

I shook my head. "I know better ways of questioning a man than that, Varys. It needn't hurt."

His face was full of hatred then. "What, you'll use your magics on me? I'd rather the torture." I was surprised, and he could tell. "Did you really think that your magic was a secret? With that animal of yours at your side? I am not such a fool, and I know well the dark acts practiced by your sort," he spat.

I shook my head. "I very much doubt you have ever met anyone who practices magic the way I do, Varys. But you have my word, on my honor and my lord Stark's, I will not use magics on you to question, compel, or torture."

He looked conflicted for a moment, then resolved. "I wish I could believe you. Everything I did, I did for the realm." And then he jumped, head first, and dashed his skull against the rocks.

Chapter 16: Kingswood Vacation

After I brought back Varys' body as proof of his death, I took care of Tommen and Myrcella that night. It was a cruel thing to do to a child who's only sin was having the wrong father, but civil war would have been crueler. Tommen was sent off to the Citadel under guard, while Myrcella went to the Faith, both in tears, their worlds shattered.

I couldn't stand to watch.

The next two weeks passed with me taut with stress as I waited for Joffrey to arrive. Security was extremely high as groups of Baratheon and Stark guards explored through the tunnels and masons were brought in to seal them up. There was the fear that Varys had passed on his knowledge to the other conspirators and that a band of assassins or infiltrators could enter from below.

Finally Joffrey arrived, swearing and fighting his fate. Another application of Red mana and he was sterile, a bit of Green to make sure it healed in a way to be permanent. And then he was off for the Wall.

A week after that Cersei arrived and was executed, and I finally breathed easier.

Robert had two strong brothers, and Stannis a child of his own. There was no possibility that a civil war would break out on his death, and so less incentive to kill him. Varys, likely the leader of the Westeros side of the Targaryen conspiracy, was also dead. If someone were to just bring in Baelish's head I would be perfectly content.

Robert wanted to make me the new Master of Whisperers, which I adamantly refused. Fuck that. I didn't want an unending, thankless job, and I sure as shit didn't want to become the Seven Kingdoms' Spymaster. That just sounded miserable.

No, I needed to get away for a bit. So I absconded with a young raven from the Rookery, and fucked off to the Kingswood for a proper break. It was time to work on my magic.

I named my new raven Nevermore because I was a massive nerd and found it funny. I had decided that I wanted an aerial scout, messenger and spy, and Nevermore was going to be it – after I modified him, of course. At first I was going to go for a bird of prey, the kill-iest I could find, because what red-blooded man-child doesn't want to have a massive golden eagle or gyrfalcon swoop down on his enemies?

But then I thought about practicality, about how if I ended up in another world and got to bring my pets with me that I probably should have a peregrine falcon. Golden Eagles were for emperors, after all, and gyrfalcons for kings, whereas peregrines could be for anyone from a knight to a duke.

But practicality is like quicksand; after you get stuck in it, you can't get out. I quickly realized that people might put together the peregrine I had as a pet, and the bird spying on them from the trees. So I settled on a raven. Of course, it was a Citadel raven, which meant it had been part of a centuries long breeding program for intelligence, loyalty, sense of direction, and flight speed. But it was still a pretty common looking black bird that you could find in just about every environment on earth.

Before I boosted Nevermore, I needed to get into the right frame of mind. I settled into the Kingswood, meditated for a day while bonding a couple Green mana, and then I was ready.

I was trying something new with Nevermore. I had had a decent idea of how to boost myself, worked out over several months, and then applied similar principles to Togo. In other words, slow, careful, controlled and purposeful improvements. For Nevermore, I was going to go with more power, a bit of intent, and some prayer to lady luck. Hopefully he'd have some beneficial magical mutations which I could then reverse-engineer and apply to myself and my other furry friends.

First, I gave Nevermore as much strengthening as I could without making him unusually large. He was a very glossy, powerful example of a raven when I was done, and his frame hid magically powered muscles that should have made him stronger than pretty much anything within his weight class and faster than anything relying on natural biology to fly.

As a side note, I really wanted to get my hands on a live dragon. No way were those things natural flyers, and I wanted that magic. The bones and scales I'd collected were impressive and useful, but I wanted to fly like a real wizard, under my own power, unlike that eagle-riding has-been Gandalf.

After that, I tried out a new enchantment I thought should work, called the Projectile Shield. I wasn't willing to test it on Togo, of course, but I wasn't attached enough yet to Nevermore. If it failed, there could always be a Nevermore II, III, IV, and so on, after all.

This enchantment was an improved and permanent shield, much like the Arrow-Ward in effect. Unlike the Arrow-Ward though, it was permanent. Though it could be overwhelmed, it would siphon from ambient energies and the user's excess energy to recharge over time. I got the inspiration for that part from the wildfire.

I couldn't quite manage to fully optimize it yet, but in the future I wanted the shield to be able to share energy with other nearby Projectile Shields. Really, I just liked the image of a group of my enchanted animals charging through a concentrated hail of arrows or bullets to rip apart the enemy.

The Projectile Shield was also a move towards a more finely defined conceptual application of the White ideal protection. The earlier Arrow-Ward was a clunky thing of White to protect, directed by Blue to detect incoming energies, and Red to push them away. It worked almost entirely on my physical understanding of the world, and though it used magical energies to do so, was really no different from a modern counter-rocket system you might find. It had that same sort of detect-analyze-react procedure.

The new Projectile Shield in contrast didn't use the Blue and Red parts. Instead, it was more of a imposition of the concept of being defended from incoming projectiles. I'd decided to focus on projectiles because by doing so I could push the outer boundary of the shield further from the body. That was good in case I ran into explosives in the future, but even dealing with arrows, stones, bullets or other simpler threats it allowed for a longer time to decelerate the projectile and bleed off the kinetic energy. That made it more than twice as efficient against projectiles compared to a tighter body-hugging shield, and I figured that with my growing strength and speed I had less and less to fear from someone in close quarters.

I wove the structure of the enchantment, and began tying it to Nevermore's essence. It was easily the most complicated enchantment I had to date, mostly because all my previous ones were more in line with enhancing things that were already there or working within the crudest form of that color of Mana. But eventually I managed it, and Nevermore was arrowproof.

Well, at least for one arrow, even if it was a ballista bolt or something, though a heavy trebuchet rock or cannon shell might break through. After that, depending on how much it strained the spell, the shield could go down. For normal arrows, it would take three to five at the same time to totally take down the shield, or half a dozen within about five to ten seconds. I wasn't able to test it that easily, and the spell was designed to work on living creatures so it was somewhat cruel to experiment with.

I realized after putting the first Projectile Shield on Nevermore that I could, at least in theory, add a second, even a third. Unfortunately, that took more skill than I could manage for such a small creature. I decided to leave Nevermore for a day or two in case there was an adverse reaction, and continue to ride east towards the Wendwater River, bonding another three Green Mana as I went.

Once I felt confident Nevermore wasn't going to spontaneously explode or catch cancer or something, I applied the same Projectile shield to Togo and Aethon. Being much larger, and with my growing familiarity with the spell, I managed to stack it onto them three times each. Basically, as one shield went down, the next would cycle in making it much, much harder to take my precious pets down with ranged weapons. I even managed to get it on myself twice.

Next I wanted to see if I could induce beneficial magical mutations or adaptations.

I started pushing Blue into Nevermore, filling him up with it. I was trying to meditate on the concept of air, of flight, while I did so. I wanted something that would at least allow him to fly further, faster, longer. Optimally, it would give him some controlled air magic, but I wasn't holding my breath.

Eventually, as I somewhat predicted, he developed something, even if it wasn't the full-blown air magic that I'd hoped for. By careful observation, Nevermore always seemed to have favorable winds. Whether an updraft when climbing or a tailwind when flying, it was just that little bit of assistance, but it made a big difference in speed and aerial agility.

It wasn't amazing, but I applied it to Togo, Aethon and myself as well. It helped our ground speed a bit, and if nothing else when we were hot a nice breeze would blow.

With the Blue evolution completed, I added in the final enchantments. These were linked, allowing me to see out of Nevermore's eyes, and for him to hear my voice. They were based on the sympathetic research I had been doing to try and kill all the Lannisters via the Kingslayer's blood. That research hadn't succeeded, but I did manage to figure out how to cast a link between two creatures which I was touching, in this case myself and Nevermore.

Then it was pretty easy to set that link to be specifically one way for visual or auditory information. I put in a weak White ward which could be deactivated to activate the sending/receiving aspect of the link. Nevermore got a Visual send only, and we both got audio send/receive. That way I could close my eyes and see what he saw, and I could speak and relay new orders to him while he was in the field. Similarly, if he was listening in on some conversation, he could relay it to me.

I also boosted his memory and intelligence. Ravens were actually already capable of speech, and that way he could remember conversations and relay them to me later. I gave him an everclean feathers enchantment, and loaded his mind with a bit of extra White so he'd be calm and patient when flying and spying.

With Nevermore to fly backup, I wouldn't walk into another ambush like the Mountain's again.

Since I managed to achieve the main pet upgrade of the trip, I had a bit of spare time to gather more Mana and practice some other spells.

I had been avoiding evocation, or combat magic, for a few reasons. First, I was originally pretty weak. I didn't want to be burned as a witch. Second, they were flashy as fuck, and I was avoiding being a really obvious, scary mage. I much preferred being seen as a fairly obvious, scary warg-knight loyal to the Starks. I fit in to Westeros' understandings of magic that way. Third, I used to have only the smallest reserves of Red which introduced a limit to my ability to cast proper battle magics.

But I was no longer so weak, and I had three times more Red mana than I did just after I arrived at the Red Keep. It was enough to be a pretty respectable battlemage. And while I didn't want to be too scary, I was soon approaching the point where I would be needlessly hampering myself not to develop truly effective combat magic. My best spell before entering the Kingswood in that regard was a variable strength wildfire bolt, and I learned that almost by accident.

I'd done some reading on myths and legends. Westeros had, apparently a long time in the past, been under assault by zombies and their ice-demon overlords in the North. Those dudes hadn't been active in millennia, but I figured that extra-magically-destructive fire was just the thing to fuck them up if they decided to make trouble.

On the other hand, dragons had been around as recently as a few centuries ago. I figured the odds were higher of my getting into a fight with one of them. Mostly because I intended to track down a dragon and get every single bit of magical knowledge out of its body I could. Then I wanted to get a dragon for a pet. Aethon was awesome, but Smaug was going to be even better.

Unfortunately, wildfire was known to be ineffective against dragons. It didn't always even work against the dragon-riders, since apparently some of those Targaryens were naturally fire-proof. I should probably add tracking down Valyrians and seeing if I could find a fire-proof one to my projects, come to think of it.

And no, not by setting them on fire and seeing if they lived. I'd have to develop good enough scanning magics to be able to detect the active or inactive magic in their body, blood, or whatever else it was attached to.

Anyways, I decided that I wanted a different combat spell option than just killing it with (wild) fire. Not that that was bad, I was as fire-loving as the next mage, but I felt it lacked a certain breadth.

Also, I just couldn't call myself a proper battlemage until I could cast chain-lightning. So obviously, I had to develop that.

First I figured out a basic Lightning bolt spell. It was a very fast spell, and it automatically hit the target since I was effectively designating them as a ground and then using magic to make a conductive path between my finger (where the bolt started) and their face/chest (which then exploded). Better yet, it was efficient and scalable. It cost a full Red and two Colorless to cast, and I could add as much Colorless as I wanted. That was pretty expensive, but the damage was well worth it, capable of splitting fat oaks in half even at minimum charge.

Then I was playing about with having the starting point be somewhere other than my hand. This led me to develop what I jokingly termed Tribulation Lightning (because it came from the heavens on a clear day). Unlike the previous Lightning bolt spell, this one called a lightning bolt down from the sky to strike the target.

It was a little more subtle, and I figured I could easily use it on those perceived as wicked, liars, etc. to simulate heavenly wrath. It did need a bit more energy than a standard bolt though, consuming an extra Red mana per casting without all that much extra power for the added cost.

Then after a couple days of experimentation and wanting it really, really hard I figured out how to do Chain Lightning. While I could make it look like Sith Lightning, that was really far less effective than having the Lightning bolt fly out and pinball between different targets. It was as expensive as Tribulation Lightning, and easily the most effective targeted anti-personnel spell.

As opposed to a big wildfire fireball, which basically just burnt the fuck out of everything, I could even have the chain lightning avoidjumping to specific targets in an area, perfect if I ever ended up in a hostage situation. Well, I could do that about half the time if I concentrated hard; suffice to say, it was a proof of principle but needed more practice.

After a few days of playing with Lightning, doubtless scaring the shit out of the local wildlife and any poachers or bandits, I decided to get a move on and finish up my Mana collection. By the time I was back where I entered, I'd picked up a total of seven Green Mana, doubling my supply of that resource, and three Blue mana, two from the Wendwater and the last from where it fed into Blackwater bay.

I still had a couple days left before I had told Ned to expect me back, so I settled in to meditate a bit. I was going to try something pretty risky, first on Nevermore, then on the rest of us if it worked. I'd taken a bit of dragon bone from the wings and skull of one of the skeletons hidden away inside the Red Keep. The magic of it was dead, mostly, but I could sort of sense what it used to be, and even without magic the bones were a miracle of biological materials.

Obviously, I wanted to use the bones to replace our own. Dragon bones were a lot stronger, and I suspected that they'd allow for greater saturation and conductivity of magic within the body. If I could make my bones effectively indestructible while making them lighter it would be an advantage, making me tougher and faster at the same time.

First I tried the most basic way of doing it that I could think of. I took a bunch of Green and suffused it into both Nevermore and the bone. The bone needed a bit of Red, probably because dragons connected to destructiveness, freedom (for the dragon) and fire, so I added some Red to the Green. Then I basically thought really hard at the Green that if Nevermore's bones were like that it would be a better animal; faster, stronger, swifter, more attractive to mates.

To my surprise, it actually worked. When I scanned Nevermore's bones, they were distinctly Draconic.

Then I started to think. If that worked for regular dragon bones, what would happen if I improved them first? Made them stronger, better, with Green and Red. Gave them better arcane properties with Blue. Infused them with White, adding to the bone structure's order so that they are stronger and can resist even conceptual damage, reinforce the dragon's conceptual protection against magic so that a small amount of that carries over to the person using the bones.

I decided to try it out; I had a couple pieces of bone anyways, so if I accidentally destroyed one it was fine.

Nevermore's transformation from dragon bone to improved dragon bone, or dragon bone mk. II, took a lot more energy than the original, as I had to supply the extra White, Blue, Red and Green, but it worked.

Of course Togo, Aethon and myself were a different story. The transformation was magically expensive, so I had to go slow, meditating for hours while I balanced out the transformation with my mana supply. Luckily, despite my utter failure to repeat my dimensional transportation while meditating, I had kept up my practice in the art of sitting still and focusing, and was able to manage it.

With my bones upgraded I went in for a whole new series of improvements in my body cultivation. My bones had previously been a limiting factor in my strength, the Green taking to the muscles and tendons more efficiently than the supporting skeletal structure. I also had a lot more mana available, and better control of it, so when I infused myself with those energies it was far more effective than before.

In the process, I naturally upgraded the oakflesh enchantment. Using a familiar fantasy naming convention, I wanted to call the new version "ironwoodflesh," but that sounded fucking awkward, so I decided to call it "oakflesh II" until it was good enough to qualify as stoneflesh.

I massively strengthened my body, gaining at least twice the bonus from the permanent magical effects than I had had before. Previously, I might have been able to match the Mountain in a contest of physical strength; now, I could easily best him. The excess of Green further developed my muscles, pushing my baseline closer to the limit of what I could achieve. There was still room to improve, but I was at least on the level of a top physical athlete.

The bones also served as a good conductor for Red, which meant that I was not just reacting faster, but able to move faster in general. It was almost like a freedom from the restrictions of physics that limited my motion, a kind of conceptual speed and freedom of movement, rather than the simple improved physical performance that Green could achieve. Likewise, with more Blue mana available, I could push my inherent precognition further, had a finer sense for mana, and gained even faster, clearer thoughts.

The effects of the White also improved. I gone from a mild, to moderate, to significant store of healing energy, ready to recover wounds automatically. The skin-tight conceptual defense had improved with my finer understanding of the concepts of White's protection as well, providing a back-stop of resistance for anything that managed to penetrate the Projectile Shield.

Even my Black's aggressive protection against foreign toxins and diseases seemed to be operating slightly more efficiently.

I passed similar upgrades on to Togo, Aethon and Nevermore. Then, with my time up, I decided to return to stinky, smelly, civilization.

Another thing to add to the list. Have Robert spend extra income on a proper sewage system.

I hadn't managed to get everything I wanted to done. The last item on the agenda was to try and figure out how to generate and implant graphene or carbon nanotube subdermal body armor. I had high hopes for it, and believed that the absolutely ordered structure would make it easily reinforced by White. Still, I didn't have time for it, so I was forced to leave it be until later.

Honestly, I was pretty happy with the progress I had made.

Then I got back to King's Landing and found out Robert had been poisoned. Again.

Chapter 17: Marriages

"Your Grace, we really must stop meeting this way," I drawled as I entered Robert's room.

He laughed before wincing in pain. "Odysseus, you cruel bastard," he gasped. "Everything hurts. Don't make me laugh, I beg."

I sighed, shook my head. "Really, Your Grace. What happened this time?" I asked as I began to treat him, once again pretending to use Chinese massage. It went much faster with my improved reserves and greater finesse, but he had been in quite poor shape. If it weren't for some upgrades I had made to his kidneys and liver the last time, he would likely have died before I made it back.

"Ah, one of the servants. Had some debts. Was told he could either put something in my food, or die. The fool. I would have paid him twice that to have a chance at these fucking traitors," Robert grumbled.

I hummed. "And there was no one found? The man behind the servant escaped?"

Robert nodded. "Aye. And a fucking shame it is too," he said darkly. "I swear, when I catch whoever's behind this, I'll shove my hammer up their throat."

"Up their throat, Your Grace?"

He smiled viciously. "That's right. Up their throat. Starting a good bit lower, of course, through a different hole entirely."

I chuckled at the imagery.

"I think it's clear, Your Grace, that we need to get a new Master of Whisperers sooner rather than later," I suggested. "And perhaps have new servants brought in from men loyal to you and your brothers."

He grunted as I worked on a particularly tight spot. "You're not the first to suggest it. Going to tell me who I should marry too?"

"Well, as you mention it, I still think Lady Margaery might make a good choice," I said, pretending that his question had been serious.

His eyes flashed. "They sided with the Mad King and Rhaegar," he complained.

I nodded. "They did. But that was the previous generation. Loras was but a babe then, and is a good friend of your brother's now. Margaery wasn't even born. And it's a good move politically. If Dorne were to rise up, and Highgarden were to join them, it might even convince the Westerlands that they should cause some trouble in Tywin's memory.

"But if the Reach is loyal, then Dorne is surrounded on them on the one side and the Stormlands on the other. Likewise, the Lannisters are flanked by the Reach and the Riverlands. Of the remaining territories, you know that the North is loyal, and the Vale still remembers you. The Riverlands will side with family, which means the North and the Vale, which means you, Your Grace. The Ironborn are a bunch of opportunistic curs; they'll stay bottled up if there's no weakness."

Robert sighed. "I had thought of waiting a few years and wedding Sansa," he admitted. "To be Ned's family in truth. I feel like I have poorly rewarded the Starks for all they have done for me."

Pervy old man; you can have Margaery, but not Sansa. No matter how annoying she can be, she was still partially my responsibility to protect. I would have suggested having Sansa marry Renly, if I didn't think he was gay and entirely too content and able to manipulate her to his own ends. That wouldn't make for a happy marriage either.

I shook my head. "Perhaps one of your children with your next wife, Your Grace, and one of Ned's. Rickon and Bran are both young enough that if you have a daughter in the next few years they might make a good match. Or one of his grandchildren, come to think of it; Robb's of an age to marry soon. My lord will love you as a brother regardless, and needs no further honors to do so. But the realm would do better if you were wed, and had some heirs, and the Reach has the best candidate for that."

Robert lay back with a sigh. "I suppose you are right," he finally accepted. "Did you have thoughts for the Master of Whisperers?"

In fact, I had. Both Tyrion Lannister and Oberyn Martell were decent candidates, if it weren't for the fact that they're politically unreliable. The Blackfish likely still wouldn't leave his niece, and was thus stuck in the Vale. The North, Vale and Stormlands were generally less political, while the Riverlands used less subterfuge. Or at least, I didn't know of anyone from there who was both suitable and wouldn't misuse the office.

But I did have an idea. Olenna Tyrell, the Queen of Thorns. She was meant to be quite the character, and extremely cunning. Granted she was pushing seventy, but I could make sure she had a few more good years in her, and it would be a way to give the Tyrell's influence at Court to match Margaery's new station without letting that bumbling oaf Lord Mace Tyrell get involved.

I just wasn't sure how Robert would react to the suggestion.

"I have some ideas, Your Grace, but they are not firm ones. I'd prefer to raise them in the small council. Anyways, I've finished the treatment. Same as last time; take a piss, drink some clean, unpoisoned water, and don't drink for a couple of days."

He nodded vigorously, springing out of bed. "By the Gods, Odysseus! You are truly a miracle worker," he boomed, then picked me up in a bear hug before putting me down. "I swear, a day or two after your treatments and I feel even better than before!"

Well, that's because you are better than before, you great lummox.

I grinned. "It's the contrast, Your Grace. Your body is simply overjoyed not to be poisoned. And the lower amounts of alcohol in your system helps too."

He frowned. "Bah, now you sound like Erreck. Always going on about the benefits of boiled water strained through charcoal."

I raised my eyebrows. "The Grand Maester is entirely correct, Your Grace. Pure, clean water is quite healthy, and using boiling filtered water to make healthy teas can be beneficial as well."

He just looked at me and sighed. "But what's the pointing in living, if it's not to live well? And who lives well if they don't drink? I tell you truly, Odysseus, being dead inside your heart is just as terrible a fate as being dead in truth. I'll help you with that; you'll sit alongside me at dinner, and we will be drunk and merry!" he announced with a wide grin.

I laughed, shaking my head at his antics. "Very well, Your Grace. But not tonight. Two days from now, remember?"

"Bah. I'll have to be more careful not to be poisoned again, if this is the sort of care I get," he complained sarcastically as he opened the door to his room.

Ser Barristan, who had been standing by the door and obviously heard everything spoke up. "If it will make you more careful, Your Grace, perhaps you should forebear from wine for three days."

We all laughed.

Later, I reported back to Lord Stark about my return and the king's renewed good health. I also introduced him to Nevermore.

"Say hello to Lord Stark," I said, sounding like one of those idiot pet owner that think their animal is really no different from a young child. Ned looked at me with a bit of confusion.

Then Nevermore turned his too clever eyes to point at Ned. " 'Ello, Lord Stark," he cawed. "I am Nevermore!"

Ned's eyes were wide. "It talks," he muttered in disbelief.

Nevermore cawed in disagreement. "He talks! I'm a he, not an it," he complained.

Ned blinked a couple of times, still not quite believing his senses. "My apologies, Master Raven," he said on autopilot. But that was Ned; unfailingly honorable and proper.

"Of course, of course," Nevermore replied. "We can't all have them fluffy dresses, or massive mounds of tender fat to tell apart girl from boy like you humans."

I facepalmed. I should never have made the raven conversational. And how he ended up with the local equivalent of a cockney accent was utterly beyond me.

"Ser Odysseus, why does the raven talk?" Ned asked, begging for the world to make sense.

"Because I've got things to say!" chirped Nevermore / "It seemed like a good idea at the time," I replied.

I still couldn't tell if the bird was always taking the piss, or the universe had decided I needed some insightful yet clueless comic relief. Either way, I got a headache anytime the bird spoke for more than a minute. At least Togo seemed to share my pain. Then again, he seemed to be blaming me for the situation, so maybe that wasn't such a good thing…

"Ok, ok, enough for now, Nevermore," I ordered. "Why don't you go for a fly." And in a flutter of wings Nevermore was off.

Ned drew a deep breath, then another before he spoke. "You know, Odysseus," he said with an artificial calm. "I really am not sure I was ready for a talking raven."

I nodded. "As it turns out, neither was I."

He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "What were you thinking? I mean, do you just go off into the woods, and get bored, and think I know, I'll make a raven able to speak?"

I laughed. That was actually pretty damned accurate, though the talking bit was more of a fortuitous accident.

When I was doing the auditory link something must have interacted with the memory improvement and suddenly Nevermore could speak. Come to think of it, I needed to fix that auditory link enchantment at some point, make it more of a telephone and less of a station-to-station telegraph so that I could add Togo and Aethon onto it without building up some tangled mess of enchantments right next to my brain. Yet another thing for the list.

And while I'm thinking of the list, maybe I should add a Togo-like dog for Ned and Robert; it would certainly cut down on the poisonings.

I shook my head and drew my focus back to the matter at hand, namely, why Nevermore speaks. "That's not entirely incorrect," I admitted. "Really, Nevermore is meant to be a scout and carry messages. I can see through his eyes and hear through his ears. But I also made him able to remember conversations. And then he just started speaking."

Ned sighed. "Of course," he said, somewhat used to my antics. Then again, I'd never created a whole new obviously (semi) intelligent species before.

"So, not to change the topic or anything, but I'm changing the topic. I was speaking to Robert earlier; I think he'll go for marrying Margaery Tyrell."

Ned brightened up. "That's good to hear," he said. "It would help the Realm's stability if the Reach were to brought in closer with the Crown."

I nodded. "I was thinking about that. Given that Sansa isn't going to be marrying Joffrey," I said, watching as Ned winced at that reminder, "I was thinking that it might be a good idea for her to marry Willas Tyrell."

Ned looked a little shocked. "I hadn't really thought about it. Willas Tyrell?" he questioned.

"Yes," I answered. "It strengthens both the Stark and the Crown. A second marriage alliance, to the heir of Highgarden especially, would even more firmly bring the Reach into the fold. Beyond that, Sansa is the daughter to the Lord Paramount of the North, cousin to the Lord Paramount of the Vale, and the granddaughter to the Lord Paramount of the Riverlands. If she marries Willas that would make four of the great houses with close familial ties to the Starks, and the Reach has a lot of food that could help during Winter."

"And why not Renly?" Ned asked, wanting to hear my reasoning.

"Renly is firmly wedded to the Crown as is, he can hardly rebel against his brother," I joked. "Beyond that, he has less to offer the North. But perhaps most importantly, I believe Sansa will be happy with Willas. He is by all accounts a good lord, a kind man, gentle with animals; the fact that he is like that after being crippled speaks to a strong character. Sansa believes too strongly in storybook tales, in pious, true knights, dastardly villains, and the eventual and relatively painless triumph of good. She lacks the teeth, physical or political, to truly protect herself. I don't know that Renly, who is relatively untested, is the right man for her. I think Willas might be."

I wasn't sure whether to say my suspicions of Renly and Loras, but decided that doing so was better than not, and so continued. "Beyond that… I have seen the way that Loras looks at Renly, and Renly Loras. I do not judge them for it if it is the case, and I am sure that each will do their respective duties with regards to fathering heirs either way, but I cannot help but suspect that there is more than simple friendship between them."

It took him a moment to catch on. "Ah. Ah! I see. Yes, that could make for an unhappy marriage," he mused, grimacing a bit at the thought. "I'll think on what you've said, Odysseus, and speak to Sansa as well."

I nodded my head in an approximation of a bow. "Very good, my Lord."

Two days later, I allowed myself to get roaringly drunk with Robert. We had a grand time.

The next day in the small council he announced that he would be asking the Tyrells for Margaery's hand. Renly seemed pleased.

In the ensuing discussion about the Master of Whisperers, Stannis proposed Ser Davos Seaworth. The man had extensive contacts among Braavos and the Free Cities, but was relatively weak on internal affairs, especially among the nobility. I had initially proposed Olenna Tyrell. She might have been female, a mark against her in that society, but she was wickedly intelligent and had a powerful grasp of the political movements within the Seven Kingdoms. That said, she was far less connected outside of Westeros, and had few connections to the lower classes.

I actually preferred the solution we came up with; a new position was added, the Director of Foreign Intelligence, who would serve to manage spying activities outside of the Seven Kingdoms, working closely with the Master of Ships, Master of Coins and Master of Whisperers as their interests intersected. Ser Davos was made the first Director of Foreign Intelligence, and it was agreed that Lady Olenna would be offered the position of Mistress of Whisperers.

The next morning, the ravens went out, and by the end of the week we had received their agreement. In some five to seven weeks the Tyrells would be at court. Three months after that Robert would wed Margaery.

Meanwhile Davos, at Stannis' order, had already prepared the first foreign intelligence briefing for the small council. The results of which meant another adventure for yours truly.

Chapter 18: Over the Sea and Far Away pt. 1

Ser Davos brought much news. The movement of pirates in the Stepstones. Shifts in prices of goods and political changes in the Free Cities. What certain large and dangerously competent mercenary companies were up to.

And then he had to move the news onto Daenerys Targaryen. She had married Khal Drogo, or was about to last we heard. Robert might have sent assassins after her then, but the mess with Cersei's infidelity and Varys' treason distracted him and he allowed Ned to wait and see whether she would survive among the horse-lords, or even be capable of getting with child.

Now word had trickled in from Ser Jorah Mormont, a former slaver and exile who was trying to spy his way to a pardon, that Daenerys was likely with child. And Robert, still full of hatred for the Targaryens wanted her dead. He didn't care that she was still truly a child, being about to turn sixteen. That she might die in childbirth. That the odds of the child surviving to adulthood were so low. That the Dothraki, for all that they were excellent cavalry, would never come across the sea.

No, Robert wanted Daenerys dead along with her brother. And to be fair, I could understand where he was coming from. On a national politics level, both Viserys and she and any of her future blood were a risk. Whether a rallying point for a civil war that could kill tens of thousands, or a foreign invader with a nice justification, she was just too potent a symbol and too great a risk.

On the other hand, Ned fucking hated the idea. He fought the Targaryens to restore justice and honor to the realm, not to send poisoners after girls and unborn babes. At least Viserys, an adult and known anti-Baratheon agitator, was seen as acceptable target (even if Ned generally disliked assassins). But with Daenerys it was the exact same argument from sixteen years ago, when Robert refused to condemn the men responsible for killing the Targaryen children during the sack of King's Landing. And much like that argument, both sides were sticking to their guns, getting louder and louder as they shouted at each other.

"I'll handle it," I volunteered before they could say anything unforgivable. Plus, maybe one of the Targaryens had that whole fireproof Valerian thing going on. Either way, I'd get to see a whole new continent and avoid any real work for a couple months. Visit exciting places, kill the people trying to kill you, get some mana, what's not to love?

Ned was looking at me suspiciously while Robert was happily assuming I was agreeing with him.

"See, Ned, Odysseus gets it!" he boomed.

"What exactly do you mean by "handle it," Odysseus?" Ned asked, a deep tone of warning in his voice. For all I had done for him and his family, he would never truly forgive me if I were to go out intending to murder this troublesome girl. That sort of honor was all too rare, sadly.

"You're both working under an incorrect assumption," I stated, confusing both of them. "It's not Daenerys we need to worry about, it's Drogo. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when a Dothraki Khal dies doesn't his wife get sent to join the, what were they called? The Dothraki crones who live in Vaes Dothrak?" I asked.

"The dosh khaleen, I believe," answered Ser Davos.

"That's right. The dosh khaleen. I'll give Daenerys and any child she has, born or not, the same treatment I gave Joffrey, Tommen and Myrcella, and see to it they aren't in a position to cause any trouble. And I'll either treat with Drogo, get him to give up Daenerys and bring her back here as a prisoner for Your Grace's disposition, or I'll kill him. The Dothraki may fancy themselves horse-lords, but I bet any sum of money you care to name that Aethon can outrun the lot the them."

I looked at Ned and continued. "I believe my lord Stark that that satisfies honor. Viserys is a man grown and outspoken about his desire to seize the throne, and deserves no special protections. Drogo, a man that leads a slaving warband forty thousand strong, is hardly an innocent, nor an illegitimate target. And Your Grace will be able to rest easy that there won't be any white-haired claimants to the throne coming from those quarters."

Robert pursed his lips then nodded slowly. "That works for me. Ned?"

"Sir Odysseus' suggestion is honorable. You're sure you can do it, and get away safely?" he asked, worried for my safety.

"I can and will," I answered with a grin.

Robert drew himself up. "Very well then. Ser Odysseus, I charge you to go forth and end the threat of Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen. Do you accept?"

"I do, Your Grace."

He smiled at me. "Good man. Do you need any money, supplies or assistance?"

I thought about it for a minute. "I'll use my own money, and provide an accounting afterwards. I do need about five days to prepare," I stated. "Other than that, if Ser Davos could find me a good ship headed to Pentos, that would be grand."

"It may be faster to sail all the way to Volantis, or Meereen," Davos suggested.

I shook my head. "We'll make better time overland."

He raised his eyebrows at that but didn't say anything. Ships could make a hundred miles a day; it was crazy to think of a horse making more than that, let alone the three or four hundred that Aethon could achieve fairly comfortably. Plus I wanted to visit a number of the so called "Free" Cities, and see if there was any truth to their rumored magics.

"Well, Your Grace, my lords, if there's nothing else that needs my attention, I have much to prepare," I said.

"No, that was everything, go on Odysseus. We'll have a feast for you before you go," Robert said, still happy that the nuisance of Daenerys would be dealt with even if not how he'd initially envisioned. As far as Robert was concerned, feasts were awesome and thus he gifted them to people when he was particularly pleased with them.

At least he wasn't throwing me a tourney.

The next five days were spent memorizing maps and the customs from a travelogue of a man who had stayed with a Dothraki khalasar. I acquired two more ravens, Mu and Hue, and transformed them into the same pattern as Nevermore. I named them partially after Muninn and Huginn, Odin's ravens, but thought better of actually calling them Huginn and Muninn, just in case Odin was real, could tell, and might be upset.

But their names were also a bit of a joke; Mu means nothing, and Hue means color. So Mu Hue is no color, and their feathers were black. It wasn't very funny, but it amused me a bit. I spent a few days reworking the visual/auditory links, adding in a variable connection selector on the send side, and a link database on the receive side. It still wasn't a phone, but it meant that I could have up to a dozen links before I needed a redesign. That was more than enough for three ravens, Togo and Aethon.

The reason I needed the extra ravens was because Nevermore was going to stay behind in King's landing. If Aethon and I reallypushed, and I used all my available Green Mana to reduce the physical strains of running quickly, we could make as many as a thousand miles in a day. That meant that in the case of an emergency, we could be back within a fortnight even once I found Drogo's khalasar. Nevermore would be able to keep an eye on things for me.

Jon had insisted that he would come with me. He argued that as my squire, it was his duty and I'd be shaming him if I left him behind. He could tell I still sort of wanted him to guard the girls, which he had gotten pretty sick of, so he used the ultimatum; if I left him behind, he'd follow anyways.

So he, Ghost and Shadowfax were going to be joining us. I planned to upgrade him as much as I could on the ship to Pentos so he shouldn't slow me down much. He was a good enough swordsman that he could be a real help if things went pear shaped and we had to fight our way out, keeping the enemy off of me while I shot them with arrows or blasted them with spells.

Taking Jon and Ghost did however mean that Ned and Robert were less guarded than I would have liked, so I took two juvenile hunting dogs and gave them an upgrade package. I didn't give them Togo's gigantism, but the rest of the upgrade package was put into place. Then I gave them to Robert and Ned and told them I expected that the dogs would check all the food and people coming into their presence while I was gone. I also spent some time with Lady and Nymeria making sure that they were fully up to date with their enchantments and upgrades. Arya was desperately jealous I was getting to go on such an adventure.

Lastly I spent a day in the godswood, stocking up on arrows. I had this terrible suspicion that we'd end up in a running fight with forty thousand dothraki screamers, and I felt nervous about running out. By day's end I'd filled five bags, with six dozen arrows to a bag for a grand total of three-hundred sixty arrows. It seemed an auspicious number, at least.

Then the five days were up. We feasted until late in the evening, and the morning found Jon and I on the ship to Pentos.

The ship's journey was pretty boring, to be honest. No pirates, no storms, just a regular crossing. I did have time to give Jon as close of an approximation of my own upgrades as I could manage.

They didn't quite connect as well. He didn't get quite as large of a boost in his physical abilities, had more of a minor danger sense than true combat precognition, and so on. I had suspected it when improving Togo and Aethon, and later the ravens, but there was something fundamentally different between their bodies and my own.

Still, he was significantly stronger than when he started, his natural body streamlined and enhanced as if he'd been working out hard for a year or two. That was then further boosted by the magic in his system; he was easily among the strongest men in the world, more similar to the Mountain than the youth Jon appeared to be. It didn't really matter that I was stronger and faster still; Jon was strong enough, and easily skilled enough with a sword, to cause some real damage.

I added him to the communications link as well, so we'd be able to coordinate if separated. I had been careful upgrading Jon, doing it in small bursts so as to ensure I didn't do anything to harm him, but that did mean that the upgrades took up the rest of the journey.

The impression I got of Pentos was a beautiful city full of shitty people. The houses had tiled roofs, and were somewhat reminiscent of Spanish architecture. The city itself was at least half again larger in population and footprint than King's Landing, and cleaner too. Bazaars and marketplaces abounded, goods from the further parts of Essos available that you could rarely find in Westeros. The powerful, ruling merchants, called magisters, kept gorgeous walled manses. In the center of the city was the Great Marketplace, sort of like a miniature but permanent version of the fair that took place in the middle of the Hand's Tourney. The faith of R'hllor was practiced in that city, shrines dotting the neighborhoods while a large red temple served as the center of worship.

But despite the fact that Pentos had lost a war against Braavos, and languished under a treaty that forbid them more than twenty warships, sellswords, contracts with free companies, a true army or to possess slaves, I passed many people who were collared, their faces branded. "Free bond servants," they called them. Debt slaves in all but name, their food, clothing and shelter counted more expensive than their service. Considering their debts passed onto their children… I saw no difference between it and true slavery whatever the legal definitions.

That was not the only part of the treaty that the Pentoshi bent or broke. Their ships were often easily converted between raiders and merchantmen, and would fly the flags of Lys or Myr when carrying slaves. The city may not keep an army, but it had a strong watch and each of the magisters their own force of private guards, many of them Unsullied. And in general the city had found it cheaper to buy off the Dothraki than to fight them.

No, it was a pretty city, but a rotten one. We stayed just long enough for me to bond with the temple, gaining a White and a Red before we were once again on the road. I had been disappointed watching the service; it was clear that there was something to it, some spark of mystery, but it never caught fire and blossomed into true magic. Perhaps a more senior priest, or a different temple would be able to aid me in my search for power.

The road from Pentos went through Ghoyan Drohe to Norvos. Along the way I picked up a pair of Red mana in the Velvet Hills. Ghoyan Drohe itself was a ruin, a dead city cast down by dragonriders to rot. The canals had filled in, the city turned to swamp. It provided a pair of Black mana, and might have given more but it was unpleasant enough there that Jon asked we continue on.

I picked up a pair of Blue mana when passing the Little and Upper branches of the river Rhoyne, then another at the Noyne. Norvos was located in a valley in a hilly, somewhat mountainous area. I managed two Red mana at our rest stops before we arrived at the city.

Ruled by a theocracy of fanatic, flagellant bearded priests, I had no desire to stay in the city of Norvos and so we rode through. I picked up a pair of Greens in the nearby forest as we rested a bit and hunted to increase our supplies, then another two Red mana as we left the Hills of Norvos on our way to Qohor. I picked up a Blue crossing the Darkwash, and a Green from the forest just before entering Qohor.

Chapter 19: Over the Sea and Far Away pt. 2

Qohor, a city of about a half a million, was surrounded by strong, stone walls. The furthest east of the northern Free Cities, and along one of the main routes into that area, it was often visited by Dothraki khalasars. Though it paid them tribute rather than fight, the city maintained their walls and a strong core of Unsullied to deter attacks and reduce the cost of tribute.

The Unsullied were hard to describe. Basically, the same principle of being an unflinching warrior that you'd see from the Spartans, but rather than being trained for initiative the Unsullied slave-soldiers were trained to be ridiculously, suicidally obedient. They were skilled yet disturbing to contemplate.

Apart from being the gateway between western and eastern Essos, Qohor had one more claim to fame. It was known as a city of sorcerers. The greatest of Qohorik smiths could rework Valyrian steel, even if they couldn't make more of that fabled metal. Divination, blood magic and necromancy were rumored practices.

I was nervous of pursuing their magics without caution though. They worshipped a dark god there, the Black Goat, and gave it daily sacrifices of blood and animals with condemned criminals for holy feast days. And that was in good years. In times of true crisis, the Qohorik nobles might sacrifice their own children. Truly, their "god" was more of a demon. They guarded the secrets of their magic jealously, and I had no desire for a city of half a million to chase me as a sacrifice. But Valyrian steel… that was a secret I wanted.

Jon and I entered the city cautiously, my senses straining to catch any active magic, my eyes channeling an overlay of mage-sight. I was disappointed. None of the street wizards, or their more expensive kin available for consultation seemed to have true power. But then I found it; a forge that glowed with true magic. It was weak, yes, and old, but there were signs of more recent power as well. The smell of the sacrifices they used to power their spells was distinct, the blood seeped into the earth.

I found a master smith, and asked him about whether he could reforge Valyrian steel.

He looked me up and down, the quality of my armor making him raise an eyebrow. "I can, but I doubt you have any," he replied.

I laughed, shaking my head. "I wish, I wish. But no, I was hoping to see it done. It is the greatest magic of the modern age, and I wanted to be able to bring the tale of watching a true master smith at work back to my home in Westeros."

His face became grim, his body posture aggressive. "You speak our language without accent, outsider, so you should know. The secrets of the smiths are for Qohor alone."

Damn. I was going to have to try it. "Of course, of course," I said, deescalating the situation. "I would never dream of anything different. But surely it would do no harm to just watch, just the once, and pay a hundred dragons for the privelege?" I argued, loosing the Blue spell that I hoped would act as a Jedi Mind Trick and help convince him.

It seemed to work as he blinked, then nodded with slightly glazed eyes. "Yes, yes, it would do no harm to just watch. I will show you."

I had seen Ice before, of course, Ned's Valyrian greatsword, but the enchantment on it was like the edge of a fractal snowflake. I just couldn't get enough resolution on it to properly understand it, and it was obvious that the application of the enchantment was as much part of the casting as the final shape. I was hoping this would let me bridge the gap.

The smith gathered his apprentices and journeymen, then began the task of re-forging the single small Valyrian dagger he kept for practice. They were looking at Jon and I askance. Poor Jon, of course, was following little of this. His Valyrian was not conversational yet, and the local dialect had drifted far from what the classical Valyrian he had been taught by Luwin as a boy.

Hours of heating, sacrifices, chanting, and working the blade followed. I was engrossed, as were the smiths. Too much so to notice one of the younger apprentices slipping out near the end. I did notice when he returned, however, with a handful of officers, a priest, twenty Unsullied and forty common soldiers besides. Or rather, Hue and Mu noticed while flying over-watch for just such an occasion, and they warned me.

Jon and I fled, our horses turning off the street just as the band sent to arrest us turned onto it. Ghost and Togo were outside the city; I knew that the odds of my getting into trouble there were high, and there were only a handful of people in the world who had canine companions like ours. The Starks had enough enemies and assassins as it was.

Aethon and Shadowfax pushed their way through the crowds and we had disappeared out the far gate before the alarm spread and sent the city into lockdown.

But it had worked; I had the secret of Valyrian steel. Oh, I'd need to work with a smith to make the true version; the folded and refolded layers of a damascene blade were a necessary part of the enchanting process. But that was the third level of the Valyrian enchanted blade.

The first level, the basic enchantment to never dull or break, to be a fraction as heavy, and to cut slightly better because the edge was harder was easily in my grasp. The only issue was that the lack of weight to the sword could make the blows have less momentum.

The second level was for the edge to be extremely sharp. That required being cast on the blade at forging as it had a naturally self-sharpening effect on the blade, or for me to figure out how to magically sharpen a blade's edge at the same time that I cast the enchantment.

The third level was by far the best. It included a sort of conceptual ideal of cutting, as well as what I thought might be a kind of guided strike effect to help the swordsman. It had a higher level of the base enchantments too, and made it so that each strike carried the impact of what the sword should have weighed.

Unfortunately, it would still need a conventional master blade smith to manage. The conceptual effects in particular were partially a distillation of the concept of a fighting blade, and depended on the smith's ability to resonate with that ideal, their ability to push that purpose into the weapon. It was really interesting from a magical point of view, and gave me insights into how I'd be able to get enchantments to "stick" for lack of a better term to inanimate objects.

Suffice to say, learning how to smith was put on the list of things to do when I had time. As a proper mage, I'd likely find it much easier to impose the concepts, and wouldn't need to be a true master to manage the third level of the enchantment. Though if I did become that good, I'd likely be able to make something amazing.

A vorpal sword. That sounded like a lot of fun, and really damned unfair for anyone we went up against.

Until then, Jon and I would have to content ourselves with our +1 blades, the metal shimmering slightly when caught in the light.

After leaving Qohor we decided to cut through the forest rather than take the road south that passed through Ar Noy. Unfortunately the river Qhoyne was too close to Qohor and any potential pursuit for my liking, so I had to forgo its Blue.

The forest was old, ancient even, and the mana was dense and potent because of it. I picked up another eight Green mana on the way, taking my time since I knew that after we entered the Dothraki Sea and its thousands of miles of plains and grasslands that I wouldn't have another easy source of Green Mana for a while.

It was a heady thing, so much wild, natural magic. Playing around with it I learned some more on how to manipulate plants, a bit of Green and colorless for growing food or shelter from roots and bushes, or how I could use some more power and cover an animal in entangling roots, trapping it. I doubted I'd use the spells much, but they were fun to play around with, even if the magic made Jon a bit nervous at first.

Then we left the forest and entered the plains. It was some fifteen or sixteen hundred miles from where we left the forest to Vaes Dothrak, the only Dothraki city, which sat in the middle of their grasslands. I knew that Drogo and Daenerys had been headed there a few months ago, and hoped to find them, or at least news of where they were headed last, at Vaes Dothrak. We would ride half the day, then stop to rest and for me to bond the plains. They gave White mana, and over the journey from the forest of Qohor I bonded ten times.

The journey was uneventful. Hue and Mu would scout in turns, keeping an eye out for the Dothraki barbarians. And they were truly barbarians; horse-riders and raiders one and all, they believed that farming, cutting the earth to till it was a sin. They thought that the gods could not see unless the actions took place under an open sky, and so they eschewed cities. They depended on their horses for transportation and sustenance, eating and drinking the milk, blood and flesh from their steeds.

A man who did not ride was not a man; literally. Only the crippled, very young, very old, very pregnant, eunuchs or more valuable slaves rode carts, while being forced to walk was an act of shame, fit only for slaves. All others rode, which made the Dothraki amazinglight cavalry. But for all their similarities, in any comparison with the Mongols, the Mongols came out on top.

The Mongols of Earth conquered and forged empires; bloody as their acts may have been, they adapted and assimilated the civilizations they ruled. The Dothraki merely destroyed. They were a scourge as far as I was concerned, hordes of man sized destructive cunning beasts rather than possessing any of the finer traits of humanity.

I contented myself with the fact that someday, eventually, the civilized forces would grow and gain in population, technology, strength. And then those fucking horse-lords would face the fangs of civilization: rifles and cannon. And they would become a footnote of history.

Until that day the Dothraki would continue as a human plague.

A couple days ride away from Vaes Dothrak we stopped. I had grown greatly in power during the journey: eleven Green, eleven White, four Blue, two Black, and seven Red extra compared to when I had started out from Westeros. I'd had a lot of nights to spend time thinking and tinkering with how to improve the spells, the upgrades and cultivated power I had gathered.

The Green based Supernatural Physique, Oakflesh, and Regeneration had all improved. Blue had been streamlined a bit, but hadn't had more than minor incremental gains. In Red, the improved reactions, increased power when hitting, and the straight up conceptual bonus to speed that I called Haste had all improved significantly.

With White, I had managed to get the stored healing energy to be denser and more efficient, while the skin-tight conceptual defense was actually getting useful, more like an inch of heavy padding in its effect against physical attacks with a similar performance against magical ones. I also figured out how to not just improve the Projectile Shield, making it stronger and adding another layer, but also how to link them together with other, nearby Projectile Shields so that they could share power.

The disadvantage to that was that if one person's shields went down, everyone's went down. But the advantage was that to bring one shield down the attackers had to bring everyone's down. For example, it was impossible to target the horse and ignore the rider, or vice versa.

The linkage wasn't perfectly designed yet; optimally, I'd have the shields being partially linked so if a heavier attack like a ballista bolt hit one person's shield, that shield would just pop, stopping the projectile but not over-drawing on the shield network. Then their second shield layer would activate and cycle into the networked shield defense. But the Dothraki didn't use ballista, so I figured it was a moot point at that moment.

I even figured out how to us Black mana to get more nutrition from food. It was a bit strange, but when I shifted my point of view I realized that digestion is really killing the food and taking its qualities for myself. Black's death and greed fit well enough into that image. It was minor, but I did notice my health slightly improving. That was by far and away the most interesting Black-oriented effect I had managed to date; if properly developed, it might even let me steal more abstract powers and traits by eating them, sort of like the protagonist of Re:Monster.

I took the time to clean up the upgrades, engineer them into more generally applicable enchantments, and give them to Jon, Togo, Ghost, Aethon, Shadowfax, Hue and Mu.

Then with a bit of time to spare I reverse engineered the Valyrian steel spell enough that I could improve our armor. The links of the chain shone and shimmered when exposed, would never suffer from rust, and would be far harder to penetrate. It was only equivalent to the first level of the Valyrian steel, but it was already a great improvement.

Honestly, given the stone-like oakflesh and all of the other upgrades I doubted we had much to worry about, but better safe than sorry. Plus it was far subtler for an arrow or sword to fail to penetrate our armor than for it to merely cause a pin-prick in our skin.

And I'll admit; my inner fantasy nerd was much happier to have bright, shiny mail compared to the slightly rusty, discolored mail I had had previously. Plus enchanted gear is always better, right?

Fully prepared, we set off for Vaes Dothrak.

Chapter 20: Over the Seas and Far Away, pt. 3

Vaes Dothrak was a city without walls or gates, defended by a thousand miles of grassland and the millions of Dothraki riders that would fall onto any army that thought to invade. It was a city inhabited by slaves and ruled by the dosh khaleen, former khaleesis whose khal husbands had died. The city was sacred to the Dothraki, and it was forbidden to draw a blade or shed a free man's blood within its borders.

The city itself was massive, ten times the size of Pentos, supposedly with enough space in its halls to fit every Dothraki from every khalasar at the same time. This had not been tested in centuries, however, not since the last time that the Dothraki had a great khal, a khal of khals, to command them in their destructive ways.

Merchants were welcomed in the city and afforded safe passage by the khalasars so long they kept to the laws and gave gifts of salt, grain and silver to the dosh khaleen. After all, the savages needed some way to trade loot they didn't want or need for things they did, and valued some of the fruits of the civilizations that they so disdained.

We had heard of this, and passed over the tribute without issue. Jon and I peace-tied our swords and spears into their holsters. Our horses and canines drew admiring glances and comments as rode in, passing under two massive horse statues that framed the road. After a bit over a month of travelling, we had arrived.

The first thing to do was to find out if Drogo's khalasar had arrived yet or not, and so we made our way to the Western Market to enquire. The Western Market was the great bazaar used by traders from the Free Cities to the west of the Dothraki Sea. The Eastern Market which I planned to visit later was where traders from traders from the East came, even those as far away as Asshai, Yi Ti and the Shadow Lands.

The books in Westeros were dismissive of claims of magic from the east, but it was rumored that in Yi Ti sorcerer-kings ruled provinces, that in Asshai shadowbinders, aeromancers, and fire mages conducted fell and powerful rites. It was a known fact that Asshai was truly ancient, that the animals in the city died within days, that the river there was full of deformed fish and phosphorescent at night while a glistening black during the day.

Even if only one part in ten of its reputation were true I would hesitate to go there. The Shadowlands that it bordered, said to be the birthplace of dragons and demons alike, sounded like it might legitimately be inhabited by Sauron. I was by no means prepared to venture into the magical equivalent of a nuclear fallout zone to gain magical knowledge, not yet. One does not simply walk into Mordor, after all.

But one day, when I was stronger, my magics more powerful and sophisticated, I would venture into that place. I would even brave the Shadowlands if it was the only way getting a dragon as a pet. But until then, I was happy to be able to talk to people with first-hand accounts of the place. It was even possible that the Eastern Market would have some magical types present, though unlikely that anyone of true power would come to the Dothraki Sea.

When Jon and I went to the Western Market we found that we had beaten Drogo to the city, so we settled in to wait. We visited the Eastern Market, saw Zorses and Elephants; there was even a tiger that I thought about buying, but I didn't want to risk making Togo jealous. Similarly, the Zorses looked fucking awesome.

The Jogos Nhai were this race of horse nomads, smaller in stature than the Dothraki and with weirdly conical heads. They lived east of the Dothraki Sea past the Bone Mountains in the plains north of Yi Ti and plagued that country with their raids. Unlike the Dothraki, who were content to be bought off and spent as much effort fighting each other as they did the more civilized cities, the Jogos Nhai believed that to spill the blood of their brethren was a crime and so only made war on their civilized neighbors.

They were a true blight, but their Zorses were amazing. They had bred horses with zebras, then somehow instead of a race of sterile zebra-horse hybrids managed to make a true-breeding species, the Zorse. Zorses could live on a bit of weeds and some completely non-nutritional devil grass for months, travel long distances without food or water, and were slightly larger, stronger, faster and more ferocious than any horse or horse-zebra hybrid had a right to be.

I strongly suspected magic had been used sometime in the breed's past when I heard about their characteristics. They were just too obviously engineered. I scanned one of them, and found a particular structure that would allow them to drain a type of energy out of something; I suspected that was the ghost-grass eating adaptation. There was another adaptation that let them substitute ambient mana for food. Other than that, they weren't particularly interesting. I did crib the adaptations though.

If they'd been available in Westeros I might have ridden one instead of a horse, but Aethon wasn't just a mount. He was my friend, and I wasn't replacing him with some fancy black and white striped model no matter how cool they looked.

Nor, sadly, was Aethon amenable to a cosmetic makeover, no matter how many apples I promised or how awesome he'd look afterwards.

Also sadly, I didn't find any magical practitioners in the Eastern Market, or any texts on magic. I did bond both markets, getting a White and a Red from each, so it wasn't a total loss magically.

Drogo still wasn't there, so Jon and I went on a trip around the Womb of the World, a large-ish lake next to Vaes Dothrak, and the Mother of Mountains, the nearby glorified hill range. Neither really deserved their names, but the belief in those places had made the mana dense and powerful. We weren't allowed to actually set foot on them as they were considered holy locations, but could get close enough for me to connect to them. The lake was bound for two Blue mana. The mountain, slightly larger, was bound two times for a total of four Red.

Then Hue who was on patrol at the time saw in the distance a great dustcloud. Drogo's khalasar approached, and it was ridiculously massive. He had forty thousand riders, men capable of fighting. But he also had at least sixty thousand women, children and slaves; I put the number at closer to eighty thousand extra at a guess. And they had more than one horse per rider as well. All in all it was truly worthy of the word horde.

And it was up to me (and to a lesser extent Jon) to ensure that this group never managed to plunder Westeros.

When Drogo and his party rode up to the Horse Gates they found Jon and I waiting for them atop our horses, fully armed and armored, Togo and Ghost on our flanks.

"I think this is the maddest thing I've ever even heard of," Jon muttered.

Jon wasn't very happy about this plan.

I snorted in amusement. "Quiet Jon, you're ruining the moment," I said softly.

He turned to me, mouth agape. "The moment? What moment? Two against twenty thousand isn't a moment, Odysseus, it's suicide!" he hissed quietly. "Even your magic can't win against these odds!"

I smiled. "I told you, Jon. I won't need any magic."

"Yes, because why would you blast Drogo from a nice, safe distance? That wouldn't make for a good enough story!" he practically growled.

"It wouldn't!" I defended, my voice soft but insistent. "Now shut up, it's almost time for everything to start."

"Fine. Fine. But when this goes wrong, I'll be telling you I told you so until we're back safe in King's Landing." He was practically exuding an affronted aura. I hadn't realized that was possible.

"If that makes you feel better. Seriously though, hush," I said. The riders were about three hundred meters distant, and had sent out a small band of a half-dozen at a canter to find out what we were doing as the main party approached. The smaller band stopped about forty meters away and called out.

"Who are you, to block the way of the mighty khal Drogo!" their leader shouted in the harsh Dothraki tongue. Seriously, all-speech was definitely the way to go when travelling in foreign climes. 10/10, would be given by mystical accident again. I mean, could you imagine having to give a challenge through an interpreter? That just loses all the impact.

"I am Ser Odysseus, Knight of Winterfell of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros!" I called back. "I am here to tell Drogo – give up Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen, the enemies of my king, or face me in combat, or be known to all here as a coward!"

That pissed them off. One of the younger riders had to be restrained from charging us. "You are brave, Andal, but foolish," their leader called. "Make your peace with your gods, for you will soon be dead." He turned and gave an order to one of his riders who then turned his horse about and raced back to the khal.

For some reason, Dothraki believed that all Westerosi were Andals; I wasn't even from Westeros, but whatever.

After the messenger reported to Drogo, their party continued forward at the same speed. Jon was tense and nervous at my side, the standoff between us and the other riders uncomfortable. Finally they came up and joined the original scouts who were only slightly distant. I could see a silver-haired girl, Daenerys, and a large, armored figure who I guessed to be the disgraced knight and spy, Ser Jorah Mormont. I couldn't see Viserys though. Drogo was obviously the leader, mounted on a red horse at the front.

Drogo asked Mormont a question. Mormont shook his head then turned to face me.

"You claim to be a knight of Winterfell, but I know of few knights that serve the Starks, none of them with your sigil," Jorah called out in Westerosi common.

"I was knighted half a year or so ago," I replied easily with a wolfish smile. "I suppose I'll be taking your disgraced head back with me as well, Mormont. It's truly a good day."

His fist tightened on his lance. "What deeds have you done then, that would make you worthy to face khal Drogo?"

"I crippled the Hound, Sandor Clegane, while I was unarmed and he with sword and shield," I called out in Dothraki. "My dog, Togo, killed Jaime Lannister in a trial by combat. The Mountain that Rode, Ser Gregor Clegane and forty of his men ambushed me, alone. I killed them and took their heads to show to their Lord who had sent them while he feasted. I killed Tywin Lannister in single combat the following morning. I won the Hand's Tourney in archery, am a horse archer, and have both the most powerful bow ever made and the fastest horse; had I wanted to, I would have simply killed you and Drogo and whoever else I wanted to and left. But I am a warrior, and as a warrior I challenge you, khal Drogo, who has made himself an enemy of my king by his choice of wife."

I could see the look of shock on Mormont's face. It seemed that at least some of this news had not caught up with him yet, and unlike the Dothraki he knew how incredible those achievements were. Drogo turned to him, and asked him what all of that meant. Jorah didn't look like he wanted to answer, but he couldn't refuse either.

"You claim to have the fastest horse, and the best bow," Drogo called out. "Prove it. If it is true, then you will fight Jorah the Andal. If you can beat him, you will be worth killing. But we will not fight hidden behind iron like cowards; no, you will be allowed your horse, your saddle, your lower clothes, and your sword. Nothing else."

"Against Jorah as well?" I asked.

Drogo shook his head, the bells in his braids faintly tinkling. "No, against him you may fight as an Andal." Again with the Andal thing, I would be feeling very microaggressed if I bought into that BS.

I nodded, smiled. The conditions weren't outside of expectations. "Very well. We are in agreement, Khal Drogo." Then I turned to Jon. "Jon, I'll ride off a few hundred paces, then signal for you to throw the shield into the air. Do remember to give it a decent bit of height." We had bought an extra shield just for demonstration purposes if that proved necessary. I wasn't damaging one of ours, after all, especially after I enchanted it. That was just profligate.

Aethon turned to the side so they could see just how fast he really was, then I bent down and grabbed hold of the special handle-straps I'd had added to the saddle. "Show them what you can really do, Aethon!"

And like a shot he was off. I couldn't measure it with a great deal of accuracy, but I knew that Aethon could manage a top speed of over a hundred miles an hour. Even he couldn't keep that sort of speed up for long, or on anything but good terrain, but it was damnedimpressive. Six or seven seconds later, when we were a few hundred yards away from Jon, Aethon slowed and stopped. I drew my bow and three arrows, and used all the temporary spell buffs to make myself even faster and more accurate, then burned Blue to warp destiny. I would not, could not, miss.

Literally. With that much destiny manipulation, missing was quite literally impossible.

I told Jon through the communication link to throw it. The round shield went flying up into the sky, it's face towards me. And then with a thwack, thwack, thwack the arrows were away. A moment later they landed on the target, a crack, crack, crack audible all the way from where I'd shot.

It was an impossible target and they all knew it. The first arrow had slammed into the shield, moving it and giving it spin. Then the second hit where the shield moved to, as did the third. I moved back to Jon at an easy canter that was still faster than their horses could gallop. I could see how impressed the Dothraki were by my stunt.

When I rejoined Jon, I called out to Drogo again. "Was that proof enough, khal Drogo?" I asked.

He nodded. "It was. Rather than have such a man die, I would offer that you join my khalasar. I will give you horses, women and riches."

I shook my head. "My apologies, khal, but I have a lord and king already." Plus, I don't want to be some slaving, looting, barbarian nomad, but I was diplomatic enough not to tell him that.

"Very well. Jorah will face you, and if you beat him, I will," he announced. I took off the saddlebags for my arrows and the holster for my bow and passed them over to Jon on Shadowfax.

The difference between Mormont and I was striking. I was in a relatively open helmet designed not to obscure my vision, and wore chain mail over a leather and cloth gambeson. My gauntlets were only half-plate. Mormont, while not in full plate, did have a breastplate, a heavier helmet, and was in general equipped more like a proper knight than a rich man-at-arms.

He took up his lance, got his shield in position. I did the same. Unlike in a joust, where there is a divider, and each party passes with their shield facing their opponent, in a true battle it wasn't unusual to charge straight at each other, playing a game of chicken where whoever balks first loses position. Or, of course, the knights crash together and – assuming no one's horse goes down in the impact and both riders stay in their seats – try and smash the enemy apart as quickly as possible before he returns the favor.

I was a good rider, good with a spear, and with all the practice I'd gotten with Jon, actually good at fighting on a horse now too. Skills wise, I was around the level of a veteran but not renowned knight, the kind of warrior that formed the backbone of Westeros' armies. Jorah was a champion, the sort of man who could match and beat the best knights in Westeros in a fair competition.

Unluckily for him, it wouldn't be fair. I was far stronger, faster and tougher than Jorah, and Aethon was far stronger, faster and tougher than Jorah's horse. Beyond that, Aethon was smart enough to learn how to fight, to overcome his instincts as a herbivore (though I hadcheated a bit with magic for that part) and become absolutely lethal in a brawl. Meanwhile I could, even one-handed, pull off tricks to parry his lance with my own that I shouldn't have had the leverage or strength or speed or timing to manage. But I wasn't limited to human strength or senses, and could.

Jorah began to trot then canter at me. I did the same in return with Aethon on a collision course.

We got closer and closer, faster and faster.

I could see it in the other horse's eyes, the moment it decided to veer off slightly.

"Now, Aethon!" I shouted. Aethon exploded forwards, his head lowered to ram into the other horse. Jorah tried to hit me with his lance but I parried it to the right-side of my body. Then Aethon hit and sent the other horse tumbling away, its stance and speed nothing against Aethon's power. Jorah went tumbling, clattering along the dirt.

Aethon came around and I hopped out of the saddle, drawing my sword.

I kicked the groaning body over onto its back. He had lost his helmet sometime in the fall and was too stunned to recover fast enough.

In a bout of theatricality, I decided to go all into the absurd local chivalry. "In the name of Robert of the House Baratheon, the First of his Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and the Protector of the Realm, by the sentence passed by the word of Eddard of the House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, I carry out the sentence of death to the slaver and traitor Ser Jorah Mormont."

Then my sword swung down, and off came Jorah's head.

Chapter 21: Over the Sea and Far Away, pt. 4

I picked up Jorah's head by the hair and holding it away from Aethon rode back to Jon. He helped me strip off my armor and upper clothing, and I left it with him when I turned to face Drogo.

"Are you ready, khal Drogo?" I asked.

Daenerys reached towards him, begging him not to do this, and to his credit Drogo seemed conflicted. Then he came to a resolution.

"Come then, blood of my blood. As we are one, let us fight this Andal as one," he called out. Three other riders moved forwards with him.

Oh, that fucking cheat.

I shook my head. "Jon, it's fine!" I called out. "I've got this."

Jon just looked at me. "I wasn't going to move in the first place," he said dryly. "After all, I wouldn't want to ruin your grand story."

"Gods, Jon, with that much saltiness are you sure you aren't Ironborn?" I replied. Then, to make sure I got the last word, I urged Aethon forwards.

The four dothraki had spread out in a tight arc, their horses moving at a steady walk. They had seen what I had done to Jorah, and weren't going to risk closing so quickly. One stayed at the back and drew a bow. Seriously. These guys really went all in when it came to stacking the deck. Unluckily for them, there was no way a single archer was going to break through my shields. But I didn't want to show that off unless necessary, so I urged Aethon to move faster.

"I thought you said we would fight with swords, khal Drogo?" I called out as I closed with them.

"And we are," he replied. "But I said nothing of my bloodriders. Of course, you could always join my khalasar instead."

I shook my head. "There won't be a khalasar when you're dead." And with that, we clashed. Or rather, Aethon did, rearing up and dancing forwards while balanced on his hind legs, his front hooves lashing out and downing the two bloodriders' horses that were part of front line. It was a thing of terrible beauty, watching Aethon fight. The bloodriders were good, and didn't go out of the fight with their horses, but it gave Aethon the chance to charge the archer before he was ready. We passed to the archer's side, and my blade flicked out in a wicked horizontal blow, taking off the archer's upraised hand.

We wheeled around, then charged back at khal Drogo who was now far less good-tempered. I heard Daenerys scream in the background as we clashed one, twice, three times as I battered his guard lower and lower. Then his sword was totally out of position and I extended forwards, my sword passing in a straight lunge through the front of his neck and out the back.

I withdrew the blade, and Drogo's hands came up to his throat, desperately trying to staunch the bleeding as his mouth filled with red blood and he choked on the air he would never breathe again. Then Aegon stepped forwards, putting Drogo closer to me, and my sword swung hard to the side, taking off his braid and part of his skull. With a twist of the wrist I flicked his braid towards me and caught it.

"NO! NOOO!" I heard Daenerys shout, restrained from rushing to Drogo by the men he had once set to protect her. I rode down the last of Drogo's bloodriders then turned to the rest who were looking on in shock and horror. Drogo's party broke into a chaos of shouting as Jon, Togo and Ghost raced up behind me. Jon tossed me my archery equipment which I quickly reattached to Aethon's tack. I didn't, however, have time to get my armor back on.

I turned to their party which was growing a bit more orderly and called out. "By my victory I claim Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen! Does anyone here gainsay me?"

My hand was full of arrows, the first already nocked and ready to be drawn. I could already see the riders splitting up into two main groups, each headed by what I was guessing were some of Drogo's lieutenants. In the middle were Daenerys and her protectors who looked far from pleased at their position. Both leaders had seen me shoot, and neither wanted to die for some foreign girl or her piece of shit brother.

"You killed Drogo. She is yours," the one called.

"This is known," agreed the other.

One of Daenerys' protectors looked furious. "She is our khaleesi!" he shouted. "We must bring her into Vaes Dothrak so she can join the dosh khaleen!"

I grinned. I'd had the time to talk to the merchants and some Dothraki about Dothraki customs, and knew their law well enough to answer that. "Wrong. All khaleesi must be approved by the dosh khaleen first. Khal Drogo never presented her. So Daenerys Targaryen is not your khaleesi, but simply a girl your khal had at one point. I imagine he's done the same to many girls," I said somewhat crudely.

I could see him wavering. "Or you could challenge me for her?" I offered. And that did it. The fight went out of his eyes, and he pulled back from her.

Poor Daenerys. She couldn't even speak Dothraki, couldn't follow the rapidly changing situation. But she realized how bad things were for her when the last of her protectors pulled back and abandoned her.

I looked at her, not unkindly. She was just a girl, for all the death and misery she could have sparked, and never chose this for her life. "They've abandoned you, Daenerys," I explained.

"T-they can't," she gasped. "I'm their khaleesi!"

"I'm sorry, girl, but you're not. Dothraki khaleesi's have to be presented to the dosh khaleen, the widows of all the khals who died before their time. That was going to happen after you got to Vaes Dothrak. Now, they decided it would be easier to surrender you to me."

She was looking around, the panic and hysteria starting to set in. I decided to nip that right in the bud. "Hey! Daenerys. Look at me. Look at me. It's going to be alright. I won't harm you. And if you go out into this crowd, you'll be nothing more than a rich prize, a toy that used to be Drogo's to boast about. So take a deep breath, and calm down." She was doing so, thankfully, rather than panicking and running and make this situation into a whole mess.

I had been closing with her then when I figured I was near enough hit her with a bolt of concentrated suggestion to sleep. She passed out, slumping in the saddle. Aethon raced forwards and I caught her, pulled her into the saddle in front of me, and her grabbed her horse's reins. Her horse was a beautiful silver filly, and I figured Daenerys might want to keep her. A couple minutes later a rider came galloping up, a struggling silver-haired male tied up and slung over the horse's back.

"Unhand me! I am your king!" the figure screamed.

The rider rolled his eyes and shoved him unceremoniously onto the ground. "This one," he told me, "is utterly useless. He would rather ride a cart than a horse."

Oh, Viserys, were you really so stupid as to do no research about the people you wanted to have fight for you? No Dothraki would follow someone who rides in a cart.

Whatever. I didn't need that bastard; if he'd just gone into a nice, quiet exile I wouldn't have been there in the first place. Quick as can be, the groaning young man's noises were cut off as an arrow sprouted out of his skull.

I turned to look at Jon. "I told you it would make for a good story," I said with a grin. "Now let's get out of here before anyone else tries to kill us."

I started pushing temporary versions of my enchantments into Daenerys' horse so it could keep up.

Jon came up beside me. "But wouldn't that just make the story better?" he asked snarkily.

I glared at him. "I think I liked it better when you brooded." We both burst into laughter at that relatively weak joke and the sudden decrease in tension.

A few hours later, and with Hue and Mu to verify that there wasn't any pursuit we particularly needed to worry about, we stopped for a rest. I got my clothes and armor back on, and settled in to work on the horse.

First, I sterilized her. I made sure I could reverse the procedure, but I didn't want to release a new breed of super-horses without consideration. Then I added the same upgrades that Aethon had. I noticed that when I upgraded an animal it would be reasonably loyal to me. The Direwolves loved me about as much as their owners, and warg-bonds were deep. Still, just in case the horse tried to help Daenerys escape I used a modified communication link that left her incapable of stopping me from over-writing its vision, hearing, scent and touch with my own. If I needed to I could shut the horse off from all sensation, though hopefully that wouldn't prove necessary.

I checked over Daenerys too. She was pregnant, the to-be-born child a girl. I made sure both of them would be having no new children without my reversing the magical surgery. That way even if she did somehow escape, it wouldn't be a critical emergency. I also installed the conceptual shield and added a bit of regeneration so that she could keep up when we were riding. I'd take it away when we were on a ship to King's Landing.

Then I noticed something interesting. A dormant, unpowered enchantment resting in her blood. I memorized the pattern of it, thinking I'd test it later. With any luck, it would be the storied Targaryen fire-invulnerability.

With that done, I woke up Daenerys.

She was obviously confused by everything that happened, and recoiled back when she saw me.

"You fainted, Daenerys," I explained, shooting a glance at Jon not to mention my magic to her.

She looked on the verge of tears. "So, my sun-and-stars?"

I assumed she meant Drogo, as her horse was right behind me. "Drogo?" I verified.

She nodded. I shook my head. "I killed him," I answered. "It wasn't a dream."

Then she broke into sobs. "Why?" she finally asked. "Why did you have to kill him? He didn't even want to go to the Seven Kingdoms!"

"But you did, Daenerys," I said calmly. "And your brother did. And you didn't want to go to bend the knee, but to start a new rebellion. You think you're in pain? You think today was bad? Grow up, girl. A successful rebellion on your part would have put at least a hundred thousand men into the ground before the dust cleared and the fighting was over. A hundred thousand widows and orphans. No, today was a mercy. A mercy for all the people sleeping peacefully in Westeros who won't be killed, raped, enslaved by some barbarian Dothraki horse-lord."

She looked up at me, confused. What I was saying didn't fit with her world view. "B-but, I thought the Usurper was ruining the country? That people were just waiting for us to come back and restore things to the way they were?"

Wow. They had kept her very sheltered apparrently

I laughed bitterly. "Are you really so naïve? The rebellion didn't happen for no reason, Daenerys. Do you think that all those lords went to war over what, greed and the evil in their hearts? No. Your father was called the Mad King for a reason. His own son, Rhaegar, was plotting to depose him. But then Rhaegar fell in love with Lyanna, and lost his reason in turn. He stole her. It would be wrong if she had been the poorest peasant girl or beggar.

"But she wasn't. She was the daughter of one Lord Paramount, the betrothed of another. And when her father went to court with her older brother to beg for her release, the king, your father, accused them of plotting to kill Rhaegar, of having had Lyanna seduce him to give them justification for it. He burned Lord Stark alive while his oldest son was tied so that he would slowly strangle if he struggled to help his father. Lord Stark died screaming, and his son died struggling. That's why Robert rose up, why the Starks came south. And the memory of that, of that madness your family was so famous for, is why the Kingdoms would never fall without a heavy fight."

She looked stunned. "Your brother never told you about that, did he?" I asked. I had to hammer the point home while she was still recovering, and would likely have to reinforce it half a dozen times on the way back. "About how your father refused to cut his nails and hair for fear of anyone with a blade being close to him. About how he'd beat your mother. About all the other lunacy. So no. No one who wouldn't stand to profit, and profit heavily, is interested in your returning to take the throne."

"And how do you know all of this?" she demanded, sullen. Ah, great. A pissed off teenager. Was I sure I couldn't just kill her? Because I was sure she'd test me patience in the days to come.

"I asked questions of those who were at court at the time," I answered. "Some of the servants and Ser Barristan the Bold included."

"Barristan turned his cloak," Daenerys rejoined.

"He killed a dozen men at the Ruby Ford, and finally fell to his injuries. He was so wounded they expected he would die, but Robert had been impressed enough by his honor and skill that he sent his own maester to tend to Ser Barristan. By the time Barristan could walk again without assistance, the war was over. In return for Robert's mercy, he swore to him. And even now, all these years later, when Robert heard of your future child and grew fearful, and all but Lord Stark on the small council accepted the necessity of sending assassins for you, Ser Barristan spoke in your defense. He took no small risk doing so, even if he was not successful."

Daenerys lowered her eyes in shame. "If you were meant to kill me, why didn't you?

I grinned. "I'm not meant to kill you, of course. Lord Stark and Ser Barristan were right. There was no honor in killing a young pregnant girl. I volunteered to see you brought back under Robert's control, or placed into the dosh khaleen."

She looked at me incredulously, her mouth hanging open. "Wait, do you mean to say you set off to do this? That you always intended to kill Drogo? Just the two of you against his whole khalasar? Are you insane!?"

Jon decided to speak up. "I asked him the same thing, you know. He said it would make for a better story."

I settled back in arrogant amusement. "Well, it worked didn't it? And we're not two, we're eight. I'm Odysseus, as I mentioned before the fight. This is my friend and technically my squire, Jon. Aethon is my noble steed, while Shadowfax puts up with Jon's bony ass. Togo is the oversized dog, Ghost the direwolf. Hue and Mu are my ravens, but they're currently out scouting. Anyways, I'd rather we avoided any pursuit, so it's time to ride."

Daenerys began to mount her horse. "Eight, because of course he counts the animals," I heard her mutter. "And he has the temerity to call my father the mad one."

"I heard that!" I called out. "And you shouldn't insult the non-humans here, you'll hurt their feelings. By the way, what's your horse called?"

"My silver? The Dothraki don't name horses," she replied.

"You're not Dothraki, Daenerys," I reminded her.

She looked down and sighed. "I don't know then."

"How about Asfaloth?" I suggested.

"Asfaloth? What does that mean?" she asked.

"Asfaloth, which means foam-flower, was the horse of a hero from a tale. Glorfindel, one of the greatest of the Firstborn in wisdom and strength, an Elf-lord who met and turned back the Immortal Witch-King of Angmar." I had been just slightly obsessed with Tolkien as young child. I only read the trilogy three or four times before I started only reading my favorite bits in subsequent read-throughs, so that wasn't too excessive. Right?

She considered it. "No, I don't think so. I think being my Silver suits you just fine, doesn't it?" she asked the horse, getting a nod in response.

Fine. See if I care if you subject your horse to your horrible naming sense.

Chapter 21: Over the Sea and Far Away, pt. 4

I picked up Jorah's head by the hair and holding it away from Aethon rode back to Jon. He helped me strip off my armor and upper clothing, and I left it with him when I turned to face Drogo.

"Are you ready, khal Drogo?" I asked.

Daenerys reached towards him, begging him not to do this, and to his credit Drogo seemed conflicted. Then he came to a resolution.

"Come then, blood of my blood. As we are one, let us fight this Andal as one," he called out. Three other riders moved forwards with him.

Oh, that fucking cheat.

I shook my head. "Jon, it's fine!" I called out. "I've got this."

Jon just looked at me. "I wasn't going to move in the first place," he said dryly. "After all, I wouldn't want to ruin your grand story."

"Gods, Jon, with that much saltiness are you sure you aren't Ironborn?" I replied. Then, to make sure I got the last word, I urged Aethon forwards.

The four dothraki had spread out in a tight arc, their horses moving at a steady walk. They had seen what I had done to Jorah, and weren't going to risk closing so quickly. One stayed at the back and drew a bow. Seriously. These guys really went all in when it came to stacking the deck. Unluckily for them, there was no way a single archer was going to break through my shields. But I didn't want to show that off unless necessary, so I urged Aethon to move faster.

"I thought you said we would fight with swords, khal Drogo?" I called out as I closed with them.

"And we are," he replied. "But I said nothing of my bloodriders. Of course, you could always join my khalasar instead."

I shook my head. "There won't be a khalasar when you're dead." And with that, we clashed. Or rather, Aethon did, rearing up and dancing forwards while balanced on his hind legs, his front hooves lashing out and downing the two bloodriders' horses that were part of front line. It was a thing of terrible beauty, watching Aethon fight. The bloodriders were good, and didn't go out of the fight with their horses, but it gave Aethon the chance to charge the archer before he was ready. We passed to the archer's side, and my blade flicked out in a wicked horizontal blow, taking off the archer's upraised hand.

We wheeled around, then charged back at khal Drogo who was now far less good-tempered. I heard Daenerys scream in the background as we clashed one, twice, three times as I battered his guard lower and lower. Then his sword was totally out of position and I extended forwards, my sword passing in a straight lunge through the front of his neck and out the back.

I withdrew the blade, and Drogo's hands came up to his throat, desperately trying to staunch the bleeding as his mouth filled with red blood and he choked on the air he would never breathe again. Then Aegon stepped forwards, putting Drogo closer to me, and my sword swung hard to the side, taking off his braid and part of his skull. With a twist of the wrist I flicked his braid towards me and caught it.

"NO! NOOO!" I heard Daenerys shout, restrained from rushing to Drogo by the men he had once set to protect her. I rode down the last of Drogo's bloodriders then turned to the rest who were looking on in shock and horror. Drogo's party broke into a chaos of shouting as Jon, Togo and Ghost raced up behind me. Jon tossed me my archery equipment which I quickly reattached to Aethon's tack. I didn't, however, have time to get my armor back on.

I turned to their party which was growing a bit more orderly and called out. "By my victory I claim Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen! Does anyone here gainsay me?"

My hand was full of arrows, the first already nocked and ready to be drawn. I could already see the riders splitting up into two main groups, each headed by what I was guessing were some of Drogo's lieutenants. In the middle were Daenerys and her protectors who looked far from pleased at their position. Both leaders had seen me shoot, and neither wanted to die for some foreign girl or her piece of shit brother.

"You killed Drogo. She is yours," the one called.

"This is known," agreed the other.

One of Daenerys' protectors looked furious. "She is our khaleesi!" he shouted. "We must bring her into Vaes Dothrak so she can join the dosh khaleen!"

I grinned. I'd had the time to talk to the merchants and some Dothraki about Dothraki customs, and knew their law well enough to answer that. "Wrong. All khaleesi must be approved by the dosh khaleen first. Khal Drogo never presented her. So Daenerys Targaryen is not your khaleesi, but simply a girl your khal had at one point. I imagine he's done the same to many girls," I said somewhat crudely.

I could see him wavering. "Or you could challenge me for her?" I offered. And that did it. The fight went out of his eyes, and he pulled back from her.

Poor Daenerys. She couldn't even speak Dothraki, couldn't follow the rapidly changing situation. But she realized how bad things were for her when the last of her protectors pulled back and abandoned her.

I looked at her, not unkindly. She was just a girl, for all the death and misery she could have sparked, and never chose this for her life. "They've abandoned you, Daenerys," I explained.

"T-they can't," she gasped. "I'm their khaleesi!"

"I'm sorry, girl, but you're not. Dothraki khaleesi's have to be presented to the dosh khaleen, the widows of all the khals who died before their time. That was going to happen after you got to Vaes Dothrak. Now, they decided it would be easier to surrender you to me."

She was looking around, the panic and hysteria starting to set in. I decided to nip that right in the bud. "Hey! Daenerys. Look at me. Look at me. It's going to be alright. I won't harm you. And if you go out into this crowd, you'll be nothing more than a rich prize, a toy that used to be Drogo's to boast about. So take a deep breath, and calm down." She was doing so, thankfully, rather than panicking and running and make this situation into a whole mess.

I had been closing with her then when I figured I was near enough hit her with a bolt of concentrated suggestion to sleep. She passed out, slumping in the saddle. Aethon raced forwards and I caught her, pulled her into the saddle in front of me, and her grabbed her horse's reins. Her horse was a beautiful silver filly, and I figured Daenerys might want to keep her. A couple minutes later a rider came galloping up, a struggling silver-haired male tied up and slung over the horse's back.

"Unhand me! I am your king!" the figure screamed.

The rider rolled his eyes and shoved him unceremoniously onto the ground. "This one," he told me, "is utterly useless. He would rather ride a cart than a horse."

Oh, Viserys, were you really so stupid as to do no research about the people you wanted to have fight for you? No Dothraki would follow someone who rides in a cart.

Whatever. I didn't need that bastard; if he'd just gone into a nice, quiet exile I wouldn't have been there in the first place. Quick as can be, the groaning young man's noises were cut off as an arrow sprouted out of his skull.

I turned to look at Jon. "I told you it would make for a good story," I said with a grin. "Now let's get out of here before anyone else tries to kill us."

I started pushing temporary versions of my enchantments into Daenerys' horse so it could keep up.

Jon came up beside me. "But wouldn't that just make the story better?" he asked snarkily.

I glared at him. "I think I liked it better when you brooded." We both burst into laughter at that relatively weak joke and the sudden decrease in tension.

A few hours later, and with Hue and Mu to verify that there wasn't any pursuit we particularly needed to worry about, we stopped for a rest. I got my clothes and armor back on, and settled in to work on the horse.

First, I sterilized her. I made sure I could reverse the procedure, but I didn't want to release a new breed of super-horses without consideration. Then I added the same upgrades that Aethon had. I noticed that when I upgraded an animal it would be reasonably loyal to me. The Direwolves loved me about as much as their owners, and warg-bonds were deep. Still, just in case the horse tried to help Daenerys escape I used a modified communication link that left her incapable of stopping me from over-writing its vision, hearing, scent and touch with my own. If I needed to I could shut the horse off from all sensation, though hopefully that wouldn't prove necessary.

I checked over Daenerys too. She was pregnant, the to-be-born child a girl. I made sure both of them would be having no new children without my reversing the magical surgery. That way even if she did somehow escape, it wouldn't be a critical emergency. I also installed the conceptual shield and added a bit of regeneration so that she could keep up when we were riding. I'd take it away when we were on a ship to King's Landing.

Then I noticed something interesting. A dormant, unpowered enchantment resting in her blood. I memorized the pattern of it, thinking I'd test it later. With any luck, it would be the storied Targaryen fire-invulnerability.

With that done, I woke up Daenerys.

She was obviously confused by everything that happened, and recoiled back when she saw me.

"You fainted, Daenerys," I explained, shooting a glance at Jon not to mention my magic to her.

She looked on the verge of tears. "So, my sun-and-stars?"

I assumed she meant Drogo, as her horse was right behind me. "Drogo?" I verified.

She nodded. I shook my head. "I killed him," I answered. "It wasn't a dream."

Then she broke into sobs. "Why?" she finally asked. "Why did you have to kill him? He didn't even want to go to the Seven Kingdoms!"

"But you did, Daenerys," I said calmly. "And your brother did. And you didn't want to go to bend the knee, but to start a new rebellion. You think you're in pain? You think today was bad? Grow up, girl. A successful rebellion on your part would have put at least a hundred thousand men into the ground before the dust cleared and the fighting was over. A hundred thousand widows and orphans. No, today was a mercy. A mercy for all the people sleeping peacefully in Westeros who won't be killed, raped, enslaved by some barbarian Dothraki horse-lord."

She looked up at me, confused. What I was saying didn't fit with her world view. "B-but, I thought the Usurper was ruining the country? That people were just waiting for us to come back and restore things to the way they were?"

Wow. They had kept her very sheltered apparrently

I laughed bitterly. "Are you really so naïve? The rebellion didn't happen for no reason, Daenerys. Do you think that all those lords went to war over what, greed and the evil in their hearts? No. Your father was called the Mad King for a reason. His own son, Rhaegar, was plotting to depose him. But then Rhaegar fell in love with Lyanna, and lost his reason in turn. He stole her. It would be wrong if she had been the poorest peasant girl or beggar.

"But she wasn't. She was the daughter of one Lord Paramount, the betrothed of another. And when her father went to court with her older brother to beg for her release, the king, your father, accused them of plotting to kill Rhaegar, of having had Lyanna seduce him to give them justification for it. He burned Lord Stark alive while his oldest son was tied so that he would slowly strangle if he struggled to help his father. Lord Stark died screaming, and his son died struggling. That's why Robert rose up, why the Starks came south. And the memory of that, of that madness your family was so famous for, is why the Kingdoms would never fall without a heavy fight."

She looked stunned. "Your brother never told you about that, did he?" I asked. I had to hammer the point home while she was still recovering, and would likely have to reinforce it half a dozen times on the way back. "About how your father refused to cut his nails and hair for fear of anyone with a blade being close to him. About how he'd beat your mother. About all the other lunacy. So no. No one who wouldn't stand to profit, and profit heavily, is interested in your returning to take the throne."

"And how do you know all of this?" she demanded, sullen. Ah, great. A pissed off teenager. Was I sure I couldn't just kill her? Because I was sure she'd test me patience in the days to come.

"I asked questions of those who were at court at the time," I answered. "Some of the servants and Ser Barristan the Bold included."

"Barristan turned his cloak," Daenerys rejoined.

"He killed a dozen men at the Ruby Ford, and finally fell to his injuries. He was so wounded they expected he would die, but Robert had been impressed enough by his honor and skill that he sent his own maester to tend to Ser Barristan. By the time Barristan could walk again without assistance, the war was over. In return for Robert's mercy, he swore to him. And even now, all these years later, when Robert heard of your future child and grew fearful, and all but Lord Stark on the small council accepted the necessity of sending assassins for you, Ser Barristan spoke in your defense. He took no small risk doing so, even if he was not successful."

Daenerys lowered her eyes in shame. "If you were meant to kill me, why didn't you?

I grinned. "I'm not meant to kill you, of course. Lord Stark and Ser Barristan were right. There was no honor in killing a young pregnant girl. I volunteered to see you brought back under Robert's control, or placed into the dosh khaleen."

She looked at me incredulously, her mouth hanging open. "Wait, do you mean to say you set off to do this? That you always intended to kill Drogo? Just the two of you against his whole khalasar? Are you insane!?"

Jon decided to speak up. "I asked him the same thing, you know. He said it would make for a better story."

I settled back in arrogant amusement. "Well, it worked didn't it? And we're not two, we're eight. I'm Odysseus, as I mentioned before the fight. This is my friend and technically my squire, Jon. Aethon is my noble steed, while Shadowfax puts up with Jon's bony ass. Togo is the oversized dog, Ghost the direwolf. Hue and Mu are my ravens, but they're currently out scouting. Anyways, I'd rather we avoided any pursuit, so it's time to ride."

Daenerys began to mount her horse. "Eight, because of course he counts the animals," I heard her mutter. "And he has the temerity to call my father the mad one."

"I heard that!" I called out. "And you shouldn't insult the non-humans here, you'll hurt their feelings. By the way, what's your horse called?"

"My silver? The Dothraki don't name horses," she replied.

"You're not Dothraki, Daenerys," I reminded her.

She looked down and sighed. "I don't know then."

"How about Asfaloth?" I suggested.

"Asfaloth? What does that mean?" she asked.

"Asfaloth, which means foam-flower, was the horse of a hero from a tale. Glorfindel, one of the greatest of the Firstborn in wisdom and strength, an Elf-lord who met and turned back the Immortal Witch-King of Angmar." I had been just slightly obsessed with Tolkien as young child. I only read the trilogy three or four times before I started only reading my favorite bits in subsequent read-throughs, so that wasn't too excessive. Right?

She considered it. "No, I don't think so. I think being my Silver suits you just fine, doesn't it?" she asked the horse, getting a nod in response.

Fine. See if I care if you subject your horse to your horrible naming sense.

Chapter 22: Over the Sea and Far Away pt. 5 (Or, There and Back Again)

That night, before we all went to sleep I told Daenerys I'd be searching her things. I didn't think she'd try and kill us; she certainly wouldn't succeed, as someone, whether furred, feathered or human was on watch at any given time. But if she wasn't armed she'd be less inclined to do something foolish, and I wouldn't be forced to punish her for it.

That's how I found the dragon eggs in her saddlebags. Three of them. One deep green with little flecks of dark gold. Another cream with golden streaks. The third midnight black with red marks like a tribal tattoo.

They might have been petrified but I could feel it deep inside, the life just waiting patiently to be fed enough mana to be born. Hell. Fucking. Yes.

Obviously, I wanted to be stronger in just about every respect before I hatched them, and I needed to be able to do a lot more with mental effects, brainwashing, bindings and the like. Westeros needed a pissed off wild dragon running about the place burning cities like I needed a jalapeno enema – in other words, not at all.

But was I going to be a dragon-knight? Damn straight.

I didn't sleep until I finished crafting a ward to keep the magic balance inside of the eggs stable instead. As much as I didn't want them to hatch yet, I wanted them to die even less.

Ah, dragons, I sighed to myself. I had dragons. I was grinning like a loon.

"He does know they won't just hatch, right?" Daenerys asked Jon cautiously the next morning when my joy still hadn't receeded.

Jon looked at her pityingly. "He only mentioned how he wished he felt up to going to Asshai and the Shadowlands while we were already so relatively close once or twice." Daenerys looked puzzled as to why that might explain my reaction. Then Jon finished his sentence. "Once or twice a day. Every day since we passed the Free Cities. He was talking about what he'd need to be able to camp out for years, in the Shadowlands, just to find one of these things."

"Is it because he's a wizard?" she asked. Jon and I looked at her in shock. "The horses are moving much too fast, and my legs haven't been chafing at all. Then he falls in love with the dragon eggs. It wasn't hard to guess," she explained, rolling her eyes.

I cleared my throat. "Ha. Yes. Well I try and keep it quiet, generally. I mean, it's something of an open secret, just look at Togo, but I find it's a lot more fun to be a wizard than to be asked to be a wizard, if you see what I mean."

She looked at me with a fair bit of confused fear. It was almost as if she were the captive of someone she thought slightly mad.

I deflated a bit. But only a bit because dragons. "Let's just get a move on," I instructed.

The problem was I had three of them. I hadn't anticipated needing three names. Beyond that none of the names I could think of were auspicious. I wanted my dragons to be giant fire-breathing monsters of intelligence and wit, not just massive amounts of killy-ness.

Of course I wanted the killy-ness too.

Then it came to me.

Zelazny, Feynman and Stephenson. Three amazing authors. Zelazny wrote Lord of Light, my single favorite book ever. Feynman had a unique way of looking at problems that I attempted to emulate as a student. And Stephenson's Diamond Age had been the novel that set me down the path of science in the first place. I'd simply name the dragons randomly from that list as they were born.

From Vaes Dothrak we went west and slightly south towards Volantis. After our previous innocent misunderstanding I didn't want to risk travelling through Qohor again. Beyond that, Volantis had this massive, centuries old magical black stone wall. Or at least they thought it used magic, but considering it was seamless and thick enough to drive six chariots across the top I wasn't going to discount the possibility.

Although that did raise the question; just what kind of fucking monsters are out there that a twenty-four meter thick, 60 meter tall wall was considered reasonable and necessary?

Either way, I wanted to see Volantis and its wall, so we set off for it. Given that Daenerys was pregnant, we took it a little easier. At the beginning of the journey she was somewhere on the border of the first and second trimester. I asked her if she wanted an abortion, which she refused with a bit of horror. As far as I and Blue was concerned the baby wasn't showing any signs of true sentience at that time, so I felt like it wasn't immoral to offer.

But that just gave me more time to bond with the land as we passed over it. I picked up eight White plains in the Dothraki Sea as well as a pair of Blues from rivers we passed in that area. They weren't marked on my map so I had no idea as to their names. Then we were travelling along the edge of the Painted Mountains and I picked up a neat half-dozen Red mana.

After passing over some hills we entered into the marshes and swamplands around the source of the Volaena river basin. The ground would have been unpassable if it weren't for my weaving roots into a solid road for the horses to walk along. I picked up three Black mana passing through that area. Then we were past the marshes and travelling along the Volaena river itself, which I bonded twice before we finally came to Volantis.

I was wary of bringing Daenerys into the city, especially with her eye-catching white hair. I wasn't too worried about her running; she'd gained a fairly deep level of Stockholm syndrome over the past three weeks of travel, helped along by gentle nudges of Blue. Slightly unethical, and I knew that, but if I could present Robert with a Daenerys who was happy and content and obviously not going to incite rebellion things would go much better for her. Beyond that I really wasn't capable of anything more than planting temporary suggestions and emphasizing certain thoughts. It was a slow nudging in truth, rather than a thorough conditioning or total control.

At least so I comforted myself. It was interesting to see how easy it was to be corrupted by power, the temptation to violate people in the deepest and most disturbing ways simply because it was less bother for me.

But Westerosi traders were not unusual in the city, and the bounty on Daenerys and Viserys' heads from over a decade ago had never been officially rescinded. Beyond that the Old Blood of Volantis, those who could prove unbroken descent from Old Valyria and were allowed to live within the Black Walls, might take an interest in her. So I used Green mana to change her hair from silver to a more common blonde, her eyes from purple to a deep blue. I attached an Uninteresting Object enchantment to the bag that was holding the dragon eggs, then again on their padding. And with that we were ready to enter.

Volantis was a great city, perhaps the greatest of the Free Cities. Once it had been the most populous. Though that was no longer the case it did have the most other cities within its territory, hovering somewhere between city-state and a proper small nation. In contrast the other Free Cities were more centralized around their single main city.

After living in nature for so long being in a populated city with its smells and noises – but mostly smells – was a real shock to the senses. Even in the relatively exotic Volantis we cut quite the figures, a pair of Westerosi warriors with a beautiful blonde, all riding handsome horses and flanked with pony-sized canine beasts.

That did give us a bit of space. The hathays, a type of cab used by the people of Volantis who believed that travelling on foot was somehow demeaning, gave us an especially wide berth, careful that our animals wouldn't spook their dwarf-elephants. In Volantis even being mounted on horses was seen as distinctly middle-class. But fuck that bourgeoisie laziness, Aethon was a much better ride than any wheeled conveyance, especially since they lacked suspension systems.

The city was full of tattooed persons. Slaves were consistently tattooed to mark their status and denote their occupation, and Volantis had five slaves for each freeman. I was honestly amazed that there hadn't been some Spartacus to come along and slaughter the slavers yet. I didn't want to stay in the city for too long; the slavery made me uncomfortable. On the other hand, I was very interested by what was on the inside of the Black Wall. I wanted to explore the towers and temples, the stores of ancient knowledge held within.

There were some other important structures in the city that I wanted to visit as well. The Temple of the Lord of Light was dedicated to R'hllor, whose worship was most common outside of the more traditionally Valyrian Black Walled populace. The

Temple was supposedly three times the size of the Great Sept of Baelor; I wanted to bond it, and see if any of their priest's sermons included real magic.

There was also a bridge, the Long Bridge, that went over the wide mouth of the Rhoyne and connected the older and newer parts of the city. The bridge itself was some two kilometers long, which was simply amazing considering it hadn't been built during the age of myths and magic.

Volantis seemed to like these sorts of overblown edifices. It was also home to the Merchant's House, an Inn which was certainly the largest in the city, possibly the largest, at least with regards to maximum occupancy, in the Free Cities. We were staying there while we explored the city. It was strange to sleep on a bed after so long on the ground.

Since we were staying there the Merchant's House was the first place that I bonded. It provided a White and a Red mana. The first two days we travelled along the Long Bridge. Each five hundred meter stretch provided a White and a Blue mana, four of each in total. Jon and Daenerys window shopped while I followed along, most of my attention focused on attuning myself.

Then we had finished with that, and it was time to move onto the Temple. It was a truly massive complex and took three days of my attending the Temple and pretending to pray before I finally managed to attune the whole place. In the end it gave me three Red, three White, two Blue and two Black. What that said about R'hllor as a god was disturbing; the place was weighted very heavily towards Red and Black for a place of prayer and knowledge. Even a relatively chaotic place just being in a city and organized would give that relative amount of White. Unfortunately, the priests' magics were still as unimpressive as they had been in Pentos.

Then it was finally time to approach the Black Wall. I looked at it closely with my magical senses. It was impressive. Over the course of the day I bonded that gatehouse, gaining a pair of Reds. I also learned three new enchantments. The first was something I probably could have figured out on my own with a bit time, and was an effect I dubbed Fuse Stone.

But deeper in the Black Walls, sleeping and drained of power were some more interesting enchantments. The second enchantment I learned that day was what I thought of as Living Stone. The Walls, were they powered, could actually slowly regenerate themselves and repair damage. Sort of like a persistent stone shaping effect directed to strengthen and heal the walls. The third enchantment of the day was what I called Hateful Stone. If the walls defined you as an enemy then on contact it would attempt to destroy you, in this case by burning.

Unfortunately both the second and third enchantments depended on a power source. For the Black Wall, this was the stone that the Wall was itself made of. The thickness wasn't just defensive, but actually meant that the Walls were once upon a time an absolutely massive battery for the enchantment. That said, the energy density of the stone, which seemed to be mostly dragonglass with some other things mixed in, was low. It made sense they needed so much. But with higher ambient mana I wouldn't be surprised if the Black Wall fortress stayed standing basically forever, even if it was being actively attacked day and night. I could tell that the energy was mostly drained though, and that the Walls would start running totally dry in a century or three.

I couldn't wrangle an invitation inside and had little chance of finding anything interesting in a timely fashion without a guide, so I decided we might as well leave Volantis. The stench of oppression was starting to get to me anyways.

We followed the river Rhoyne north for a week as I bonded seven Blue mana from it, then passed two days in the Velvet Hills, earning two Red, before finally ending up back at Pentos. We were stuck there for four days until there was a ship going to King's landing. Ten days after that and some three and a bit months and a new calendar year after we left in the first place, we were finally back in Westeros.

Come to think of it, it had been about nineteen months since I first came to Westeros. I was soon to be twenty two years old.

Chapter 23: Homecoming

I had kept Lord Stark updated via Nevermore, and so he knew to expect us. Jory Cassel and a squad of Stark guardsmen were waiting for us at the docks. Our cavalcade of people, horses, and massive fanged beasts left the ship.

I walked up to Jory smiling, grasped his arm in mine. "Captain Cassel! It's good to see you again."

He was smiling too. "No, it's good to see you again, Ser Odysseus, and you Jon. I feared that you would never return from your mission."

I spread my arms wide, showing off that I was, in fact there in the flesh. "I'm devastated at the lack of faith, Jory," I joked.

He laughed. "So is that the girl?" he asked. Daenerys was in a hooded cloak to avoid any unfortunate incidents happening before we reached the Red Keep. I had restored her original coloring as we came in to port.

I nodded. "She is indeed."

He looked at her cloaked figure intently. "She's a small thing to cause so much trouble."

Daenerys shifted uncomfortably. "She can also hear you, Ser," she said.

Jory just laughed. "My apologies lass, that was rude of me. And I'm no Ser; I'm a proper man of the north, and don't need a pretty title to dress up what I do."

I gasped, clutched my chest. "Oh Captain, you wound me so!" The Stark men, Daenerys and Jon laughed at my joke. "Anyways, it's been a long journey, Captain. Shall we end it?"

He nodded, gave his men the order to split up half ahead and half behind, and we were off for the Red Keep. When we arrived, Jory told us that the king and his small council were waiting for in the small council chambers. We dismounted, leaving the horses with stablehands, and walked up to meet with Robert, Ned, and the rest of the council.

Robert looked very glad to see me. "Odysseus!" he roared. Really, the next time he got poisoned I was installing an inside voice. "You did it! You magnificent man, you did it!"

Ned also looked happy to see us back, as if weight had been lifted off of his shoulders. "Well done, Ser Odysseus, Jon. I'm glad you're safe."

Renly, Ser Davos, Grand Maester Erreck, and Lord Manderly were also quick to offer their congratulations.

Then the old woman in the room spoke up. "Yes, yes, you went off and killed some horse-lord. Congratulations, boy," she said somewhat flippantly, her eyes cunning and analyzing my reaction.

"My lady Tyrell," I said with a short bow and a smile, "may I say what a pleasure it is to have you in King's Landing. I can see that you live up to every bit of your reputation."

She gave a humph sound. "Not too easily riled, then," she said as if to herself.

Robert laughed. "Stop teasing, Lady Olenna. There's more than time enough for that in the future. Now, is that her?"

I nodded. "Your Grace, I present to you Daenerys Targaryen."

In a bit of theatrical flair she dropped her cloak to the ground and kneeled. "Your Grace," she said, eyes lowered. She was obviously pregnant, well into the second trimester, but still very pretty and so very, very young. I suppose most of that was cultural; the Westerosi married as young as thirteen and fourteen sometimes, teen pregnancy the rule rather the exception that it was where I grew up.

For all his faults, Robert tended to be generous if lecherous towards women. I was hoping that would help Daenerys; I had gotten to know her on the way back and she was a good kid. Might, in another lifetime, have even made a good queen.

He looked at her, grimaced. "Up, girl, up. I won't keep a pregnant woman kneeling, no matter what family she was a part of."

Daenerys stood up, her eyes still looking down.

"Look at me, girl," Robert ordered. Daenerys' face came up and he looked deep into her eyes. "You have Rhaegar's hair, but your eyes are far fairer. Hopefully you didn't get his madness, or worse yet your father's." He sighed. "I still don't know what to do with you. So, why not. Ser Odysseus, you caught her, you keep her."

My eyes widened. Please, please don't be what I'm thinking. I had no desire to marry, especially not some girl nearly six years my junior whose previous husband I had cut down. "Your Grace?" I choked out.

He looked at me with a bit of amusement. "Well, you took care of what we discussed, correct?" he asked, referring to making sure there would be no future Targaryen pretenders with an unusual degree of circumspection. I nodded. "So since she's no true threat, and I don't know what to do with her, I'm making you responsible for her. Send her to a nunnery, keep her here or at Winterfell, hells you can make her your mistress or even kill her for all I care."

I blinked a few times in astonishment. That was, in so many ways, fucking cruel. "I wasn't aware Westeros had slavery, Your Grace?" I asked, my voice denoting humor to take the bite out of my words.

Robert's face became a bit grim and he smirked darkly. "And we don't. I heard you finally passed judgement on Jorah Mormont as well, good job on that by the way. But no, I've simply not rescinded my previous writ of attainder. Daenerys Targaryen has no right to title of nobility, property, or even her life. But I am now deferring judgement in this matter, and giving you full powers in all matters related to her. The child too when it's born."

Wow. That was actually clever. I mean, really clever. Robert wasn't exactly famous for his legal acumen, after all, and that was as far as I was aware a loophole that hadn't been used before. It wasn't in any book of Westerosi legal practices that I read, at least.

He read that thought on my face, as well as the faces of the small council and barked a quick laugh. "Ha! You all didn't think I paid any attention when we discussed legal issues. I was just waiting for my moment." And then he laughed heartily at our surprise, the rest of us chuckling along.

Finally he stopped. "Now, I would ask for the full story now, but I've already arranged a feast in your honor which starts in an hour. And I'm sure it's quite the story."

Well. It seemed that I had to figure out what to do with Daenerys now. I was a bit overwhelmed.

As he left the council chamber to get ready to feast, Robert clapped me on the shoulder. "Now, don't worry, Odysseus. I have a proper reward for you too. But it's a surprise; you'll have to wait for me to announce it during the feast."

Oh dear.

Then Jon walked up next to me. "You know, given everything you put me through I think we can agree you owe me a favor, right?" he asked. I nodded hesitantly. Then he got a wolfish smile on his face. "Good. So, I'll be the one telling the story then."

Oh dear.

An hour later, Robert stood at the front of the packed Grand Hall. Margaery and Lord Stark were sat near him, but I was in the place of honor, Jon right next to me. Daenerys stood behind me; Robert had wanted her to serve as my cupbearer at least for tonight in a bit of politically pointed public humiliation.

I'll admit, the power, the attention… It was a heady feeling, one I feared I might grow used to. I had grown, developed, changed during my time in Westeros. When I returned home, how would I relate?

Robert rang a bell, getting total silence. "Alright," he said. "When I announced this feast, I didn't say what it was for. Or rather, who it was for. Odysseus, stand up," he ordered.

He pulled me up and put an arm around my shoulders. "For those few who weren't here for the Tourney of the Hand, or didn't get to see him fight and compete, this is Ser Odysseus Gangari. And tonight, he's who we're all here to honor. I'm sure you've at least heard of him. He's an accomplished and learned warrior, a great healer, and one of the most honorable men in the Realm."

I was blushing a bit at the unstinting praise.

"I'll cover some of his greatest achievements, then talk about what he's done most recently. First, as a warrior. He beat Sandor Clegane, disdaining weapons and only using his fists despite both being armed. His dog, Togo, fought and won a trial by combat with the Kingslayer and traitor, Jaime Lannister. Ser Gregor Clegane, the Mountain that Rode and forty men ambushed him – he brought their heads in sacks right to this hall, and fought and killed Lord Tywin Lannister the next day." The crowd went wild with cheering at that.

"Aye, aye, I know," Robert boomed in agreement. "You'd better believe, I was even happier than all of you. And a lot of us were cheering extra hard when he took the championship in archery later." A lot of people smiled and nodded in agreement.

"He was critical in overturning the Lannister conspiracy, in bringing Cersei Lannister to justice, in discovering the treachery of Grand Maester Pycelle as well as Lords Baelish and Varys, and though Baelish is still at large his properties were seized following a plan which Sir Odysseus suggested.

"The Crown is some five and a half million dragons richer today, and we have much of that thanks to our good knight. Further, Lord Manderly, the Master of Coin, assures me that Odysseus' advice has left the Seven Kingdoms with a yearly profit three quarters of a million dragons greater. Now, I'm not one to count coppers as many know, but even I'm impressed by that."

Another round of cheers rang out. I was getting so many fuck-me eyes, from married and unmarried alike. Hell, even some of the men; no judgement, but no way in hell guys. Some of the women though… There's a reason they call it tempted to sin.

Robert waved for quiet again. "Now, any man who achieved half of that in his life would count it well lived, but our Ser Odysseus has gone even further. He's a great healer, helping save the life of Bran Stark when the boy was pushed from a tower. Not to mention saving my own royal life not once but twice."

And at that the crowd went quiet with shock then wild with applause. Dammit, Robert, I liked shit being calm and quiet. Plus, I was previously a little feared. Now everyone would want to be my friend. Plus they'd bring me sick people to heal which just… urgh. Notwhat I wanted to be doing with my life.

Robert waited for the shouting and cheering to die down. "We should have been feasting him many times before, but Ser Odysseus dislikes too much attention and is perhaps too humble."

Ya, no, that was just a straight up lie. I am far from humble. It was like that time I was in middle school and my physics teacher was so happy with me that he praised my organization. I was good at physics, not filing, and had already lost something like three quarters of my papers, but organization was part of the rubric so I got a ten out of ten on that and a bit of praise added to my year-end report.

I was about as humble as an eagle; that is to say, not at all. It was more my anti-social nature not wanting to have to deal with too much popularity than anything else.

"But over these last few months he has achieved something that I just could not let him get away with brushing off," Robert continued. "Accompanied only by his loyal squire, their horses, and their dog and wolf, he rode out past the Free Cities. Ser Odysseus proceeded to cross hundreds of leagues of grassland, patrolled and inhabited by the savage Dothraki horse-lords. Finally, he found the horde of one of their kings, Khal Drogo, who commanded forty thousand cavalry."

Everyone was listening entirely intent on Robert's story as he paused to build tension. It was times like this that made me realize why they made him king. The man was charismatic, and boy did he know how to work a crowd.

"Also part of this horde were three of our enemies. Ser Jorah Mormont, who fought bravely at Pyke and bested Jaime Lannister after breaking nine lances in the joust, yet sold men into slavery and fled before my good Lord Stark's justice could reach him. Viserys Targaryen, the Beggar Prince and pretender to the crown. And his younger sister, Daenerys Targaryen who was to wed Drogo in return for an army."

The room was totally silent now. You could literally have heard a pin drop as the crowd just ate up Robert's performance.

"When I heard of this, I had a heavy heart. It wasn't the most honorable course of action, but I decided that for the good of the realm, to prevent another war, it had to be done. I had to send assassins after the Targaryens, after any unborn children the girl might carry." Robert sighed deeply, as if I hadn't been there I might have believed that he wasn't just pissed off, fearful and lashing out at that time.

"But my Hand, Lord Stark, and Lord Commander Barristan argued against that. Argued that my honor was too dear to lose whatever the case. So I was left with a most difficult decision; my honor as a man, or my honor as a king?"

The room listened raptly as Robert drew them in, his voice getting softer as he related his great moral dilemma.

"But then Ser Odysseus spoke out. Without thought to risk or reward, he volunteered to ride out, kill Viserys and Drogo, and retrieve Daenerys. And in so doing, to keep my honor safe as both man and king. As you can see," he said his voice gradually rising, then turned to gesture at Daenerys, "Ser Odysseus was successful, and Daenerys Targaryen is now in hand!" he boomed.

If I thought the crowd went wild before, what followed gave a whole new definition to the word. It took minutes for the cheering, banging and stomping to even start to die down.

Eventually Robert raised his arms for quiet. "Now, when I asked this man, this hero, what he wanted for doing so much to aid the realm, to save my life, to save my honor, do you know how he answered? He didn't ask for lands, for honors or favors, for some highborn lady's hand in marriage. Hells, when I tried to give him a lordship or place on the small council previously he's even refused. He hasn't even mentioned being refunded the monies he spent on his quest."

People were visibly impressed by that, and curious as to where Robert was going with it. I, of course, knew. After all, I'd organized it by communications raven with Ned and Robert before we even took ship.

"No, Ser Odysseus asked for one thing. He asked that his faithful squire, Jon Snow, the son of Lord Eddard Stark, be legitimized as a cadet branch of House Stark. And so I want it to be known to all here that Jon Snow is no more. In his place sits a new man, Jon Farstark!"

Jon was totally shocked, his mouth open as everyone started applauding him and chanting "Farstark! Farstark!" He shot me a look saying he'd get me back for this as I pulled him into a one armed hug and ruffled his hair while I smiled.

After a while Robert raised his arms for quiet again. "Now, you all know me, and you all know I'm generous to my friends. So there was no way I could allow Ser Odysseus to get away with this selfless act being his only reward. All the time that he was gone, I wracked my mind for what reward I would give him when he came back with success. And then, well, there was the tragic passing of Lady Whent a fortnight ago. This time I'm not giving Ser Odysseus the option of refusing," Robert said with a smile.

Oh, that bastard! He was giving me so much work! I thought.

"And so I present to you Ser Odysseus Gangari, Lord of Harrenhal!" Robert shouted as the crowd went wild once more, screaming and chanting "Gan-ga-ri! Gan-ga-ri!" and "Harr-en-hal! Harr-en-hal!".

I turned to shout in Robert's ear, "that was evil!"

He gave me this massive, innocent smile and shouted back, "I know!"

Robert waited a bit for people to calm down, then raised his arms wide for attention again. "So, before we hear the tale of his latest adventure, something even I haven't had the details of yet, let us raise a toast. To Lord Gangari!"

""To Lord Gangari!"" the crowd echoed and drank. I saluted with my wine-glass in return and drank a bit myself.

"Well," I said loudly as I stepped forwards to begin my own speech. "I still say that Harrenhal is much too great an honor, and a heavy burden. But as I seem to have no other choice, I shall have to bear it."

The crowd laughed at my joke.

"I wanted very much to tell everyone the story of our adventures in Essos," I said. And I really did. A culture of epic storytelling was basically the greatest thing about Westeros. "I even subjected myself and Jon to a number of situations so that the resulting tale would be even better than otherwise. However, my dear squire, not knowing that I was planning to gift him a name, demanded a single reward of his own; to tell our story. And so I give you Jon Farstark to relate our journey into the heart of the savage Dothraki Sea, our actions and battle while there, and our return to fair Westeros."

And then with a bout of clapping from the crowd I sat down, and Jon stood up.

"I've heard my master, teacher and friend called many things," he began. "Some people have called him mad."

A few hisses, jeers and boos at those that would denigrate a hero, some from the very same people that had done so in previous months.

"Others," Jon continued, "have called him a genius."

Now some cheering, quickly quietened.

"Of course, they're all wrong. I'll tell you the hidden truth, here and now," he said, his voice quiet and drawing everyone in. "To me, at least, it's quite obvious. He's a mad genius," he deadpanned. The crowd burst into laughter, as did I. Under my influence Jon had lightened up a lot and proved to have a deep sense of humor.

"You see, my lord doesn't look at the world like normal people. No, he looks at the world like it's an epic of the first age, and he's the heroic protagonist…" Jon continued as I began to dig into my food and wine with a smile. I might as well have a good night, because in the morning I'd have to start getting my shit together.

I'd been given my most difficult job yet; to fix the cluster-fuck that was Harrenhal.

Once I had, my future dragons had better not fuck it up like their cousins did in the past.

Chapter 24: New Lands

Ned came by in the morning to record my house words. I went with "Thy Will Be Done". The overt Westerosi meaning was to be obedient and dutiful to m y overlords, the Tullys, and my king Robert. The more hidden meaning was a reference to my magic powers. And the reference to the Lord's Prayer was a reminder not to lose myself and my morals. I had no desire to demonstrate the concept of absolute power corrupting absolutely, after all.

I looked at Ned warily. "So now that you've managed to force a lordship on me, what's next? Going to try and get me wed?" I sarcastically asked.

Ned was looking at me with the particular face he used when something was hilarious and he was not laughing because Starks are serious. A shiver went down my back and I bolted upright.

"No!" I protested.

He couldn't help it and grinned. "I've already had someone approach me about that, as it so happens." He paused long enough to really wind me up, then continued. "Arya decided that if she had to marry someone it was going to be you." At that, I knew he was joking.

"Oh, you jackass!" I exclaimed. "You had me so worried for a moment."

Ned chuckled. "But seriously, if you aren't wed by the time she's sixteen, we'll be having this talk again." He raised a hand to stop my protest. "I know how you feel about marriage; you explained the customs of your homeland, and I haven't forgotten. But ten years difference is not too long, not when I suspect you will live far longer than any ordinary man. For your own sensibilities you can be betrothed when she's sixteen, and wed when she's eighteen so long as her feelings don't change. But Odysseus, you are one of the few men with whom she might be able to live a happy life," he finished, pleading somewhat.

I sighed heavily. "Fine. If, if I'm still unmarried in four and a half years we can go ahead with your plan, at least to the point of Arya and I talking about it."

Stark smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. "Thank you, Odysseus. That is a great weight off of my shoulders. What are your thoughts on Harrenhal?" he asked, gesturing to the documents and maps I was looking at.

Honestly, I had been pissed off a bit about being given Harrenhal at first; it felt like settling down, giving up on going home. But then I realized it might be nice to have a home in Westeros. Once I figured out how to get home I'd almost certainly be able to travel back and forth at will, and being the undisputed lord of a fief could be fun.

Still, I groaned. "You know giving me that place was adding an extra job for me to do. That place is a mess."

And it was. Harrenhal was designed to be a royal seat, and even then it was overly large. Winterfell was a massive fortress and could host over ten thousand troops and as many civilians in a siege in reasonable comfort. Harrenhal was three times larger. The godswood alone was twenty acres, all of it inside the walls.

Winterfell needed a minimum patrol on the walls of about fifty men to detect a surprise attack, and needed about two hundred more to hold the walls properly. Two shifts to alternate sleeping and fighting and taking into account the strength and height of the walls meant that a garrison of five hundred was able to keep Winterfell safe from twenty times their number.

Harrenhal needed almost as many soldiers as a full combat shift at Winterfell just to patrol the walls properly. It should be properly garrisoned by at the very least a thousand troops. A good garrison would include two thousand foot and five hundred horse. From the latest figures, they had only two hundred guardsmen and less than a half-dozen household knights.

Everything was such a larger scale there, that monstrous edifice of a concentric castle on steroids. Harrenhal was meant to be a royal capital, not a lord's seat, and without those extra revenues it was next to impossible to run the place properly. Then add in the fact that so much damage was caused and never fixed after the castle was burned by dragonfire, the rumored curse from the workers whose blood had been mixed into the stones and mortar, the fact that old Lady Whent had been mostly incapable of properly managing her territory for years… honestly, my "reward" was more of a punishment.

Still, I'd make it work. It was my responsibility, after all, and I wasn't going to leave the thousands of people that lived on what were now my lands in the lurch.

Was I going to cheat like fucking crazy with magic? You'd better believe it.

My first priority was agriculture and the food supply. Initially I'd just give a boost to what the farmers were already doing; add Green to make hardier, healthier plants and animals and White to ward away pests. Then I'd introduce fully upgraded fruits and vegetables, first to my own castle for a year or two to really optimize them, then to my farmers. I'd also be requiring my farmers to use Four Field rotation, and start the enclosure movement soon. I had plans for aquaculture too; Harrenhal bordered the God's Eye lake, and fish farms are highly productive with large protein yields. All of that would take time though.

Part of improving the agriculture would include improving the tools used, which tied into the second thrust I was planning, metallurgy. Given that I had the secret to Valyrian steel, I had no doubt that I could make my lands a center for Westeros' smiths. I also knew how to make blast furnaces and Bessemer converters, so I could manage plentiful, cheap steel. Granted, actually making those would be very difficult if it weren't for the fact I could shape and improve stone materials. I'd make sure to spend some time designing better plows, seed drills, harvesters and the like too.

Apart from metals and food, I was planning on one more industry: books. I wanted a paper mill and printing press. Large amounts of paper was actually likely to be the bottleneck there, but I was hoping that a half-dozen alchemists and some guidance from me might make it work.

Even better for my future industry, my lands were connected by river to King's Landing which meant I could export easily. Someday Harrenhal would be productive and powerful. I would have the last laugh.

But most of that was for the future. My beginnings would be much more humble. And the very first step was to raise some seriousfunds. Luckily, there was a product that I could produce quite easily that was literally invaluable: Valyrian steel. I just needed a few good smiths to sign on with me. I still had the lion's share of the gold I had won in the Tourney, about eight-hundred dragons, and I was sure that the Harrenhal vaults held more, so paying them wouldn't be an issue.

I even had an idea as to who to visit first: Tobho Mott, and his apprentice, the king's bastard Gendry Waters. When investigating Arryn's death Ned had come across Gendry, and been impressed with his skills. Apart from being a lord, Ned was a well-trained warrior and had an eye for quality equipment. Anyone good enough for the Lord of Winterfell was good enough for me, at least until I revolutionized the industry.

Luckily Gendry and his master were willing to have him come work for me. I recruited another two journeymen level smiths who seemed skilled and worked for well-reputed masters, and gave them money to buy whatever equipment and supplies they would need at Harrenhal that wasn't already available there. I asked Lord Stark to look over their preparations then left with Jon and Dany (short for Daenerys) for Harrenhal.

Unlike when travelling in Essos, I wanted to be there faster rather than take the chance to gain mana, so we travelled at a good pace all day, making the four hundred miles or so by noon the following day. We passed by my new town, Harrentown, and its four and a half thousand inhabitants along the way.

My new lands were fairly extensive, stretching from about forty miles west of Harrenhal over to the Kingsroad about eighty miles the east of my castle, and going from about twenty miles north of Harrenhal down to about 250 miles south. Of course, most of my southern area was occupied by the God's Eye lake and the Isle of Faces, the latter of which was exempted from my control.

My lands were relatively productive agriculturally and fairly densely settled; all in all, I had a population of some four-hundred thousand. This included nine subordinate houses of landed knights and their lands, as well as the town of God's Tears where the God's Eye river starts. The rest of the population were scattered about in fishing and farming hamlets and villages.

The decent supplies of food and relatively clean fresh water meant that my peasants tended to be fairly healthy; the weak leadership in previous years meant that banditry was starting to become more prevalent. There was a decent sized piece of woods to Harrenhal's south-east which came close to the Kingsroad; the bandits seemed to use it to raid my villages and travelers depending on their circumstances. I looked forward to collecting more Green mana and hunting the bandits at the same time.

When we arrived, Dany was just about ready to kill me. She was pregnant and moody, and though relieved to be in my care was somewhat upset by the fact that I could do anything I wanted to her and there'd be no recourse. She trusted me not to abuse that authority, but it was still a difficult situation to digest, especially for a pregnant teen. Dany had had quite enough of riding, and was glad to be done with it. Though not, it seemed, glad to be at Harrenhal.

I couldn't blame her. The place was a fucking disaster zone. Living there was like living in a building that had been hit by a hurricane and never properly repaired; it was better than living in the natural wild, but hardly pleasant on the mind. The half-melted stone was disturbing, but the gnarled, twisted, leaning towers were legitimately worrying.

Stone castles tended to settle over time, sinking very, very slowly into the ground. If the towers shifted much more, the whole damned things could come down. It wasn't like the stone was reinforced by rebar or anything either. Just mortar, which meant that any and all structural integrity was really coming from the fact that everything was under compressive loading. Add shear to the mortal like the towers were experiencing from their tilts, and I gave our materials at most fifty years more until something went catastrophically wrong.

It took Harren forty years and all the money in the Riverlands to build my castle; there was no way in hell I'd be able to fix it soon enough to feel comfortable – it didn't matter how much money I used, how many Valyrian blades I made and sold.

No, looking at that mess, I realized it was time to fess up to being a wizard, and get my magic on.

The fact that the fortress was legitimately cursed didn't help things. I had felt the sinister tendrils of Black reaching for us before being repulsed by the protections I had given us. It was a weak thing, but the ground was cursed and over time would invite misfortune for those that called it home. No wonder Harrenhal kept changing hands.

I suspected that breaking the curse would have a noticeable effect, so I figured I might as well go all out. It wasn't like my magic was really that much of a secret, and I was strong enough by that point that I could face the assorted armies of the world and laugh. I had a hundred and fifty five mana after coming back to Westeros. That could power enough attack magic to wipe out small armies.

Further, as I had gained more and more mana I had noticed that my bonds grew deeper, more complete. I was already starting to see a noticeable degree of diminishing returns, but my mana cycle time had decreased from a little over half an hour back when I first arrived at Winterfell to about five minutes. I had plotted it out, and determined that the cycle time for mana was roughly an hour divided by the square root of the total amount of mana I had access to.

With so much raw power available, I had to fight the temptation to just use every increasing amounts of mana in crude but easy applications, rather than improving my skill and finesse alongside my power. The latter more skillful method had fewer immediate results but would allow me to go much, much further in the future.

I shuddered to think what another mage of my variety might be capable of after gathering mana for a decade, a century, a millennium. How mighty they might be.

I had conceived of the idea of creating a spell to form mana bonds. Then it would be an exponential mana-bonding curve until the whole of Planetos gave me power. By a back of the envelope calculation, assuming that Planetos was the same size and land-area as Earth, that meant that there were about fourteen point five million chunks of land that were four square miles in size, which seemed to be the size that I bound for non-improved mana sources – for example plains as contrasted to the more efficient cities. Assuming that it took five mana per new mana bond, and my mana cycled every five minutes, I could fully bond the whole world in about five hours and fifteen minutes.

That was fucking crazy. I kind of wanted to do it. I didn't for a few reasons.

First, I was a firm believer in the twenty second rule of evil overlords: "No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head." I was pretty sure bonding all the mana on Planetos counted.

Second, I had noticed a sort of subconscious awareness of the land after I bonded with it. I was pretty sure that if one of my forests burned down, for example, or was cut down and a town built there, I would know. It didn't seem that the mana I had was pressuring my mind, but it could easily be that my mind was naturally and slowly adapting to the strain. Suddenly being aware of fourteen point five million lands seemed like it might be too much.

Third, I had noticed if I bonded a lot of mana of the same sort in quick succession that I got a little crazier. Challenging khal Drogo to a fight wasn't out of character, sure, but it was driven by the parts of my character that had been amplified by all that extra White I'd been picking up. Otherwise I'd have never decided on a semi-honorable duel. That was why I was careful to pick up even Black mana occasionally despite my general distaste for it and inefficiency using it.

I suspected that by area, Planetos was heavily skewed to White and Green, grasslands and forests, with comparatively smaller amounts of river and coastline, mountains and swamps. Granted those had higher energy densities than forests or grassland, but it still wasn't something I wanted to leave up to chance. Even if the planet were perfectly balanced, it still might supercharge all parts of my personality. I had no desire to give myself personality disorders, I was crazy enough already.

Fourth, I wasn't quite sure how to do it yet. I could feel the possibility for the spell, but it just wasn't there in my mind yet. Still, whether it took ten new mana to get there or a hundred, I looked forward to having a more efficient way of gathering mana bonds. Especially if I could do so at a nice distance, and set the spell to target a specific type of bond. That would just be grand.

But even if my power curve wasn't as explosively exponential as it might have been, it was still at least somewhat exponential. In my magical infancy, I might have gone mad bonding ten mana of a single color back to back, and if I didn't go mad it would have been close. After returning to Westeros I could do something like that and just take a day or two off afterwards to re-center. As I gained more and more mana bonds, and grew more and more used to them, I could gain the next ones with less effect.

So again, I was left wondering how strong a true elder land-mage like myself might become. How many worlds they might call upon. How skilled their magic, how overwhelming their power.

One day I would be like that, as much above the fabled Titans as they were above the mortals of antiquity. Already I was above any of the nations on this world.

It was a heady realization, powerful and frightening in equal measure.

But that was to worry about in the future. For now, it just meant I could fix a broken castle with impunity.

Chapter 25: Meet the New Boss

Of course, before I went around re-arranging the skyline, I had to meet my new subordinates. I had sent Nevermore ahead to tell them when I'd be arriving and to ask for a meeting of the lord's council. Then Nevermore had winged his way north to Winterfell; it was hard for Ned to be so far apart from the rest of his family, and that way he could at least get and send news in near-real time.

After ordering a servant to find Dany rooms near my own and look after her needs, Jon and I were led off to greet the officers of Harrenhal and Harrentown.

There was the Marshal, who was in charge of all military affairs, Ser Deran Middlebury. A fierce man with a cynical outlook into his middle years, he had a stout build. He preferred to organize and command from the rear. He was responsible not just for the men, but for their logistics as well.

The Captain of the Guard was Ser Levir Hawick. Stern, average height and solidly built, his red hair sported a widow's peak. He was in his thirties and very respectful. His job was to see to the day to day operation of the Guard, focusing more on a tactical/executive level than a strategic one. He was Ser Deran's second in command.

Ser Kase Crane was Master-at-Arms. Restless and energetic he was a strong man but with a bit of fat to him and despite being fairly young had thinning brown hair. His job was to train the soldiers in how to fight, and help lead them in war.

The Master of the Horse was Ser Darran Perk, a gentle man, especially with horses. He had sandy hair and his long face suited his lanky frame. He was responsible for selecting and caring for the horses and helped in training the men to ride and fight from horseback. Like Ser Kase, he would help lead the guardsmen in combat.

Chief Constable Arnol Stally was outspoken and a bit of a braggart. Tall, with salt and pepper hair and beard he kept the populace of Harrenhal and Harrentown in line.

Chief Steward Stefon Bridges was my senior civilian manager and advisor. He looked after the finances for my house, which Jon would now be helping with, made sure taxes were collected, and commanded the castle's servants. He was assertive, confident and competent. His blue eyes, black hair, thin frame and average height made me think he might hail from the Stormlands.

Mayor of Harrentown Edam Blest was a bit of a worrier, wringing his hands during our meeting. He was shorter than average, solidly built, and had a large bulbous nose.

The Harrentown Dockmaster was Dorran Lander. He might as well have had his picture under the encyclopedia's entry for sailor; he was talkative, average height, had light brown watery eyes, a broken nose, and missing a finger that he'd likely accidentally cut when gutting fish or lost in a net.

The Septon, Marcyn Chess, was a disagreeable and self-righteous man, taller than average, soft in body and not a great orator. I suspected that we might have trouble after I showed off my magic.

The Maester was called Connor Rislet. Compassionate, intelligent and pragmatic I was glad to have him. Physically a little shorter than average, he was fit but skinny and had thinning salt-and-pepper close-cropped hair.

Master Smith Bryan Teague was the senior smith for the castle, and the most accomplished in the region. Sharp-witted and tongued he had a reputation for no nonsense. Shorter than average but built like a beer barrel he reminded me a bit of a fantasy dwarf-smith.

Chief huntsman Orwen Wyne was calm and quiet, of average height and build, and brown haired.

After meeting them and hearing their reports on the state of my lands, I wasn't particularly happy. Nor was I particularly surprised though. Things were as I'd been told to expect by Ned and Robert. I wanted to get started with my magic then and there, but decided it might be better to wait until I had spoken with Ned and Robert, laying all my cards out on the table. Even if they knew and suspected the truth, it was just polite and what a friend should do.

So instead I laid out my general vision for the future. How I'd be using my knowledge to better than double the food production. How we were soon going to be the top steel producers in Westeros. How Harrenhal was going to be the first place in Westeros with a proper paper-mill and printing press.

Basically, that there were good things coming, and that I'd be leading the territory to wealth and power for all involved.

Furthermore, I'd be fixing the damned castle.

They seemed cautiously optimistic, which was about what I was hoping for, though they obviously disbelieved my last claim to fix the castle and its curse. Now that I'd met them and verified there were no critical emergencies, I was able to go back and start gathering together the caravan of smiths, alchemists, and other experts. Of course they'd need an escort on the road, so I told my new Captain, Ser Levir, to take as many men as he thought necessary to be safe on the road to King's Landing and then escort my experts back to Harrenhal. It would take Ser Levir about two weeks to get to King's Landing; I certainly wasn't going to travel at that slow pace.

I sent Hue back to Ned with the message that I'd be by King's landing tomorrow and would like to speak with him and Robert.

I left Jon behind to start getting the clerks using double entry book-keeping, and to find some boys from Harrentown who could be trained up as clerks to go back through the last few years of accounts and re-record them in a better format. Daenerys was taking a much deserved rest and relaxation. And I left in the morning for King's Landing.

Riding quickly and fueled to endure with extra charges of Green, Aethon, Togo and I managed to arrive in King's Landing some nine hours later. It was still the early afternoon. Ned and Robert weren't busy, and were happy to meet with me.

I looked at them slightly nervously, hoping that they'd react well to what I was about to say. "So. I'm not sure how exactly to say this… You know how Togo is absolutely massive, and Aethon can run faster than any other horse but Shadowfax? There's a simple reason for that. I'm a wizard."

Robert and Ned just looked at each other and burst out laughing.

I was taken aback. "That was not the reaction I was expecting," I muttered.

Robert was howling in amusement and smacking his leg in his paroxysms. "I'm a wizard! Hahahaha! As if that's a secret! Ahahahaha! And his face, Ned, his face! AHAHAHAHAHAH!"

I narrowed my eyes. "Alright then. I'm glad I've amused you," I said snarkily.

Eventually they calmed down a bit. "So what brought this stunning revelation on, Odysseus?" Ned asked. Robert started laughing again as soon as he heard the word "revelation."

"I'm planning on coming out about it, at least to an extent," I replied. "Harrenhal is a wreck. I'm stunned that none of the towers have collapsed yet, but it's only a matter of time. Ten years, twenty, fifty… I have no desire to be buried in falling rocks. And the place is fucking cursed to boot. There's no way to fix either of those without a lot of pretty obvious spells getting thrown about."

Ned raised his eyes. "Your magic can fix something like that?" he asked incredulously.

"I've gotten a lot stronger since leaving Winterfell," I admitted. "And I roughly doubled my strength while in Essos. I figured out how to achieve some of the same effects of the wonders there. Volantis' Black Wall taught me how to mold stone and repair it, while in Qohor I saw enough of how they reforged Valyrian steel to be able to make my own."

That last one had their attention. "New Valyrian steel, you mean?" Robert asked seriously.

A wide and gleeful smile dawned on my face. "That's right. I need to work on it while it's being made by a master smith, but I can manage it. I'll be selling them at set rates, a hundred times the weight of the weapon in gold for true Valyrian folded steel. Twenty five times the weight of the weapon for unfolded Valyrian steel. Or five times the weight of a metal item to have it given a Valyrian blessing."

"What's the difference?" Robert asked.

"The Valyrian blessing is the basics of the magic they put in the steel. It makes it so the metal doesn't dull or break, at least not that I've been able to manage at the sorts of forces a human can exert. The metal also gets a lot lighter, which is both a good and a bad thing. Swords and other weapons rely partially on their weight to cut, after all. The best part about the Valyrian blessing though is that it can be applied to something that's already been forged, including armor."

I could just see their eyes light up at that.

"One level up from the blessing is unfolded Valyrian steel, or as I think of it false Valyrian steel. This does everything the blessing does but also makes the edge of the blade very sharp. However, it needs to be cast while the blade is still somewhat fluid. After the sword will have an edge sharper than the finest razor.

"And then there's the pinnacle. The problem with true Valyrian steel is that it needs a smith with skill, soul and heart sufficient to shape the magic. I can provide the power, but not the inspired act of artistic creation. But true Valyrian folded steel is truly amazing. To begin with this takes the advantages of the less sophisticated techniques and makes them even greater. Then the magic and the smith work together to imbue the blade with the conceptual ideal of cutting. If cutting was a god, then the sword would be its saint. Beyond that, there is something about the blade that causes them to strike true. Lastly, the sword gains metaphysical weight to replace what was lost to the magic. When the blade strikes it hits just as hard as non-magical steel of that size and speed would, but since the blade is lighter and thus faster it actually allows the wielder to strike harder."

Ned nodded. "That has been my experience with Ice," he agreed. "How many of these blades can you make?"

I grinned. "We will be making a single item a month. The right to choose what is made will be auctioned, then the purchaser will pay the price of the item itself."

Ned sighed. "Of course. Your pricing seemed far too reasonable. I should have expected something like that."

I shrugged. "One a month, auctioned, will bring me more than enough income to help reform my territory. But I was thinking we might help each other. Lord Manderly has a quarterly auction of the treasury bills and bonds. I was hoping you might add three of my monthly items to the auction, one for each of the months of that quarter, and publicize it ahead of time. We could start with the auction in two months time."

Robert nodded. "That would certainly bring a large crowd to the auctions," he agreed.

I smiled. "Thank you, Robert." He had told me after I brought back Daenerys that if I didn't call him Robert, at least in private, that he'd appoint me to the small council too. "Now, in appreciation of our friendship I wanted to offer the two of you some gifts. First, you can ask for whatever weapons or armor you like from me before the auction. I only ask that you wear it to the first one, and show it off.

"Other than that, I wanted to offer to improve you with my magic. I can make you supernaturally strong and fast, make your flesh as hard to damage as stone, give you a slight premonition of danger, give you a defense as powerful as leather armor that will work on any attacks – even magical ones, shield you so that it would take a dozen archers shooting at once to overcome the protection and harm you, make your bones nigh unbreakable, make it so that you heal faster and are healthier and harder to poison in general, improve the good qualities you can absorb from your food, make it so that dirt and sweat comes off of your body and you stay ever clean, and make it so that the wind assists you when moving and cools you when standing."

Their eyes glazed a bit at the list of upgrades you could provide. "You have all of these?" Ned asked incredulously. "And they're safe?"

I nodded. "I do. And, they are safe. For you, at least. The supernaturally enhanced strength and speed might make bed-sports dangerous if the woman is someone not so blessed, and you will have to take care when practicing not to accidentally injure your opponents," I clarified. "I am willing to offer the same to Catelyn, Ned, and your children save for the strength. And for you, Robert, I can offer the same to your future wife, and to Lord Barristan. But I think you can understand why I am wary of making too many superhumans, and the process is not without difficulty."

Robert was stunned. "Damn. That's quite the offer. Let me think on it a minute."

I smiled. "There's no rush. I can always give you the upgrades later."

Ned was considering it, then after a minute he nodded. "I will take you up on the offer, in full," he agreed. "And I will ask Catelyn to do the same."

Robert sighed. "Ah, fuck it. I'm in too. But not the strength; I couldn't bear to lose out on my fun. Mayhap things will change after I'm married, but I wouldn't count on it."

"The regeneration brings increased stamina as well. Your future wife might surprise you," I said, grinning.

Robert laughed. "Now if you want to truly make a fortune, you should sell that!"

I shook my head. "No, that is only for my friends."

"And we're honored to be counted as part of that number," Robert replied, draping his arms around Ned and me. "Now, I think this calls for a bit of a celebration."

Robert proceeded to try and get us all drunk.

Huh. I guessed I should have mentioned how hard that was going to be for him in the future.

Nah. Let him find that one out on his own.

Chapter 26: Making Whole

I spent the next few days in King's Landing, improving Ned, Robert, Ser Barristan, Sansa, and Arya. Only Ned and Ser Barristan got the full strength. Arya I gave a less potent version of the strength, but figured that she might be too tempted to use her strength and fight if I gave her a greater level. I could tell that the spells could be improved, but didn't have sufficient time to make it a higher priority given the lack of a pressing need.

Syrio Forel, Arya's instructor, figured out the difference almost immediately. I wasn't overly surprised; he had a sort of wise martial arts master vibe going on. He inquired about what it would take to get similar upgrades from me, but balked at swearing himself to my service. It was a pity; he'd have been fucking lethal with the upgrades and a Valyrian steel rapier.

Meanwhile, Wisdom Munciter of the Alchemists Guild slowly got his party of acolytes and apprentices all packed up to come to Harrenhal and take up residence there. I hadn't had much success attracting other skilled workers, but more for lack of time to search them out than anything else. Gendry and the other smiths were busy readying to head out too.

They looked to be on schedule to leave by the time my guards arrived, so that was all fine. Unfortunately for them, they were limited to the speed of carts and wagons on the road back. Aethon and I could make the five hundred mile Harrenhal - King's Landing run in a day; they'd take a month.

Apart from just not having time to waste, needing to get back to Harrenhal and start working my magic, I had to make it back to King's Landing again in time for the start of the week of festivities leading up to Margaery Tyrell and Robert's wedding. That was starting in just a week, so I didn't waste any time and pushed on to Harrenhal when my business in King's Landing was done.

Once I was there, I had the officers of the castle clear it out, brining all the people into one of the courtyards. I intended to break the curse and fix the stones, and thought it might be better if there were no one inside while I did the work in case something went wrong. I told my officers I was going to break the curse, activated my mage-sight, and set off. I tracked the lines of dark influence back to the godswood and eventually the heart tree.

The weirwood seemed to have a horrible visage, full of hate and twisted anger with wicked eyes. It was a scarred tree, and the very opposite of sacred. I settled into a light state of meditation, then reached for White. I took one mana, then another, then five, then twenty more until I held a massive force, the greatest single concentration of mana I had ever wielded as part of a spell.

"Forgive us our trespasses," I said clearly, structuring my desire to break the curse and restore the land. Then I loosed the healing, purifying energies into the weirwood and waited with my breath held for a moment before the tree started to heal. The scars shrunk and disappeared, the once wicked gaze became fond, its sneering face settling into the happy wrinkles of a kind grandfather.

Throughout the fortress, for as far as I could sense, the darkness receded then evaporated as it lost its grip on the land. No longer was Harrenhal cursed. The air seemed sweeter, the light brighter, and a small creeping dread in the back of my mind had passed on.

I turned, walked back out of the godswood and to the Kingspyre Tower, the tallest of all the towers where Harren and his sons were burned alive. It was a lopsided, broken structure that would have looked more like a wax model left too close to the flame than part of one of the greatest fortresses ever made had it not been for the humbling, awe-inspiring size of the tower.

I stretched my hands forward, touched the wall of the Tower, and began to channel. Strictly speaking, the Living Stone enchantment that was once active on the Black Wall of Volantis needed to be cast when the object had the structure that you wanted. In other words, were I to use it unaltered, it would happily repair my castle to its current broken state in the future.

But Blue was the color of history and dreams, of time and magic. White the color of purity, of completeness, of order. And so I made those stones living, but I made them remember and long for a time gone by when the fortress was new, and beautiful, and whole. And then I settled in to channel. This was a task beyond even my grown reserves, and so rather than a quick burst of power I gave it a steady stream, fed the spell pattern with a colorless mana every other second, occasionally touching the spell up as the magic tired.

I was there for a long time, an hour or more. My focus was complete and pure, my will iron, my intent sharp as an arrow. And Harrenhal responded. The stones flowed as if time were reversed. And my castle was more and more whole. And then suddenly the magic cut off, the spell completed with the fixes. I felt that the spell would soon collapse, but that I could make some small change with what time I had remaining.

I couldn't think of what I wanted to do with the spare energies until suddenly it came to me. Piping. And with that thought, the stone flowed inside the walls, some pipes appearing to carry water and others waste. Then the massive working was complete.

Jon passed me a bit of food and water. My servants and guards looked on at me in fear and wonder, gossiping and chattering around the large yard but trying to avoid gaining my notice. When I finished with my food and drink I stretched out my arms, interwove my fingers and strained to put a nice pressure across my palms. Some of my fingers clicked at the action.

Then I gathered up my mana again and reached out to the stone once more. This time instead of moving the stone in a general fashion I blended it together, fused the different blocks and structures together, made the stones of the entire fortress a single perfect seamless piece. It was eerie and awesome, as if some sculptor had carved the massive fortress out of a lump of perfect grey crystal, or as if a god had made the whole thing in one go out of cement.

I was finished. It was better than new, a slick grey fortress of looming concentric walls, powerful bastions and immense towers rising up, the smooth stone almost shimmering as the sun broke through the clouds.

When I walked towards the castle's people, they cheered.

Harrenhal was, without a doubt, mine.

Though I was sure that the interior furnishings would still need work.

After that my people were pretty damned reverent, if intimidated. Even Jon and Daenerys were highly impressed, and they had experienced my magic before first hand. I spent the next three days going over my plans for our Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, preparing for when I could properly move on my plans. My steward started rolling out the Four-Field rotation system and enclosures immediately, organizing what he could for the spring planting, but it would still take another full year before all of my fields were using it.

My landowning farmers, who sat somewhere below a knight and above a peasant worker in the social hierarchy, tended to be fairly conservative. Most would wait for proof of success before starting a new method of farming; I was considering offering insurance if they'd make the leap, but was wary of being scammed. Then again, it was pretty hard to hide more-successful crops; the tax assessors, who were often part-time officials and the local village chiefs could see the extra plants growing.

I decided it was worth incentivizing the switch; those who did switch over their farms to the new system would be forgiven their grain tax for the next three years in proportion to how many fields they switched over. They would still be responsible for their duty to keep a certain amount of arms, perform a certain amount of training with the local militia, and be prepared to be drafted as part of my levy if necessary. The offer would only be good for these three years; in other words, if they switched next year, then they got two years of four-crop rotation tax free, the year after just one year without taxes, and after that I'd be back to collecting my share of a hopefully much increased harvest.

The magically optimized plants and animals would have to wait until I had time to experiment. That said, I did manage to bond with the Godswood there, all twenty acres of it, and gained three Green mana in the process.

Then it was time to go back to King's Landing. This time Jon came with me, since I didn't want him to miss the festivities. Dany, pregnant and not wanting to travel, nor particularly comfortable near Robert or at court in general, decided to stay behind at Harrenhal. It was a much brighter, happier place than when we had arrived, and much less likely to fall down on her head too, so I was content with the situation.

Jon and I arrived back in King's Landing to find space somewhat at a premium. The king's marriage to the young lady Margaery of Highgarden had brought thousands of lords, knights and their entourages to the city. The Reach had sent forth the flower of its chivalrous youth to represent them, and the city was practically choked with arrogant young shits who were used to be the largest fish in very small ponds. They weren't adapting to the city overly well, all charming and noble one moment then offended, petty and arrogant the next. A bunch of spoiled brats.

I sighed. I was being a bit unfair. One of the minor Reach nobles had had a collision with a merchant at the gate before we could enter. The lord was entirely at fault, far too happy to just charge ahead and expect that everyone not only would but could get out of his way in time. Then one of his carriages crashed into a wagon, and… it was a mess, and the gate was blocked.

After waiting a full half hour for it to get sorted with smaller and smaller amounts of patience left, I rode up there with Jon. The lord then got stroppy with me. Until he noticed Togo and realized who I was, at which point the lord paled and shut the fuck up. The small collision was fixed relatively soon after, but my mood towards these petty lordlings was still somewhat hostile.

Even the Red Keep was packed. Though that didn't affect Jon or me much, as we had places in Ned's tower. The day after we arrived, Robert brought Margaery to me to be improved. She was a beautiful girl, just turned sixteen, with soft brown hair, large soulful eyes, smooth skin and a slim but womanly figure.

In other words, she was totally Robert-bait. And by the gleam of intelligence in her eyes she knew it, and was using it. Not that I could blame her. Women's lib wasn't exactly a thing, and even if Robert wasn't an absolute monarch, women were generally restricted in power by what their husbands allowed them. Given that Robert was the king, well, Margaery could have a lot of power or none of it, and it all depended on how well she could lead Robert about.

Robert walked up with her arm in arm. "Now, my dear, this is the great Odysseus Gangari that I told you about. Odysseus, my wife to be, Margaery," he introduced, beaming. The man had already lost at least half of his excess flab in the weak I'd been gone, his regeneration working to restore him to a more optimal form. He looked years younger, fitter and healthier than he had been in a long time.

Robert had the habit of dropping titles among friends. I had not been granted any such dispensation, however. "Lady Margaery," I said, bowing. "I'm sure his Grace –" Robert glared at me, so I amended my statement before I found myself with a place on the small council "- Robert has told you already, but I'm not one for being formal. Please, call me Odysseus."

She smiled. "I've already noticed that my husband-to-be shares that informality among friends. I hope very much that you will be one of mine, so please, call me Margaery."

Robert was already impatient with the niceties. "Right, right, so the introductions are out of the way. Now, Odysseus, she didn't truly believe me when I said you were a mage. Before she'll agree to be improved, she'd like to see some magic."

I laughed. "That is easily done, though once word spreads of what I did at Harrenhal I doubt it will be necessary."

Margaery looked at me curiously. "What did you do at Harrenhal?" she asked. Robert seemed interested too.

I smiled widely. "I fixed it. I broke the curse there. I made the stones remember what they used to be. And then I fused them so that the entire castle is one single piece of stone, smooth as silk to the touch."

Robert gaped. "By the gods! That would truly be a wonder to see!" he exclaimed.

"You're always welcome to visit," I replied. "Gods know I have enough space inside to fit you, though the furnishings still need to be replaced and repaired and the bats chased out. There is a long road ahead of me still before it is restored to true glory."

Robert looked at me full of boyish charm and cunning. "But Harrenhal is not here."

I raised my hands in surrender. "Alright, alright," I said, looking around the room for something to show that wasn't a combat spell. I spotted a bowl of fruit, and picked out an apple. I looked carefully at Robert and Margaery. He was in black and gold brocade, she a darker and lighter green brocade dress with gold accents.

Then the apple began to twist and turn, the flesh receding as the seeds grew into wood. The small sapling began to thicken in my hand, separate into two. Then as my audience watched raptly the two rough cylinders of wood got more shapely, grew arms and legs, heads and hair, even clothes out of the small leaves. Then the wood began to lighten to be like skin, and the clothes color until one of the figures was in black and gold, the other green and gold, fixed arm in arm.

I smiled, and handed Margaery the little figures. "A present to mark out meeting."

She was astounded. "That was amazing," she said softly, not wanting to break the wonder of the moment. "Like something out of story."

Robert beamed at me, clapped me on the back. "Didn't I tell you?" he asked rhetorically.

"I just hadn't thought… how is this even possible?" she asked, still in awe.

"Magic," I said, grinning.

"But…" Margaery trailed off. "I was going to say there is no such thing, but it is obvious that there is magic."

"So, would you care for me to work my magic now?" I asked.

She began to nod then hesitated. "I do not mean to sound ungrateful, but…" she trailed off, not quite willing to speak.

"What is it?" Robert asked.

"My brother, Willas. He was crippled as a youth, and has trouble walking. Is it possible for you to heal him? I will forebear from any improvements myself if that is needed."

Ned and Lord Mace Tyrell had been in negotiations to wed Sansa to Willas in a few years, just as I had hoped. They were planning on announcing it during the wedding. I had been planning on healing Willas then, and upgrading him to match what I gave Sansa at the same time so it was really no bother. Still, it was good of her to ask.

I looked at her kindly. "It does you well to think of your brother. But as you're likely aware, he will be wedding Sansa Stark. I had already planned to offer him healing and similar enhancements to what you will soon have after the announcement."

"Oh, thank you so very, very much," she said, her eyes slightly tearing up in happiness. "How can I repay you?"

I shook my head. "There's no need for that. Ned and Robert have been good friends to me, and I give them my loyalty and friendship in return."

A few hours later, she was upgraded to match Robert, looking at her hands in marvel after a bit of pressure with a knife had done nothing more than leave a pressure-mark on the skin.

I didn't see much of Robert or Margaery for the rest of the week, as they were busy hosting the parties and celebrations leading up to the wedding. I did however meet her brother, Willas, whom I found very agreeable. I was sure that he and Sansa would get along well; by all reports their first meetings had already allowed them to develop a friendship.

I might not have been happy with dynastic marriages with such age gaps in general, but it was the local custom. If it was going to happen anyways, I thought Willas the best option for Sansa. I rather easily upgraded him, wished him the best of luck, and gave him a quick warning that I expected Sansa to be happy in the future. I didn't think it a real issue, but just in case I figured the protection of a ridiculously lethal wizard who was rumored to be somewhat unhinged couldn't hurt Sansa.

I also met Ser Edmure Tully, the heir to the Riverlands and my future liege lord. In place of his father, he took my oath of fealty. As Catelyn's brother and my at-least-in-theory boss, I upgraded him to match Robert and Willas.

Come to think of it I needed to make my way back to Winterfell at some point and upgrade Robb, Bran, Rickon and Catelyn too.

Other than that, over the week I upgraded Robert and Margaery's favorite horses as part of my gift to them, and acquired a dog which I gave all of Togo's upgrades save for the massive size to help guard her for the rest of the gift. Then I realized their guards would need to be able to keep up, and made seven more horses for the kingsguard. I had time to spare, so I upgraded Sansa, Arya, and Ned's horses too, and made sure their wolves were all up-to-date.

I had decided that super-animals might as well breed, if only in small numbers, and left them with a reduced but still present possibility to have colts and pups. Gods only knew what was going to happen when their progeny were first born. I needed to be present for Daenerys' child's birth, but even then the baby had been conceived before I added all those magics to Daenerys, and so had gotten all the upgrades that Daenerys got, in other words all the ones but the physique, at the same time as Dany.

A purely natural born animal from their improved parents could share all, some or none of the improvements, and I was excited and worried to find out what the case would be. I knew that I could make the enchantments a truly permanent part of the animal if they weren't already and I wanted them to breed true. It would just need some research. Likewise, I could make the upgrades, the more magical and less biological ones at least, limited to just that animal, but again it would take research.

Then the week of celebrations came to a close, Robert and Margaery wedded and bedded, and the Queen's Tourney kicked off.

Thankfully, I had had to have no part in planning or running it.

High in the sky a red comet blazed with fire. It was taken as a good omen by those attending the wedding.

Chapter 27: Lord of the Bow

Jon and I decided not to fight in the tournament; it would just be unfair and cause resentment. Luckily it seemed Ned had managed to convince Robert to follow suit.

Then there was a special bill and bonds auction, and every hope I had for a prosperous fiefdom was fulfilled when the first slot of Valyrian steel production was auctioned off.

Harrenhal was both a rich and a totally broken fief to hold. On the one hand, it was fairly populous and prosperous. It had a total population of about four-hundred and twenty thousand, average family size of about five and a half, and average income of four and a half dragons per family per year, which was about one and three-quarter dragons above the poverty line.

Of those four hundred twenty thousand people, four hundred thousand of them lived on lands within my territory; I ruled those lands, and taxed them, but didn't directly own and administrate the land. That was left to a patchwork of yeoman landowning farmers, knights, and various local semi-independent villages and towns. I ended taking about one fifth of their income above the poverty line in taxes and fees, with the rest going to the Tullys (one tenth), the crown (another tenth), village and common use (three twentieths), and about a quarter to the peasants to spend with another fifth to save.

Then there were twenty thousand people that lived on lands that I directly owned and managed. I managed to get my greedy mitts on about half the profit that those lands provided. That gave me a total general income of about twenty eight thousand six hundred dragons, an amount of wealth roughly equivalent to earning two hundred and sixty million dollars a year.

Which sounds like a lot until I take into account how much I have to spend. Twelve hundred on guardsmen, between pay, food, and equipment. Two thousand on the castle staff. A thousand on maintenance for the castle, and that was much reduced from what it was before. Four thousand to maintain the roads, shitty as they were, throughout my fief. Eight thousand of the taxes were taken as service with the militia, rather than gold; most of that was time spent training, and even then my people were about as useful in a fight as a wet blanket. Another eight thousand for bailiffs, constables, and as the small stipends for village heads and the like. A thousand on tax collectors, another thousand on the entertainments and feasts I was obliged to fund, and finally a thousand dragons on things not accounted for or overbudget.

That meant that at the end of the average year, Harrenhal's territory only made some one thousand, four hundred dragons in profit. That was still pretty damned good, even if most of those profits came from the reduced cost to maintain the castle. If I were back on Earth making thirteen million dollars a year, I wouldn't complain.

But it didn't take into account that instead of two hundred guardsmen at twelve hundred dragons a year, I really needed at least a thousand guardsmen which would cost around five thousand dragons a year. That would put me deeply into the red on my earnings sheet, and still didn't take into account the one-time cost of expanding the military rather than just maintaining it. Further, I didn't just want my lands to get by, I wanted them to fucking thrive.

Now, some things would have a big impact. Four-field crop rotation, for example, would roughly double my territory's income by improving the agricultural yields. Granted it would also mean I'd need to fund more mills, granaries, and other infrastructure, so it might cost a bit to begin with. The poverty line wasn't going to shift, so doubling the income meant that my peasants would have a lotmore disposable income to tax, going from one and three quarter dragons to six and one quarter dragons. Since I'd squeeze out extra taxes to "cover improvements" and the like, keeping my relative taxation rate on the peasants' profit consistent, I wouldn't be doubling my tax income; I'd increase it by about three and a half times.

Again, I was barely breaking even, but that was because both my expenses and my income were high. Better than triply my income, and that meant my territory's profits would go from fourteen hundred dragons to almost seventy three thousand dragons, increasing by a factor of fifty. With that money I could fully equip my castle and further modernize my territory.

However, historically speaking the gains from the agricultural revolution were pretty slow. It could take ten to twenty plus years before I saw those kind of gains, and at the very best with a Four-field rotation I'd be looking at four years for full impact.

I wasn't that patient. Beyond which, I was effectively in turn one of a game like Medieval Two Total War. I'd grow my territory a lotfaster if I used building cheats and money cheats. I'd already done the building cheat, fixing Harrenhal in a day. Next, I wanted to earn a shit-ton of money. And for that, there was nothing better or easier for me to do than produce Valyrian steel. As was obviously shown in the first auction.

Sixty four thousand dragons.

Sixty four thousand dragons.

SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND DRAGONS!

I felt like screaming in glee as I sat in the auction, the sound of ringing gold in my mind. It was a stupendous amount of money. Not a year ago, and I was worried that a cost of a hundred thousand dragons might send the whole realm into a financial tailspin.

Gods bless rich nobles who get their pride mixed up in having the very first Valyrian sword of the modern age, that's all I could say. Though to be fair, they'd likely get their names in the history books that mentioned this moment, and nobles lapped that sort of useless honor up like cats drinking the sweetest cream.

The second spot went for twenty two thousand dragons, the third for twelve thousand. A total of ninety eight thousand dragons, more profit than my fief used to make in a lifetime. It was paid in the form of Royal Treasury Bills, which had quickly become the standard method of moving large amounts of money around in Westeros.

With that, I was in business. It was time to go back to Harrenhal and get started.

About a month after I returned to Harrenhal, and my smiths and alchemists had finally settled in. I gave the alchemists a decent budget, and set them to figuring out how to make paper. I suspected that the process would change a lot in the future. Once they figured out exactly what was important in the paper making process I was sure I could figure out how to make a tree or bush that provided useful materials. I just needed some parameters to design my plants.

The smiths, meanwhile, were ready to make the first true Valyrian steel equipment in an age. I had spent a lot of time with them enchanting files, cutters and other equipment to be invulnerable. They had practiced daily with meditation and focus exercises to achieve the correct states of mind, and grown their skills to make Damascus-style patterned steel blades.

The first item we worked on was Ned's new sword. He had decided that Ice was pretty much the epitome of an excellent blade, and that it would be nice for Winterfell to have one for the Lord and one for the Heir. So we set to work, and created a copy of the same size, weight and dimensions. Its name read Frost.

The second was a bit more complicated. Robert had asked if we could manage a Valyrian war hammer with a blunt head, a curved spiked beak back, and a spearhead at the top of the shaft for thrusting. After consulting with my smiths, I'd sent Hue with the reply that we could, but it would be difficult. Even more than a sword, a hammer relies on its mass to cause damage. Which mean that the head of the hammer had to be true Valyrian steel for the impact.

The problem was, the head didn't have an edge. Couldn't have an edge. And instead of blade essence, had to be full of hammer essence in the crafting while the metal was folded and refolded into the shape of a hammer-head. On my part, the enchantment had to be modified slightly. The first time was an utter failure, the magic within the hammer-head detonating. The only reason the blast didn't kill one of my smiths was that I'd thought ahead and given them some protections. I still ended up having to regrow one of their hands.

A much warier group returned to try again. The second failure was less explosive; the enchantments took, but the hammer didn't achieve the hammer essence it needed and so the weapon was useless.

The third time, we succeeded in making the hammer and claw. Then we took a shaft with a spearhead sized blade on it, fit them together, and I fused the metal. And it was done. The world's first Valyrian steel Warhammer. At least, the first I'd heard of.

Fucking Robert. Only he would want something like that.

Once the hammer was done, productivity went up. I had them make Valerian steel swords and lances for Jon and I. We even had Valyrian steel belt knives, a true extravagance. If I hadn't taken care of my facial hair with Green, I'd have used it to shave too.

Harrenhal began to feel more like a home over time. I bonded the whole fortress; the five towers, the main gate, the east gate, the great hall, the kitchens, the barracks and armory, the outer and inner yards, the bathhouse. My fortress was the size of a small town, but over time I bonded it all. Eight White, four Blue, six Black and five Red from the memory of dragons and fire.

With all the extra wealth, I ordered Ser Deran to expand the Guard's cavalry. I thought about expanding the infantry too, but decided against it. I wasn't overly impressed by the foot soldiery of the Seven Kingdoms. Roman infantry or Spanish tercios would hand them their asses. Eventually I'd see to training up a decent bunch of professional infantry, but until then I saw little point in expanding what was essentially an antiquated an ineffective force.

Generally I liked the expanding cadre model for the military: a small core of permanent professional soldiers, who served as the cadre for part time semi-professionals, basically the reserves, who in turn served as the cadre for their local militias. That way, I'd have a relatively consistent force, with a hardened, seasoned core I could call on at a moments notice. If I needed to mobilize for war, I could do so quickly and with a relatively high quality of levy.

But most importantly, my territory was soft. It wasn't highly urbanized, with defensible cities, but was spread out with insignificant villages. That's where the lowest tier of militia troops came in. They didn't have to be great to see off bandits, and if everyone in my territory was trained to fight it would be easy to spot and recruit the best for my army and reserves. Beyond that, I just generally believed people should know how to defend themselves.

However, training infantry would take a lot of time and effort on my part. So instead, I decided to go for a different option, one that would also take a lot of time but make my territory one of the best protected in the land. I decided to spread the practice of archery.

It wasn't very hard. First, I grew thousands of heavily recurved bows from the oaks in the godswood, ranging from light draw-weight pieces for children to medium and heavier draw pieces for adults. I also grew arrows by the thousand, their shafts falling down like rain from the tree limbs.

Then I drafted a proclamation. I laid out a number of different achievements that I wanted people to be able to manage, with different requirements for children and adults. These ranged from what I thought reasonable out of a militia archer, which most fit men and a number of women could manage, to what I wanted out of a reserve archer, which still wasn't overly difficult but would take a degree of time and dedication to training, to what I wanted out of the archers in my guard which would take at least a modicum of skill and more extensive dedication.

I added ranks, different colored badges that these achievements would allow and a sliding scale of cash prizes; the payout for truly top archers was enough that a master archer could be a person's profession. It wouldn't pay well without other jobs, but anyone that good could join my guard anyways, and likely as a sergeant of archers which paid well. There was both an active badge, which you had to qualify for yearly, and a historical achievement badge associated with each rank to drive competitiveness.

The most skilled archer in an area was offered the responsibility of Range Officer. This meant they had to organize for a skilled archer to be present each day for at least two hours to help student archers practice. They were graded on a point system based on how many archers they had of each skill level, and offered incentives for their students to perform well.

And then, for the real overachievers and ambitious people, there was horse archery. Similar to regular archery there were badges and prizes, but unlike regular archery any sufficiently skilled horse archer, regardless of age, could get an automatic slot as a squire at my castle with a knighthood to follow once their training was complete.

For richer landowners, that was the opportunity of a lifetime for their children. To make sure it was available to those of poorer backgrounds but higher skill, any child sufficiently skilled at regular archery would be offered a spot as a squire-candidate at my castle until they turned eighteen. That way, I could have them taught their numbers and letters during the training. At the worst, anyone skilled enough for a squire-candidate slot would make a great guards archer, and with some literacy would be likely candidates for positions as corporals and sergeants.

The bows and arrows I grew allowed me to offer them for free to anyone who wanted to try and qualify; the only requirement would be logging a certain amount of time a week on the shooting range or paying a penalty. Selling the bow would be considered theft from their lord; few were so stupid as to do so.

All children aged twelve to sixteen were expected to practice at least three times a week for two hours each time; part of the budget I assigned to this was earmarked for payments to the villages to offer meals to each of these children following their practices. To motivate higher practice, the children could attend practice and receive a meal every day if they wanted.

When tax wagons left my castle for my outlying lands, unlike in the past when they'd leave empty and return full of grain, now they left loaded down with bows and arrows. The project was crazily expensive; just the food for the children ran me four and a half thousand dragons. Overall, I budgeted thirty thousand dragons a year to it, and that was after I made the bows and arrows essentially for free.

It was incredibly popular, and my people ridiculously competitive over archery though, so the project was well worth it.

Chapter 28: Lord of the Beast

However effective it seemed to be, the archery program didn't address the issue that I was dealing with at the time; a small, underpowered guard force. For that, I turned to my general solution to problems in Westeros; magic, and animals. I used Green mana to send the ravens and the castle's hunting pack into a breeding frenzy.

Then I turned all the dogs into what I called a Gangari Guard Hound. The new Hounds were about a hundred and twenty pounds, and had similar upgrades to Togo apart from the size. They were further inherently embedded with loyalty to me, a sense of justice, and a pack mentality to induce order for military affairs.

In a few months, about as much time as it would take to train even the worst guardsman, I'd have about two hundred Hound puppies. In a year, I'd have about a thousand Hounds, and then if I wanted to their population could really take off. Each one was easily the match for a proper warrior, and they could stand watches and help on patrols as easily as any of my guardsmen. Already the twenty males were helping out.

Likewise, Gangari Guard Ravens were patterned off of Nevermore's enhancements, just without a comm link and with an embedded sense of loyalty and justice. They were designed to act as scouts for my guard forces, relaying messages, and finding and reporting crimes to their attached units. Unlike the Hounds, which were basically a soldier-substitute, the Ravens were an effectiveness multiplier, allowing each member of the Guard to be much more effective.

As part of that same effectiveness multiplier, I changed the horses into Gangari Guard Horses. These were modelled after Aethon. Since my guardsmen were unenhanced, the horses had a less powerful version of the Supernatural Physique enchantment. They were designed to be even more biddable and calm, and slightly less intelligent.

The soldiers riding them weren't always the best riders, after all, and really intelligent horses weren't exactly designed for combat. Unlike Aethon and Shadowfax, I wouldn't be around to ensure the horses survived, so I didn't feel comfortable making them that sentient. But still the horses were far faster, ate less, had better endurance, were tougher and easier to ride and in all respects superior to ordinary steeds.

The Gangari Guard animal variants all had a unique coloration; they were varying shades of grey, with a hand sized version of my house's Parthian shot horse-archer silhouette on their front shoulder in black. I thought it looked quite smart, like a natural uniform. They were modified to only be viable with each other, a specific sterility enchantment that could be temporarily unlocked by another animal which had the same enchantment. I didn't want the breeds to intermix with animals intended for use by others who weren't loyal to me.

Luckily the soldiers seemed to be adjusting relatively well to the changes, taking the magic in stride as it just being normal from a wizard and adapting to their new compatriots.

Having made animals for the Guard, it seemed natural to design better animals in general. Farms, even ones that mostly grow grain, depend on animals. Shepherding dogs look after animals and protect the farms from predators. Work horses pull ploughs and wagons. Cattle, for milk, meat and leather. Sheep, for wool, milk and meat. Goats, for fur, milk and meat as well. Chickens for eggs and meat. And bees, for pollination and honey.

My castle and the nearby farming villages that supplied it and Harrentown had all of these animals to one degree or another. I used those for my first experiments. Then whenever I finished with a design I had Steward Bridges purchase a quantity of each of the animals for me to modify and then begin to breed for future sale to my farmers.

I started off with the Gangari Shepherd dog. Basically a sixty pound version of the Guard Hound with weaker physical upgrades and inclined to be naturally gentle towards humans unless it or its family was being attacked. It was pretty easy to design and enchant those. I started off with a population of sixty.

Next were perhaps the most important aspect of any farm; the horses. Gangari farm horses were designed to be biddable, to endure heat and cold, to pull heavy loads without complaint, and to consume food efficiently. Unlike Aethon, they didn't emphasize extreme speed or intelligence, though because of the supernatural physical enhancements they ended up being faster than normal horses when they went full speed. As horses breed slower than dogs, I started with a herd of three hundred. It took me two weeks just to enchant them all.

After the lengthy period enchanting horses, I wanted to make something new. Pests are a massive problem in farms. I wanted an animal that would go after them, without damaging the environment in general. At first I thought of cats, but they don't do as good a job eating bugs, and they end up going off and killing birds instead of rodents. Dead birds don't eat bugs either, so that's bad.

Eventually I made what I called the Gangari Pest Eater bird. It was mentally modified to be drawn to orderly nature, in other words agriculture. They were designed to be voracious eaters when food was available, but enter into a low-energy mode when it wasn't to survive winters. They were both territorial and at the same time hesitant to enter another's territory. This was to avoid overpopulation, and to drive off encroaching rodents and other birds that would eat the crops. If a bird ever managed to be full for a few days, implying that there were too many insects, it would cease to emit its territorial aura, switching to one designed to attract free nearby Pest-eaters and go into a higher breeding rate. I developed them off of a sparrowhawk, and used Green mana to help build up an initial population of two hundred.

After that, I went back to the basics; the simple chicken. Apart from increasing food efficiency, reducing susceptibility to disease and improving biological efficiency in general, I focused on two designs. The first were egg-laying chickens. They would lay eggs more regularly, and lay better eggs. The other were meat chickens, which would have more and tastier meat available for cooking and grow faster than usual chickens. I made a hundred of each.

Since I'd been dealing with birds for so long, I decided to move back up to something bigger, and tackled the cow situation. Cows come in two main varieties: milk, and meat. Milk cows make milk, meat cows make meat. It's pretty simple. The meat cows were easy; make them bigger, the meat tastier and more nutritious, improve the efficiency of their digestion and tolerance to heat and cold, improve their health, make them nice and biddable, and I was done.

The milk cows were a little harder. Milk itself can be quite dangerous if it's not pasteurized. I wanted to come up with an inherent filter. Basically, something that would make sure the milk was safe to drink. It took a bit of doing, but a mix of White enchanted into the udders meant that the milk was sterile, at least when it left the cow.

Further, milking cows is a massive nuisance; I made the cows self-milking. They could choose to release their milk, and I made them a little more intelligent so they could be easily taught were to milk themselves into. Beyond that, the everclean coat that I was adding to all the animals would help keep their skin clean and disease free, but I also made them naturally tidy.

Other than that, they got the typical enhancements to efficiency of digestion, weather and temperature tolerance, disease resistance, and were made somewhat regenerative to increase the amount of milk they could produce.

Given all their advantages I was sure that my cows were going to be very popular, and I established herds of a hundred of each milk and meat.

Sheep were next on the docket. Sheep also have two purposes; meat, and wool. For the standard or meat sheep, I made them totally white in their wool, and made the wool itself somewhat higher quality and more consistent. I gave the sheep the same sorts of upgrades I'd given the meat cows. And then I made the sheep a lot more orderly.

There's a secret joke in the Bible that anyone who grew up in an agricultural community with sheep knows that far, far too few people outside of those communities understand. Every time Jesus was being called a shepherd, it wasn't just because a shepherd leads and protects the flock of innocent helpless animals. It was saying that trying to look after humanity was going to be like looking after sheep, which is fucking miserable.

Sheep aren't actually as stupid as some people think. They can recognize people and like some more than others, are pretty good herd animals, can anticipate events and some even come when called by name. That's already better than most cats.

But for how sort-of smart they can be, they are also just about the dumbest animals on earth. Leave forty sheep alone for a few hours, and one of them (at least) will have gotten themselves in some situation that'll kill them if you don't fix it. They're smart enough to get into trouble, and dumb enough that they can't stop themselves or get out of it. The biggest problem is that for a herd animal, sheep are far too happy to just wander off. Reinforcing the herding instinct saved about half the trouble the sheep caused, so it was well worth it.

As for the wool sheep, those were designed with one purpose and one purpose only; making wool. Instead of the animals that might eventually be eaten when they died, I decided that the wool sheep were a cash crop. Someone who wanted wool and a sheep could buy the standard sheep; its pure white coat was already highly desirable for merchants already as the white could dye easily and the wool was superior to natural versions.

But my wool sheep, those were designed to have no dye needed. Instead, I focused on two things. First, making the sheep take as little expense in food and care as possible. I used some of the Zorse-derived low-food and low-water requirement adaptations to achieve that. That meant the meat wouldn't be suitable to eat; to make sure no one tried, I made it toxic enough to be obvious, and made the meat black and slightly smelly to really drive the point home.

Second, I focused on the wool. These sheep came in vivid reds and scarlets, yellow and gold, blue and turquoise, green and grey and brown and every color between. Each sheep was a single, perfectly even shade save for a single tuft at their chin that was multi-colored. The wool was fine and strong and soft, the everclean coat a permanent part of the wool that would make the fabric stain resistant in the future.

The coolest part about the sheep was that they had a sympathetic coloring enchantment. If you took a locket of the hair from the chin, picked out a specific color, and tied a piece of that colored wool to a shaved sheep's neck then all the new wool coat would change to and grow in as that color. These were going to revolutionize the dyeing industry, and neither the initial herd of five hundred, nor their progeny would be resold.

I wanted a monopoly on the colors to keep prices high. There was one particular lapis-lazuli derived blue dye that was literally worth its weight in gold. And I could grow masses of wool that exact shade if I wanted. Without flooding the market, and making other attractive shades of fabric, I was looking at expected profits of about twenty dragons a year on each of those multi-hued sheep. It wasn't as much as my Valyrian steel, but it was nothing to sniff at either.

I did however make a herd of a hundred white standard sheep, which were still highly attractive to the populace as their wool could easily be dyed. Those would be available for sale in the future.

With the sheep done I was making a goat when I decided it was too likely to become an invasive pest species, and stopped. Goats eat everything and can live everywhere. Making them even better at survival could easily end up with a swarm of goats covering my lands.

Instead, I moved on to working with the bees. The bees were pretty easy; I reduced their desire to sting White-oriented creatures, which mostly included organized humans and their pets, unless said White animals were being really annoying. I increased their tolerance to temperature and weather, gave them the favorable winds enchantment to make flying easier and less energetically costly, improved their digestion, health and energy efficiency in general, and upped their breeding rate and lifespan. I had had a full twenty bee-hives and their keepers hired, so I used the enchantment on those queens.

All of the Gangari agricultural animals were given a marking, somewhat similar to how I marked my Gangari Guard animal lines. Because they weren't warriors though I didn't use my sigil. Instead I used an ornate, gothic G inside a white circle with a black border on their heads. Also similar to my Guard animals, they were designed to breed true.

And then I was finally done. Two and a half months of enchanting work on the farm animals, and some two thousand dragons spent hiring laborers, breeders, workers to make stables and buildings… It was a real project and strained by castle's staff to organize. Still, I would begin spreading them, first on my own personal lands, then my territory.

Soon the whole world would know my mark as that of the absolute champion of agricultural animals!

Ahem. The whole, unholy mixture of science and magic, creating new species thing might have been getting me in a weird headspace.

But that was okay because, suddenly, baby!

Daenerys was giving birth.

Chapter 29: Lord of Lands

I had wanted to be able to offer Daenerys the option of having her daughter be born under a different name, Drogo's perhaps, but I had told Robert how I killed Drogo before they were wed in the eyes of the Dothraki. Nor had the original wedding had a septon or heart tree, so it was not recognized in Westeros. Robert had added one more humiliation to Dany, one more nail in her family's coffin; her daughter was born a bastard.

Lila Rivers, she was named.

It was a pretty name, and she would, I'm sure, grow up to be a pretty girl. Drogo had been no dog, and Dany had the sort of fine cheekbones and pronounced bone structure you'd expect from generations of royals inbreeding and selecting only the finest beauties to mate with.

The birth was easy – I was there, how could it be otherwise – but even if I hadn't been there Dany would have been fine. I was relieved to find that because so many of the physical enchantments and upgrades were Green, and birth was natural, that the enchanted Dany had an easier time with birth, rather than a harder one. That meant I was off the hook for helping birth all of Robert, Robb, Jon, Sansa and Arya's children in the future.

With the baby born I was largely freed up from waiting around in the castle just in case there was a medical emergency. There was a six hundred square mile forest to the south east of Harrenhal, in between the God's Eye and the Kingsroad. A band of robbers had infested it, and though the Guard had improved greatly, they were still over-extended enough to have trouble searching such a large forest.

I needed to take a break and balance out my mana anyways. It had been getting a little White heavy, especially after I bound four more mana from Harrentown on my visits there. So I was going to head to the forest for three weeks to hunt bandits and bond Green mana. Then I was going to travel back slowly along the God's Eye and bond some Blue for two weeks.

After that was done I planned to check back in at Harrenhal, then go up to the North with Jon to visit and upgrade Robb, Bran, Rickon and Catelyn. I envisioned a stop off in the Neck for a couple weeks on the way south to balance out my Blacks. Then I intended to visit the foothills of the Vale's mountains for about a week to get some Reds and be back into a full balance.

I checked in with my projects before leaving to make sure there weren't any emergencies. The Valyrian steel project had stabilized at around five thousand dragons a month from the auction and a further fifteen hundred from the item. That meant a total of seventy eight thousand dragons a year in profit, which was great. My agricultural project was still mostly in the breeding stage, and would start to take real effect first on my own lands, then my territory's, in a few years.

The paper project under Wisdom Munciter was starting to bear fruit. They'd been experimenting with different ways to make paper from cotton, linen and hemp fibers and rags. The paper was still poor quality, but they were quickly dialing in on how to make better quality paper, and how to do so in bulk. I anticipated that by the time I was done with my mana-binding they'd have a preliminary paper mill design for me.

On the printing side, they already had an effective ink formula, and the smiths were slowly finishing a sufficiently large collection of metal rollers and type. Instead of the vertical screw press, we were using a cylindrical rolling press. They were a lot faster, and better to adapt into future designs which could be more mechanical. I anticipated that the printer would be done in time for the large-scale paper production.

The more generalized steel-works, with a blast furnace and Bessemer converter, were still largely in the planning stages. I had purchasing agents out collecting and storing enough raw ingredients and metal scrap to keep us running when the production actually started. The agents had a budget of fifteen thousand dragons, and had actually slightly inflated the price of iron goods throughout the Riverlands.

The archery project was going well so far. General enthusiasm was high, and a vast number of children were avidly practicing. I intended my first book to be useful for my farmers. It would include a guide to archery practice and some training exercises I used, information on hygiene, herbalism and nutrition, and a guide to four-crop rotation and companion planting to improve agricultural yields.

Hue was at Harrenhal. In case there was an emergency there, he would be able to warn me. Ned and Robert had a pair of my Gangari Guard Ravens to carry a message to Harrenhal in case the capital caught fire or what have you. Nevermore was still off in Winterfell, and so it was just Mu, Togo, Aethon and I going to the forest.

Everything taken care of, I set out from Harrenhal for my vacation in the forest.

Did I say vacation? I totally meant my dutifully lordly bandit hunt.

I was not a great woodsman. I hadn't trained much for it, and didn't spend much time stalking the woods for prey. Luckily I had Togo and Mu, so I didn't have to be a great hunter to find the bandits, and Aethon was surefooted and stealthily minded enough for the both of us. I ended up finding the bandits after about a week had passed. Rather than shoot them all with arrows, which I was tempted to do from habit, I gave chain lightning a test fire.

It was highly effective. Zapped humans smelled disturbingly like bacon though, which was a bit disturbing. I'd hardly kept my hands clean of blood since coming to Westeros, but the red burned flesh, vacant and exploded eyeballs, the rictus of horror on the faces of the dead…

It was quite the shock to the system, I thought. Gods, I was already using puns to distance myself. Talk about gallows humor.

Togo went off for a day to take out any of their scouts who had escaped my strike, and I finished off binding a total of more than thirty Green mana. It was a… heady feeling. All that nature, all that wild, joyful life and conflict and growth. I took a couple days to calm down a bit, just sleeping and meditating.

Then I went to the outer bank of the God's Eye, and did that same process all over again with Blue mana. It went somewhat faster than with the Green, and two weeks later I finally rode off to Harrenhal with an extra thirty Blue mana under my control.

Then Jon, Shadowfax and Ghost joined us to go to Winterfell. We decided not to waste any time, and made it to the Stark's seat in two and a half days of heavy riding on the Kingsroad. It was nice to see the Stark boys again; Robb had grown a lot mentally as the man of the castle, as it were, and both Bran and Rickon had shot up.

Perhaps most interestingly, Bran had a strong taste of magic to him. Jon had a fair bit of warg magic, Arya only a little less, but Bran was positively glowing with it. I had no idea how to use those energies, unfortunately, and no real desire to become a warg otherwise I might have been able to help Bran with his abilities. He had been having strange dreams involving a man in a tree with roots growing out of his skin, and three eyed ravens.

To be honest that sounded suspicious as fuck.

I mean, what kind of ancient sorcerer visits the dreams of a preteen boy with good intentions? This wasn't some children's book where the plucky boy hero has to save the day because reasons. This was reality; there was precious fuck all Bran could achieve that the good wizard of bloody roots couldn't do himself. And this guy didn't sound like he was made of rainbows and sunshine either.

I upgraded Robb, Bran, Rickon, and Catelyn with a full set of enhancements, much like Jon and Ned. I held the supernaturally strong and fast physique back from Bran and Rickon. Rickon would have driven Catelyn mad otherwise, and I wasn't risking a body I'd fully enhanced getting stolen by some potential body-snatcher.

I had hoped that the conceptual armor would be effective, but it proved to be less than useful in stopping the dreams. Which either meant that the armor didn't consider the dreams an attack, or sufficiently harmful, or something; I didn't know, and was hardly equipped to scientifically explore the parameters and functions of my poorly understood magic.

While I was there I could easily swat away probes coming in to Bran, their gossamer energies no match for my mana. But I couldn't figure out how to ward Bran's mind without also blocking off his ability to warg. I could use my comm link through the ward just fine when I tested it on myself. For Bran, the annoying dreams were worth it to be able to share skins with Summer, his direwolf.

I was worried. I decided to upgrade Ser Rodrick and two dozen other loyal, life-long Stark guardsmen with everything but for the Supernatural Physique, of which I only used a minor portion. I included the mental ward for them, as none were wargs. I turned their ravens into Gangari Guard Ravens, though with Stark markings, similarly warded. Frankly, this sort of mental-mage crap scared the shit out of me, and every single one of my Guard-variant animals back home were going to get warded as soon as possible.

I enhanced enough horses into Guard Horses to be able to provide mounts and spares for the Stark family and their enhanced guards, and turned every hunting dog they had into Gangari Guard Hounds. Again, I used Stark markings and mental wards for the horses and hounds.

Their direwolves were enhanced to match Togo. Nevermore was assigned to watch over Bran in particular, and to warn me if anything went wrong. And at that point I had to call it enough. Though after I knighted Jon in a year or two I'd definitely offer Bran a place as my squire; it was easier than worrying about him so much.

Apart from that oh-so-minor issue, and Catelyn's constant sniping at Jon, the visit was lovely.

Really, why didn't I go on vacation more often?

On the way back Jon declined to stay with me and meditate for weeks in the swamps and hills, which wasn't really surprising. He preferred to go back to Harrenhal, where he was respected and appreciated, and have his ego recover from the mauling Catelyn had subjected it to.

I couldn't blame him. Meditating in and around swamps for a fortnight wasn't exactly my definition of a good time either. But I sucked it up and bound my Black mana. I didn't use them for much, and wasn't really a fan of the style or concepts in Black magic. But I felt like it was important to be balanced.

After binding the Black mana I crossed back through to the South, then travelled along the foothills of the Vale for a week, bonding two mana each day.

With all that done, I was perfectly in balance. It was a good feeling, like when you step out of an airplane and pop your ears of that slight bit of pressure you couldn't get rid of, or when you stretch out and accidentally get rid of some tightly wound knots that were bothering you deep in your subconscious.

After a day of meditating on the feeling, it was time. Time to try and bind mana with a spell, rather than with my direct interface. I was excited. I sat down, reached out my magic into a sort of net, targeting the nearest mana-sources while adding in new mana in proportion to maintain balance. Then I cast the spell out.

And it worked! First time too, it was so easy!

No more spending large periods of time binding mana.

No more having to voyage long and far to find the mana needed to balance myself out.

Even better, after I tied the spell into an enchantment, set to keep a certain pressure of new-mana, it was basically automated! It wasn't a true enchantment, more a stable spell that was permanently looped into my mana supply with some controls added on, but unless I ran my mana totally dry, it would stay there forever. Even if I dried out, I could just recast the spell.

This was a true watershed moment. I bound seven mana that first day, when previously it was vanishingly rare for me to bind three, and that only when I was taking Blue with which I had the highest resonance. As my mana pool grew, and the relative impact of the new mana on the old became smaller, I'd be able to bind even more mana than that.

But even at just seven mana a day, over a year that would be two thousand five hundred and fifty five mana! Nearly ten times what I had when I achieved my balancing.

In fact, I needed a proper name for that moment.

The Great Balancing.

Catchy, right?

It even fell on the first of July. Or, rather, what my all-speak defined as the first of July.

I hoped my alchemists could make good graph paper soon; I needed to plot my mana growth and try to derive an expression for it in the future.

But this spell was huge. Huger than huge, even. I'd be able to grow in power at close to three times the rate that I did previously, and grow in power every day rather than just on days when I set time aside to bind mana.

At that moment, the Great Balancing, with two hundred and seventy six mana available, I could comfortably destroy a couple towers or gatehouses per mana cycling, which was down to about three minutes. Of course, that was if I basically converted mana to raw energy and tossed it about; backed up by better weight and cleverness of concepts, or working within natural laws of physics more intelligently I could do a lot better.

But twenty five hundred mana? That was more at the point of asking myself if I want a whole castle crispy, or extra crispy.

I really needed to figure out how to teleport, and find some piece of wasted land no one cared about my destroying. There was no way in hell I could test the sort of spells that would make full use of that much mana near to civilization, especially not civilization that I owned.

Come to think of it, teleportation might be a good first step to getting back home. I hadn't been able to manage it when I was starting out, and had given up on it pretty early.

I set my focus to a distant hill, and tried to teleport there.

I must have stood there contorting my face in concentration for a good hour before I gave it up for the day. But my instinct was that I could manage it, somehow. And I would keep trying until I succeeded.

After all, I had all the time in the world.

Chapter 30: Men of Steel

Back at Harrenhal and with a massive supply of mana, I decided it was time to go through all of my upgrades, cultivation and personal enchantments and improve them. It was, in fact, past time for me to do so, but there hadn't been a pressing need at any point and I had been focused more on breeding support animals than on improving my own person. It was probably because I'd been overly White at the time, which made me a bit selfless.

I first improved my thought acceleration to allow me to think about the spells better, allowing me to manipulate more complicated structures before they started to unravel. Then I improved my mana-sensing and mage-sight. I realized with that greater accuracy of sense that the thought acceleration could be further improved, so I went back and did so. That in turn allowed me to improve the mana-sensing and seeing patterns. Then I was at the limit that my connection to the concepts and power of Blue would allow there.

I really had been letting myself get behind, it seemed.

I similarly upgraded my combat "jedi" precognition, not once but twice. The rest of my Blue-aligned personal improvements were more difficult to increase in their efficacy. Favorable winds wasn't a structured spell that I truly understood, but rather something I had evolved and copied. The mental ward was more technical than instinctive, and needed research rather than mana insight to upgrade. The communications link was the same.

So I moved onto my physical Green improvements. I increased my supernatural physique qualitatively, then refined it a second time. My oakflesh spell went from something I could call stoneflesh, to graniteflesh, to bronzeflesh. It was incredibly hard but more importantly very, very tough.

My regenerative healing factor likewise grew in strength. Before, I used to have to use a bit of Green and White mana every day to inject myself with life-energy, preventing aging. After the upgrade to regeneration, I realized that my body was naturally no longer aging, fixing itself into an optimal state. I still wasn't wolverine, but I had easily reached the point of battlefield-relevant levels of regeneration.

I even managed to refine the structure of my dragon bone-derived skeletal structure, and used that to increase the natural strength of my body, the baseline on which the active supernatural enhancements were added. Green didn't just provide unnatural strength; it boosted the body's natural state too. Sort of like taking a number of small advantageous mutations and adaptations, and adding them without the necessity of waiting for evolution. Naturally I was near Captain-America levels of strength and speed, as good as or better than the best Olympic athletes back on Earth. With the enhancements over the top of that, I was truly a physical beast.

With my Green sorted, I moved onto Red. I further increased my reaction speed, making it so fast as to be almost instantaneous. I also improved my haste effect which made me faster in general, then refined the improved structure to get a second qualitative improvement out of it. Combined with my non-magical baseline and Green's more physically-derived strength and speed, I could do things like lunge faster than a hundred miles an hour from a standing start, and punch fast enough to start approaching the speed of sound. The increased impact at the moment of hitting something was improved a smaller bit.

I also added a new Red improvement: fireproof. I'd finally taken the time to test the enchantment lying dormant in Dany's blood. It was pretty good to start off with, but I even managed to improve it a bit. From my testing, it could withstand temperatures of about fifteen hundred C without issue, and even temperatures above that were much less damaging. It was enough to forge without any protective equipment, which made me feel like a boss, so it was well worth it. Higher temperatures were still an issue, and things like wildfire were still potentially deadly, but typical flames were no longer a real threat.

My White saw similarly impressive gains. The stored healing energy was enough to auto-repair getting my chest blown apart or some similarly extreme injury; my more extreme experiments with rabbits showed that depending on timing, it might even be able to repair my head getting blown off before my life-pattern and mana structures dispersed too much as they did when the creatures died. My conceptual armor was less like having a padded leather armor, and more like having full plate against physical attacks; more importantly, it gave a similar level of equivalent protection against any threat including spell energies, psychic assaults and the like. As a last line of defense it was great, especially if I came up against some threat I hadn't previously considered.

The projectile shield was improved significantly in both individual shield strength, and the number of shields layered. I also improved the linking effect, so other nearby projectile shields would not only help share the load of impacts, something I'd done before, but massive impacts would only impact the shield it hit. That way, something like a ballista bolt would take down a single shield layer on one person by overloading its concept of protection, rather than a shield layer from them and everyone connected to them. In fact, a ballista bolt may be a poor example; given the recent shield strength upgrade, a ballista bolt might not even take down one shield layer on an individual, let alone a group.

The problem with that upgrade to the linking spell was that if someone was hit with multiple of those heavy impacts in succession they could lose all of their shields. So I further improved the linkage, allowing people with full shield-sets to shift one of their shields to the party under attack. That meant that I had the best of both not using more shield than needed at any point in time, sharing shield regeneration through the group, and even sharing number of shields through the group.

Black, despite being my weakest color, also improved. My anti-disease and anti-toxin effects got stronger; I doubted that anything non-magical could hope to affect me. But the gains I was most interested in was in my improved consumption ability. Before, it harvested the possible nutrition near-perfectly. After upgrading it, it could substitute life and energy content for nutritional content; I could have survived on wood if I needed to.

Not only that, but with refinement my consumption upgrade even allowed me to gain some small benefit by processing the food for essences. If I ate strong things, I would – over an admittedly very long time – get stronger. Fast things, faster. Poisonous things would give any poisonous glands greater strength. And so on. It was very, very inefficient, and I suspected would reach levels of diminishing returns, but it was only the start.

With that done, my upgrades were complete. I did a similar process to Togo, Aethon, Jon, Ghost and Shadowfax over the rest of the day.

What I really needed to develop was a way to pass on these upgrades in large numbers though for my Guard animals. As it was, I had neither the time nor the patience to do upgrades to them on an individual basis. It wasn't strictly necessary, especially on Westeros, but I worried that if they were somewhere more advanced like Earth that my beasts would be less invincible.

While I was at it, I also added figuring out how to do the enchantments at long distance, such as for Ned and Ser Barristan.

I did however take the time to make my smiths fireproof. I guess I took that whole "Only You! Can avoid workplace accidents!" message to heart.

While I was gone, my alchemists had finally figured out paper. It wasn't the nicest paper I'd ever seen, but it was easily good enough to allow for decent quality printed books. They had a pilot paper mill already running, with ten workers preparing about five hundred pages a day each; it wasn't designed to be profitable, but to test new devices. More importantly, they had identified what they needed in a plant to make optimal paper with the least processing.

I grew a few fields of the newly designed and magically modified paper-fiber plants. They were pretty heavily enchanted, and it was basically as easy as walking along the rows of trellised vines and picking off the matted plant fibers. Regeneration meant they grew back practically overnight, and they basically consumed air, water, manure and dirt to balance masses. Those fields would be more than enough for my paper industry for decades to come.

The printers meanwhile had the first press fully functional. It could do six thousand pages of text a day, or four thousand if there were images involved. Again, it was mostly a prototype; the full production facility would be about twice as fast with trained workers, and the factory would ramp up to at least twenty such presses.

By the end of the decade I intended to have printed enough books for one to be in every home in the Riverlands. The initial investment I'd assigned of a thousand dragons should be enough that by the end of the year I'd have the factories established, and then reinvestment could take care of the rest.

There were going to be four books to start off with. The first, a guide for farmers with information on "cutting edge" farming techniques and tools, hygiene, health, and archery (in my province's edition, at least). The second, a booklet with pictures, letters and numbers to help people learn to read and do math from basic arithmetic through geometry and basic algebra. The third, a book on the religions of Westeros, including both the Seven-Pointed Star as well as essential teachings and writings by Old Gods philosophers. The fourth, a book on the history of Westeros with commentary.

If I could fully distribute all of those, I would do a lot to improve literacy and education in my little corner of the world. I'd also be making something like twelve and a half thousand dragons a year doing so. Compared to the profits from my Valyrian steel industry that wasn't much. But considering that was about ten times the yearly profit from my fief when I took charge, the perspective shifted.

Other than that, there hadn't been so many changes while I was off gathering mana. Valyrian Steel was still making a fucking fortune for me. The farm animals were still breeding. The peasants were still happily practicing archery.

As for the Steelworks, they now needed me to get involved and actually build the major installations of blast furnace and Bessemer converter; the test beds had successfully identified how much of each of the different ores and such we had to use, and meanwhile the storehouses were just gathering more and more ingredients as my purchasing agents went about buying up ore and shitty iron. But there were finally enough high-quality bricks and refractory material to get building.

And so I did.

Luckily for me, making the blast furnace and Bessemer converter was actually really easy with my magic. I had massive piles of bricks where the blast furnace was going to be, and the Bessemer lining material was nearby. I had used the stone-manipulating spells enough that I hadn't had much trouble making a generalized "shape stone" spell, and I used that to form the blast furnace and Bessemer converter.

Then I did something very clever. I developed selectively permeable gas filters using White based wards. The only real difference between a Bessemer converter and the more modern basic oxygen furnace is that the latter avoids issues from nitrogen in the steel by using oxygen gas only. It wasn't hard to get a ward to reject nitrogen gas, and the high heat and pressure easily overcame any entropic energy losses from unmixing the gasses. The nitrogen was used as secondary heating for the blast furnace, increasing efficiency.

To be honest, magic overcame so many materials difficulties. All the metal I used in the devices was Valyrian blessed, and could withstand greater stresses and temperatures because of it. Making things myself was very quick considering I could shape the materials with my will alone. Stone could be made highly heat-retaining through use of insulating White enchantment, which reduced fuel losses. And on, and on – every issue I might face, I easily magicked away. Even my workers were largely immune from risk of injury due to my magic.

It was fucking awesome.

Between the blast furnace and converter, my new steelworks could process ore and scrap into quality iron, and quality iron into high quality steel (extremely high quality compared to the general technology level), faster than I could acquire the necessary materials. Even given that limitation though, within a few months my steelworks was up to about two thousand tons a year of iron production and a thousand tons a year of steel.

In consultation with the smiths, I designed and built a massive foundry for all of the smiths flocking to my lands. It took me months. As the word spread, I must have had half the free journeymen in Westeros coming to my lands. Apart from the individual and shared workplaces, I had wind and water powered machines to make plates, bars, rods, pipes, wire, and nails, and some hydraulically powered hammers, grinders, drills, saws, mills and lathes.

Many of the tools worked almost entirely on magic, or if not entirely, still relied on it for much of the work transferring energy into motion, moving energy through the space, and so on and so on. Beyond that, the tools were made of valyrian blessed steel, and so would never rust or wear so long as they were used on regular iron and steel and could withstand higher temperatures which reduced issues from long usage times from friction on the worked piece.

In short, even a modern machinist would give their left nut to be able to use my gear.

After three months of making buildings, designing tools, and all the rest of it I was sick to death of dealing with the metalworks. I estimated that by the end of the year, it would be making me some obscene amount of profit, about fifty eight thousand dragons a year even if I reinvested about half the profit, and putting more and more effort into it seemed like a waste at that point.

I felt like Midas; everything I touched turned to gold, and I had no idea of where to spend it. The only real place I had to spend money was re-investing it, or my Guard. The Guard still needed to get bigger, but I wasn't ready to start a whole shift in training, doctrine and professionalism just yet. Nor was I willing to expand until I'd managed my military reforms.

It almost came as a relief when I got word that ice zombies were gathering beyond the Wall.

Chapter 31: Zombie Watch pt. 1, Arrival

Way back when I arrived in Winterfell, fresh off the dimensional displacement boat, I had all these worries about whether the ice-demon White Walkers and their ice-zombie wights might actually exist. After all, I was magic, and so there didn't seem to be any reason that other magic might not be waiting in shallow graves to spring up and gnaw my face off.

Now, all those fears had been validated.

Hearing rumors of Wildling migrations and intending to find some of their missing men including Ned's brother Benjen Stark, the Night's Watch sent out a great ranging. It was a reconnaissance in force, with everything that implied. They would investigate and scout. If necessary or given an opportunity, they'd raid and destroy the Wildlings. Three hundred men went out under the command of the Night's Watch Lord Commander Jeor Mormont ready to kick ass and take names.

After being attacked by the ice zombies and a mutiny, fewer than a dozen made it back. The Watch was gutted. Already understrength, they were now looking at an invasion of a hundred thousand or more wildlings, followed by fucking ice-demons (or necromantic winter-fey. I wasn't entirely sure). But what we did know was that regular steel basically did fuck all, and arrows were less than useless against the zombies unless the arrows were also on fire.

Suffice to say, it was bad.

The Wall itself was about three hundred miles long, just over half a million yards. Even with such a mighty fortification, it was unreasonable to try and hold it with less than a man per every hundred yards. The Watch really needed about twelve thousand men to properly patrol the Wall long term or defend it short term in a full-press siege situation. Then again, using the same common rules of thumb for attackers and defenders, for a full-press siege situation the enemy would need about two hundred and fifty thousandwarriors, and even that would be pretty light. It was a comfort that the Wildlings probably couldn't manage that, but I suspected the ice demons could with their zombies.

Even before losing those three hundred men, the Night's Watch was down to about a thousand men. Now, they had only seven hundred. A twentieth of what they really needed.

When Robb got this news at Winterfell, he immediately decided it was critical enough to call his bannermen up and to use Nevermore to get a message to me. I in turn had Hue, who was stationed in King's Landing, relay the message to Ned and Robert.

The timing could definitely have been better. It was officially Autumn, the transition from Summer to Winter years, and everyone was trying to get that last bit of harvesting done before the weather worsened and agricultural yields decreased. The word reached me in early October, right in the normal planting time for the fall-winter growing season.

Beyond that, it was the beginning of winter in general, and even during Summer years it would snow in the North. Southern troops were straight up not equipped to go on campaign in the winter months, and the North lacked the infrastructure to supply a large expedition of southerners.

For my own specific issues, it would have been much better if the fucking White Walkers had waited a year. By then I'd have had the first companies of my new model army ready, and I'd have had thousands of Guard Hounds and hundreds of Guard Horses ready too. As it was, my expanding support formations of Guard Ravens and Hounds were only just allowing my men to keep pace with the rapid population expansion around Harrentown's burgeoning industry, and I was forced to deploy Hound units that were younger than I'd have preferred.

On the plus side, I had just crossed over the one thousand mana threshold, and there was never a more legitimate target for extermination than an undead army.

Instead of gathering all of the Seven Kingdoms' armies and marching to war, I convinced Robert and Ned to have different houses gather specific amounts of supplies along the march. Others would be sending supplies to the North, to support the Northern mobilization. Troops from the Riverlands would march north in the spring, while troops from the Vale would sail to reinforce the Wall more immediately.

Unfortunately, it was next to impossible to move troops to the Shadow Tower by sea, the river there more of a gorge than something traversable. That just meant that the Westerlands and Reach would be more responsible for supplies, and would have to send their contingents overland to take sail from the east or to march up the Kingsroad.

It was a carefully considered and orchestrated logistical movement and mobilization designed to get up to seventy five thousand troops to the Wall if necessary. The initial wave, twenty thousand Northmen by land and ten thousand Valemen by sea would be there in time for winter to truly set in. In the spring ten thousand men would start out from the Riverlands and march for the Wall, while another ten thousand gathered from the Crownlands went out by sea from King's Landing. Should casualties prove too high, a final reserve of fifteen thousand from the Reach would march, while ten thousand more would sail from the Stormlands.

The real problem was what to do about the Others, or White Walkers depending on your terminological preference. Reports from the ill-fated expedition were that they had completely resisted steel tipped arrows, and their own blades of ice shattered blades on contact. Wights were totally proof against arrows that weren't on fire, and even those were less effective than one might hope in the frozen north against fresh, wet corpses.

Apparently a search of old documents turned up that obsidian, or dragonglass, was effective against the Others themselves; I could see why it would be against demons of ice and snow, what with the memory of a volcano's fire inside every bit of rock. The rock was being mined and shipped away for processing as quickly as they could on Dragonstone, a volcanic island. Even still the Walkers would face precious little of that fell material, and we had no proof that it worked.

For my own part, Harrenhal was mostly tasked with logistics. I would be providing nearly twenty five thousand dragon's worth of food and equipment. But in return my military would not be overly stressed; of Harrenhal's Guard and levy, only Jon and I were obligated to attend to the Wall's defense.

That said, as both Jon and I had horses capable of making the Wall in less than a week and I represented a strategic force all on my own, we had to set out right away as part of the emergency reinforcements. I was appointed Robert's envoy in dealing with this situation at the Wall itself. Hue flew me the scroll proclaiming such in barely dry ink a bare day after we got the news, and I set out for the Wall.

With me were Togo, Aethon, Jon, Ghost, Shadowfax and Mu. We were accompanied by one of my two companies of Guard Ravens, and the three oldest companies of Guard Hounds. They were still young, puppies in mind if not in body, but would be invaluable for patrolling the Wall and detecting any forces thinking to sneak up onto the Wall at night, in bad weather or the like.

We made quite the procession on the Kingsroad, two riders in shimmering mail going faster than most had ever seen. Jon bore aloft a banner of grey with the silhouette of horse archer performing a Parthian shot in black. Behind followed the three blocks of massive grey hounds running in formations four abreast and twenty deep. Above our flock of ravens flew in orderly ranks, keeping pace with the men and animals below.

We made three hundred miles a day. As we grew closer to our destination we often had to leave the road, going cross country as we passed slower moving blocks of infantry and cavalry from the North headed to defend the Wall and their homes. The troops were obviously regulars, the core of different lordly houses' professional retainers sent out as first responders. It had been too short a time for the levy to have been called and dispatched.

On the morning of the six day we arrived, and found the Night's Watch in chaos.

The Night's Watch was unique in many ways from other Westerosi institutions. One of the ways it was unique was in the way it selected its leadership. It was a democracy. One man, one vote.

It generally worked. Over the past eight thousand years and despite having a large portion of the realm's convicts, there had been only four recorded instances of men who were corrupt or power-hungry enough to get the Watch involved with matters beyond their remit.

The problem with that method however was shown during our arrival. With no clear successor, the men of the Night's Watch were gridlocked over who the next leader should be despite, or perhaps because of, the looming crisis.

I went to meet First Steward Bowen Marsh, the acting Lord Commander. When my small army of beasts arrived he had been in a command team meeting with the people who I later learned were his political opponents, because defending a three hundred mile wall with some seven hundred men against over a hundred thousand wasn't complicated enough already.

They rushed out of a tower, gaping at the sight of my three centuries of Guard Hounds and Ravens.

"Acting Lord Commander Marsh," I greeted him. "I'm Lord Odysseus Gangari of Harrenhal. His Grace sent me north as soon as he heard." He was a ruddy, red-faced man with a large rotund belly, which had earned him his nickname of the pomegranate. I presented him with the scroll that gave me authority to coordinate the Realm's response.

He looked up at me, then over my combat contingent, then back to the scroll. "I sincerely hope we're getting more than animals," he muttered under his breath, erroneously assuming I couldn't hear him, "no matter how well trained."

Then he spoke up, loud enough for a normal person to hear. "Lord Gangari, it's a pleasure to have the first of what I hope will be many responders to the Watch's call for assistance. But if I may, my lord, how did you get here so quickly? I doubt the ravens have even managed to reach King's Landing yet, let alone give you enough time to bring yourself and so many animals north."

I smiled politely at him. "I am, as you may have heard or guessed, somewhat skilled in the magical arts. I had a raven of my own design at Winterfell who got word to me as soon as they knew of the fate of the previous Lord Commander and so many of your sworn brothers. They have my gratitude and prayers for their sacrifice.

"But when I got the word, and sent it to his Grace, King Robert, and the Lord of the Hand, Lord Stark, they asked me to come and help deal with the situation. Twenty thousand northerners are already gathering and coming here, as are ten thousand southerners by sea. In the spring, another ten thousand will march from the Riverlands, while ten thousand come by sea once more. A final reserve of twenty-five thousand will await word as to our progress."

I was speaking loudly so that the word might spread and improve morale. "As for my own presence, it was not just the color of my hounds that I changed, or their size; each can run at thirty miles an hour for ten hours a day. We set out the day after hearing about your plight, only six days prior."

They were visibly stunned at that performance. Making it from Harrenhal to the Wall in sixty days would have been a feat worthy of admiration and of interest to all future students of war and logistics. Making it in six, as far as they were concerned took magic; they were right, but luckily I was a mage.

I smiled widely. "And my hounds are not just fast; they are far tougher, stronger and smarter than any hound I have not improved. You will soon see that each is a match in combat for a trained man with mail, shield and sword. My ravens are likewise stronger and faster than natural ravens, and can scout from the air then return to their attached unit and give a verbal report on what they saw."

Impressed and fearful mutterings broke out at my claims until one of the men behind Marsh challenged my statement. "Hah. I'll believe that when I see it for myself," he mocked.

Still mounted on Aethon I looked down at him. "Very well. Captain Poe," I called out, turning to the lead raven of the company. "What is the combat strength of the men in this yard?"

It flew up into the air, did a quick circle of the yard and came down. "A hundred warriors in black my lord, normal humans. Three companies of your Guard Hounds. One of the Ravens. And yourself and Jon Farstark."

Everyone was looking at us stunned. A talking, counting raven; would wonders never cease?

I grinned harshly. "Now, my good brother of the Watch, you said you wanted to see one of the hounds fight? Perhaps it would be better for you to experience it first-hand. First Captain Fritz," I called out. "Show this man your worth. Just be careful not to injure him," I mocked. "The Watch needs every man right now no matter how foolish."

The lead hound gave a quick bark and broke formation, coming to stand in front of the rude man, then crouching and preparing to lunge with bared fangs. The man quickly drew his sword, a small measure of cautious fear in his eyes, his mouth set in a hard line as he prepared to try and kill my war-beast.

"I will give a count of three, then call begin." I called out. Brothers were already gathering around in a wide circle, betting on having extra duties. "One. Two. Three. Begin!"

Like a shot, Fritz lunged forwards, getting inside the arc of the swords swing where it wouldn't have the leverage and power needed to injure him. Fritz didn't slow down, but smashed into the Watch's man. A blur of movement later and the man was caught by the back of the neck.

Fritz gave a low growl announcing his victory, then threw his head back and howled. As one, the other Guard Hounds pointed their heads back and followed his lead.

"Aarrooo! AARROOO!" rang loudly, bouncing off of the walls and echoing in our ears. Once they stopped I looked down at the man who was lying on the ground.

"So, does that make you more confident my hounds can keep the wildlings from you?" I asked cooly.

The man refused to answer, spitting to the side and walking over to stand next to a man I recognized; Janos Flynt. And judging by Flint's rapidly paling face, he remembered me too.

Marsh cleared his throat. "Well, shall we enter inside and have a word, my lord?" he asked.

"Of course, it would be my pleasure."

It really, really wasn't.

Chapter 32: Zombie Watch pt. 2, Politics and Preparations

Marsh went back inside, followed by the people that he had previously been meeting with. As I was introduced to the men, I realized that not only were they the officers of the Night's Watch, but also those trying to get voted in as Lord Commander.

First Steward Bowen Marsh was acting Lord Commander, but it didn't seem likely that he'd manage to take the seat. That piece of shit Janos Slynt, the corrupt gold cloak I helped remove, was also bucking for the position.

So were: Ser Alliser Thorn, the much-hated, ever-unpleasant Master-at-arms of Castle Black who had just been humbled by First Hound Captain Fritz; Cotter Pyke, the former Ironborn and commander of Eastwatch-by-the-Sea; Ser Denys Mallister, who has commanded the Shadow Tower for over three decades; and a few others who didn't really have a shot at winning anyways. Thankfully the shit Joffrey had had an "accident" at some point, otherwise I'm sure he would have been in the running too, just to make my life more miserable.

Both Pyke and Mallister would be decent choices; they had, after all, successfully commanded castles of their own, and were popular among the men at the Wall. The only problem was that they fucking hated each other. Thorn was already out of the running; I didn't know what he'd been promised, or what sweet lies he'd been told, but he'd thrown his support to Slynt. Luckily that support was worth less now after everyone saw Fritz maul his ass. Acting Lord Commander Marsh didn't look like a fighting man, and was known for a bean-counter by the men at the Wall; he had, after all, held the position of chief bean counter for many years. It was unlikely that he'd be made Lord Commander, as the men didn't see him in that way.

It was looking increasingly likely that Slynt, fucking Slynt would end up winning as the compromise candidate. I just couldn't trust a man like that at the head of an organization that was at least half full of thieves, murderers, rapists, bandits and other crooks. But it was looking increasingly likely that I wouldn't have a choice, and something needed to happen to break the gridlock. Not to mention it was insane to leave the two castles meant to hold the flanks unattended by their leaders in this time of crisis.

So I took a different option. I decided to try and half-shame, half-bully the Watch's leadership (after all, Slynt had no shame to begin with) into deciding that since the vote was not deciding the matter of the next Lord Commander quickly enough that Marsh would stay acting Lord Commander, and everyone would get back to doing their fucking jobs.

Even at the Wall they had heard about how I'd killed the Mountain. Between that, fear of my magic, Robert's appointment as his envoy, and the two hundred forty Guard Hounds I'd brought with me they were willing to listen.

Given any luck, Marsh would prove himself a successful commander, or some other man would rise up out of the ranks. Failing that, I'd see to Slynt's tragic accident myself.

After that dick measuring contest had been decided, I turned to Marsh and asked a simple question. "What are the strategic and tactical situations?"

He grimaced. "We are light on the stores needed to feed such large armies as you say are coming, Lord Gangari, and bringing large amounts overland will be difficult as the weather cools. However, Eastwatch remains accessible by sea in all but the coldest months of winter, and that normally during years of Winter. For the Watch's current numbers, our supplies are reasonably extensive, and we have large stores of arrows, flammable cloth, pitch and other necessary items for a siege."

I nodded. "That is about as good as I could have hoped for, Lord Commander," I said, showing him my support. "Clearly you did well as First Steward to see the Watch so well prepared."

He puffed up a bit, his gut moving forward ponderously as he smiled. "Thank you, Lord Gangari. As for the tactical situation, we are most pressed. We have barely seven hundred men in the Watch now. It is difficult to carry out the necessary maintenance and repairs with so few men, let alone to turn back an invasion by a hundred thousand wildlings. Should even a small band of raiders slip past, it would be a dire threat to our castles.

"As for the threat of Wildlings, there are four main routes of attack. Furthest to the west, there is the Bridge of Skulls. It is the only way past the Gorge. The nearest castle, Westwatch-by-the-Bridge, is more a gatehouse than a true castle. Although easy to defend, a sufficiently large band may be able to force their way through. We have too few men to guard it as well as I would like without weakening the Wall elsewhere.

"The second threat is less localized; the wildlings may attempt to climb over the Wall at any point along its length, and attempt to take our castles from the unprotected southern sides. This is again an issue hard to defend against without many more men assigned to the task of patrolling.

"The third threat comes from Castle Black. Other than the path that leads over the Bridge of Skulls and through Westwatch, it is the only tunnel through the wall at present that we have not filled. Should the Wildlings be attempting to truly force the Wall and move their entire people through to attack the Seven Kingdoms, they are most likely to come here.

"The fourth and final threat comes from raiders taking ships and slipping by Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. Luckily Wildlings make for poor shipbuilders and sailors; though the Watch's naval forces are small, I doubt that the Wildlings will be able to sneak too many by. That said, should they be willing to endure extreme casualties a massive raft-borne invasion is possible there, and there is the risk that raiding parties might get through to attack us from behind."

I considered for a moment, thinking about how to best employ my forces. "Very well. I think that my forces can help in three main ways. I will send out a platoon of twenty five of the Ravens to each of the three main castles. They will patrol for Wildling movement, watch for ships and give warning for forces that target the Bridge of Skulls. Two of the companies of Hounds will be set to patrolling the wall. They will run along it, day and night, and ensure that no wildlings make it up undetected. Finally, I myself will remain at Castle Black with the last company of Guard Hounds as a mobile reserve. Should it prove necessary, I can split the company and send portions to reinforce all three locations as needed."

Marsh nodded thoughtfully. "That would free up the vast majority of the men I have patrolling the wall, and allow me to send extra forces to both Eastwatch and the Shadow Tower," he agreed. "I will reinforce the Shadow Tower with a hundred men due to the risk of the Bridge of Skulls being attempted by the Wildlings, bringing the force there up to three hundred strong. Fifty will go to Eastwatch, bringing them to two hundred men, while the remainder will stay here at Castle Black."

A bunch of much happier officers began to work out the details.

All that hustle and bustle to get there, and after I arrived we had little to do but wait. So I buckled down to magical research. There were three priorities that I worked on. First, analyzing the Wall; there was a shit-ton of magic through the thing, after all. Second, figuring out how to apply and update enchantments in mass numbers and from a distance. Third, I wanted to finally figure out how to teleport.

The Wall was an impressive structure. Despite being some eight thousand years old, it was still in good repair, and had stayed frozen and seven hundred feet tall the whole time. I had anticipated White mana being involved; the wall was ice, which was a structured crystal, and it warded against the undead. There was basically no more obvious a sign of White magic than structure and anti-undead. But that didn't explain the eternal, unchanging, self-repairing nature of the Wall. Not with the Wall being so far away from civilization.

The secret, surprisingly, was in the use of Green mana. The effect that made the ice permanent, slowly dying down before I revitalized it, was copyable with White and Green. It made the ice have some essential aspect of life energy to it. Then there was the spell to make the ice truly "living" in its ability to self-repair. Last, there was an enchantment that made the ice sacred, for lack of a better word. It basically gave it a localized anti-undead ward.

The coolest thing about the ice was it was self-powering; the ice counted as alive enough and certainly sufficiently a part of civilization to generate high amounts of White mana, while being in the frozen and wild north meant it had high amounts of ambient Green at hand too. There was a highly efficient feedback loop, and if properly staffed the Wall was naturally self-powering.

I learned to reshape the ice without much difficulty; I suspected I'd use the set of spells, or minor modifications thereof to make highly efficient cold-box devices that recharged when exposed to towns and cities. I looked forwards to having iced fruit juice in the south.

Meanwhile the anti-undead field was something I was interested in investigating further; it would likely lead to anti-undead beam attacks and a more generalized ward-undead that I hoped to use with some of my animals.

Because fuck zombies.

Luckily, it was ridiculously easy to modify into an anti-undead enchantment. It basically had to be attached to something with high concentrations of white and green. Which included all my animals and myself. Unlike Valyrian steel, which I suspected would work against the undead by applying conceptual cutting damage, the aura was more of a shield, working against allowing undead energies within that space.

Unfortunately, it was still pretty weak. The effect on the Wall relied a lot on being a massive, three hundred mile long, seven hundred foot tall, fifty foot wide chunk of ice. My animals were individually a lot more magical than the ice, and the anti-undead aura enchantment was powered by that, but the efficiency was still low enough that on an individual basis all I expected it to do was prevent my animals from being raised as wights, and to allow for impacts with their flesh or blood to harm the White Walkers.

That was good, to start, but not really satisfying. Luckily, the aura was linkable much like the projectile shields, and so blocks of my troops would cause nearby undead to be weaker and suffer damage over time. It wasn't enough to make a fight a foregone conclusion, but it did serve to make my troops more efficient.

For myself, it was more useful. I could use the structure of the enchantment to serve as a spell, then dump colorless mana into it to flare the size of the aura, strengthening it with more White and Green. It should be as effective as setting every undead near me on fire with sufficient mana, without the issue of a pile of actually burning bodies to menace my allies. I also figured out how to fire beams and bolts of the anti-undead energies.

The latter technique was easily adapted to send packets of healing life-force energy as well, the energy signatures of anti-undead and pro-life being quite close to each other. It wasn't really that useful; most injuries were either too severe for a basic life-force infusion to work fast enough, or too minor to need my attentions, but it was an application nonetheless.

Since I was messing about with attack spells, I figured it was time to set up a continuous version of chain lightning. Chain lightning was mostly a one shot attack; the bolt could be guided a bit after I shot it, but the size and strength of the bolt was defined when it was cast in the first place.

But that was from a time that my mana regeneration was slow. When I arrived at Castle Black with over a thousand mana to call on, I could have a used mana bond ready to go again in a little under two minutes. I basically had ten mana a second to spend before I started drawing down faster than I recovered.

It was worth making a spell that I cast once, then kept channeling through as opposed to making multiple instances of the same spell. It was easier on my concentration, and it meant that I could save on the mana required to build the spell-pattern every time I cast it. For chain lightning, that was a full four mana to structure the spell and provide a minimal effect, but with the bulk of the power coming from the extra colorless I imbued the spell with. Continuous chain lightning was only one colorless more to start off, and after that the power depended entirely on how much magic I was feeding it. It was effectively my magic machinegun.

Figuring out the Wall, developing an anti-undead aura, and gaining the ability to shoot anti-undead beams and continuous lightning only took a little over two weeks.

As for my progress in enchanting, it took me about a month to be able to be able to lay the same enchantment on multiple people or objects at a time, and it wasn't until two months later in mid January that I figured out how to cast enchantments at a distance.

At first I was overly focused on casting the same enchantment multiple times simultaneously. It was like trying to write the same word with both my left and right hand at the same time; in theory understandable, in practice very, very difficult. The trick that I eventually figured out was that I could cast the enchantment, and then when I went to tie it into the animal could instead send tendrils out to tie it to multiple animals at a time.

The problem was in keeping the enchantment stable while subjecting it to those stresses, which required a fine control of mana; by adding mana into the enchantment at the same rate that it was flowing to the targeted beings, I could keep the enchantment stable. When enough mana to enchant all the beings was finished, the enchantment would separate and flow into all the creatures.

The advantage was that I could process as many as a dozen animals in the time it used to take me to process one, and that improved processing factor kept increasing as I kept getting more mana and more skill controlling it. The disadvantage was that it wasn't possible for me to add the top level of what I could accomplish with enchantments; those were by definition cutting edge, at the very limit of what I could achieve and needed all my skill and focus.

But that top level kept reaching higher and higher, with what used to be the apex suddenly something I could distribute to all of enhanced friends and forces.

Which brought me to the topic of how to enchant people at a distance. I started in mid November, and was pretty close to a solution when I realized it was once again coming up on Christmas. I was depressed; every year my family would gather, everyone from all the over world coming to Florida for our family celebration.

I knew that I wasn't there, that I'd be kept in the Christmas eve and New Years prayers. That my mother would be all tense, waiting for someone to say something about how I was probably in a better place or whatever so she could jump down their throat, insisting that I was fine, that I would be fine, that I'd make it back someday to be with them again.

They were heavy thoughts. I'll admit, despite all the blood I'd shed, the things I'd done, the thought of that scene, my parents in the family setting, the specific idea of their faces and reactions to my being brought up after being missing for almost two years, for the second Christmas in a row, as everyone just prayed that I'd get home but secretly feared I wouldn't… It was tough.

I spent a lot of time in private for those few days.

But then Togo came along, picked up my wrist in his mouth, and dragged me to where I'd been doing experiments. I had talked to him about my problems, taking comfort in his quiet support, and he knew what I needed to do. I needed to work. To make progress with my magic. And to one day make my way home.

It seemed that jolt of motivation was exactly what I needed to make progress. Through meditation I found these slight links between me and those that I'd previously enchanted. I had a habit of taking a perfect memory of people before and after I did an enchantment so I'd be able to diagnose and fix whatever damage was done in the event of some sort of enchantment failure or rejection. When I thought about those memories while meditating, I found ever-so faint links between me and them. I could use those links to pass my spells without issues of distance.

It wasn't great at letting me put in place entirely new enchantments, at least not yet, but I could easily upgrade the ones that were already there and with significantly more time and effort add new ones.

Then, after spending enough time practicing, meditating, and upgrading the Guard animals back home to a higher standard, I made another breakthrough. I gained the ability to track all the magic I was responsible for. With deep focus I could suddenly feel out not just the animals that I had enchanted, but all of their progeny, at least so long as they were touched by my magic.

The Guard Hounds, with a pregnancy period of about two months and litters of several puppies at a time had been expanding particularly rapidly; there were over four thousand of them in the Guard, patrolling my lands to maintain peace and order, with thousands more too young or pregnant to be part of the active units. It took me six days just to get all of them up to the latest standard.

Judging from the fact that they were almost as good as Togo, mostly just lacking his size and experience, I could probably upgrade myself again; I had over twenty-eight hundred mana by the time February came and I was finished upgrading my Guard variants to their latest standard, so I certainly had the extra power to spare.

But teleportation was, I considered, of slightly higher priority.

A pity I didn't get to work on it just then.

Chapter 33: Zombie Watch pt. 3, Human Refugees

Things were looking up by February.

The Wall was beginning to repopulate. The North had responded in force under Robb's leadership, and Vale houses and their troops under Ser Brynden Tully's command were coming in at Eastwatch to reinforce the Wall and its castles. There were feasts and other events that I went to, but I had mostly stayed tucked away working on my troops. The Blackfish was an able commander, and he and Robb needed little input from me as to the disposition of his troops.

I decided to increase my own forces at the Wall; I hadn't realized how quickly my hounds would be breeding, and had Hue, who was posted as part of my communications network in Harrenhal, relay the order for fifteen companies, a full twelve hundred hounds as well as another two companies of Guard Ravens to come north to the Wall.

When they arrived, I formed them into three battalions of six companies each, with a company of the Ravens as aerial scouts and human/animal translators.

I had decided to model my human army roughly after the Romans, with eighty men or thirty cavalry to a company (century), six infantry companies or twelve cavalry ones to a battalion (cohort). It didn't make sense for me to use a Legion sized structure though, as a single one would probably end up including every man in my army even after I finished expanding it.

Instead the largest sizes, still entirely hypothetical, were Regiments; these were designed as combined arms formations, and had a minimum of eight foot companies, including at least two of archers and at least four of pikemen. A Foot Regiment had no integrated cavalry element, while a Mixed Regiment had eight companies of cavalry attached. A Fast Regiment used mounted soldiers who would then dismount to fight as well as the integrated cavalry unit.

Romans had similar units: the Equitata Cohort, which included a cohort of infantry with an integral cavalry element, and the Equitata Milliara Cohort, an over-strength Equitata Cohort with ten infantry companies and eight cavalry. They were often made up of auxiliaries and used in the provinces when a full Legion would be overkill.

I planned on having a Guard Hound for every man in the Regiments, as well as two companies of Ravens attached to each Regiment. The Hounds could fight from beneath the pikes, screen the archers, and support the cavalry, while the Ravens would scout and carry messages. Because of that planned integration, the Hounds and Ravens were already assigned to companies of eighty animals each back at Harrenhal. I had trained the first of them to keep organizing themselves in such a manner, and the hierarchical pack-instinct I created them with further reinforced their training.

It made it easy for the Hounds to organize and deploy along the wall, that was for sure. The Northmen and Valemen took a bit of time to get used to organized packs moving about in formation, standing watch, and otherwise doing all the military activities they could. Some inquired about acquiring some for their own armed forces; I mentioned to them that I was selling shepherding dogs as the population of those grew, but that the Guard Hounds were not for sale. The fact that the Starks had some became quite a point of envy.

Although I wanted to I did not get to work on my teleportation, I couldn't. The Vale and Northern forces had arrived just in time.

We had to deal with the Wildlings.

We were fairly lucky in how long it had taken the Wildlings to move. It may have seemed incredibly slow, but their horde often made as few as three miles a day. The massive amount of foraging required, the lack of roads and mounts, the need to carry all their tents and furs, the slowing due to the children, and the difficulties presented by walking through the snow and over the ice… It all meant that the Wildling advance was less a military maneuver than it was a slow meandering migration.

As for the Walkers, they were either slowed by the desire to raise every corpse in the lands beyond the Wall, or were wise enough to let the Wildlings test our strength first. Either way, I was glad that we were dealing with merely human foes, especially since the stocks of obsidian were not so much low as they were non-existent. Though Robert assured me they were coming soon. I was assured. But I'd believe it when I saw it.

We weren't sure of what exactly the Wildlings intended. Some believed they were coming to escape the White Walkers. Others thought that they were merely the first wave of human servants sent by the Walkers to open up a path through the Wall.

I didn't particularly care; the Wildlings had a culture of rape, robbery, murder and general barbarism. Westeros wasn't nice or pretty, especially by modern standards, but they were a damn sight better than the Wildlings. Hell, Volantis was better than the so-called free-folk, and they practiced massive amounts of slavery. Letting Wildlings through the Wall, assuming they wanted to escape rather than serve the White Walkers, would be saving their wicked lives at the expense of all the innocents they would go on to harm.

I wasn't willing to do it.

The Wildlings would be given a simple choice. Surrender, bend the knee, accept the King's laws, the Stark's rule, and peacefully settle in the Gift, a stretch of land owned but not particularly used by the Night's Watch. Fight, and be destroyed by my sorceries and the gathered armies of the Seven Kingdoms. Or run back into the chilly embrace of the White Walkers.

No other options were acceptable.

I just had to hope the Wildlings were clever enough to accept it. Failing that, that the Wall was high enough I didn't have to worry about the scent of burning flesh.

The first to show up were their scouts and outriders. My ravens reported that they were visibly dismayed at the number of banners on the wall. The scouts then turned to the sides, moving along the Wall for tens of miles in each direction, growing more and more bothered by the fact that the Wall was once again properly garrisoned. Other scouting parties approached the wall in other locations, though with a similar lack of success and growing consternation.

A number of my Ravens followed them back to the Wildling host. The reports of it reminded me a bit of the Dothraki khalasars, just without the horses and with more clothing. The Wildlings were no army, more a collection of tribes, villages, clans and warbands which had decided to wander in the same direction. That must have been part of the reason why it took them so long to arrive at Castle Black; foraging for food for that many people was a gargantuan task.

There were a few things I wanted to get a better look at.

They had giants, which modern Earth would claim inefficient and ponderous due to the square-cube law; I wanted to get a good scan of their biology and any magic they had.

And they had Wooly Mammoths; I wanted some to modify as line-breakers and mobile archery/artillery platforms for my Guard. I had always loved the Armored Elephants in Medieval Two Total War, after all.

Other than that, the Wildlings were a collection of hardscrabble barbarians and I wanted little to do with them. Unfortunately, I was the one assigned to treat with them by Robert, should they so choose.

My raven scouts had marked their leader, and one of my spies had heard his name: Mance Rayder. The traitor of the Night's Watch turned King-Beyond-the-Wall.

I gathered together Marsh, Robb and the Blackfish in case I needed to consult with them, then I sent Mu out to begin negotiations.

Watching from Mu's eyes, I saw Rayder's massive pavilion of a tent approaching quickly. It was very barbarian chic, made from the white pelts of Westero's version of polar bears and adorned with antlers from a great elk, but I thought he might have been trying a little bit too hard to stand out from the crowd.

Mu flew right past the guard in a flash and into the tent, interrupting a meeting between Mance and a number of other wildling leaders. They recoiled in shock, even their leader, though his face was neutral again so quickly I would not have caught it with ordinary human senses.

Other than the mid-sized and relatively non-descript Mance Rayder, there were three other men and three women there. One man was a massive bear of a person, with a long white beard and engraved armbands of gold. Another, tall, bald, lean and earless, wore heavy bronze scale armor. The third was in a shirt of bones. For the women, one was squat and round and stunk of blood. The second, a pretty young blonde woman, sat by the third who was pregnant.

"Greetings," I relayed through Mu.

"Oh by the hells it talks!" shouted the white beard.

Mu turned his eyes to look at the man dismissively. "Indeed. I talk. Surprisingly, so do you," Mu replied before breaking into caws of laughter. The seven wilding leaders' puzzled stares stood testament to their confusion and shock.

The blonde girl guffawed. "See, Tormund, even ravens think you more animal than man."

His face darkened. "Aye, well we'll see who ends up in whose belly, and who has the last laugh then," he muttered.

"Peace, Tormund," Mance said. "I would hear what our feathered friend has come to say."

Mu turned to look at Mance and looked him up and down. "Clever," Mu noted, then began to relay my words again in a somewhat different voice, the tone and timing shifted to match my own.

"Mance Rayder. I am Ser Odysseus Gangari, Lord of Harrenhal and Envoy of His Grace King Robert," I introduced myself.

"I didn't realize they made ravens into lords in the south," Tormund said sarcastically.

Mu laughed, a trio of sharp, strident caws coming out of his beak.

"No," I said through him. "Though I suspect Mu here could do a better job than most, I am speaking through him from Castle Black."

The bald, earless man frowned. "I think that wargs can not do this?" he asked in somewhat broken common.

"I'm no warg, but a sorcerer of a sort that has not been seen for an age," I replied.

Mance raised his hand, drawing the wildlings back into line. "And what does the envoy of the southern king have to say to us free folk?"

"I am here to tell you some facts, ask you a question, and offer you a choice," I answered via Mu. "The Night's Watch is aware of the White Walkers; their Great Ranging was slaughtered, but all accounts of those dozen that managed to escape agreed that the dead walked as wights and their commander was a white man of beautiful but inhuman form and power.

"In response to this and your own movements, the armies of the Seven Kingdoms have mobilized. Already thirty thousand men have gathered to defend the Wall, twenty thousand more are on their way, and twenty five thousand are available should they be needed. Dragonglass is being sourced and processed into daggers, arrowheads and spear-tips. We are ready to meet any and every threat from beyond the wall, living or dead."

I could see their expressions grow dark at that. A good fortress, with strong stone walls and towers, required around ten times as many men to attack it than to defend it. Something like the Wall, with seven hundred foot walls, was far, far harder to assault. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume a fifty to one combat multiplier for the defenders so long as their supplies of arrows were maintained, and even a hundred to one or more was quite possible.

The Wildlings may not have been experts in siege warfare, but it was clear that their plan for a lightning assault to break through the Wall and into undefended North had failed before it had truly begun.

"What we do not know is why you come south," I continued. "It could be you are fleeing the White Walkers. It could be you are aiding them, a first wave of humans to break through the Wall that would stymie their fell magics and undead. So which is it?"

Mance looked at Mu seriously. "All men with warm blood in their veins are enemies of the White Walkers," he said. "And we are no exception."

I had Mu give a jerky up and down nod. "That is good to hear. So now, I offer you a choice. The first, if you wish to enter beyond the Wall, you must bend the knee. You will accept the King's laws, and whatever communities you form will accept both the Starks and the Night's Watch as their overlords. You will peacefully settle in the Gift, and only those invited to settle further south will be allowed to do so. Further, you will be responsible for providing a number of your warriors to help man the Wall during the present crisis.

"The second, you may fight, and be broken on the Wall by the gathered might of Seven Kingdoms. Or, the third option, you may turn and flee, running back into the chilly embrace of the White Walkers.

"I will come again tomorrow to hear your thoughts."

As Mu turned to leave, Mance asked a question. "What if we agree to kneel, then go back on our word?"

Mu transmitted my laugh, turning it even harsher and crueler. "Did you think Mu was unique?" I asked, mocking. "That I only practiced my art on ravens? The hounds I breed are as smart as men, can run three hundred miles in a day, tear through plate armor like it was parchment, and have flesh as tough and hard as bronze. Fifteen hundred are already with me to protect the Wall. By year's end there will be fifteen thousand to patrol these lands." Mu copied well my voice as I continued, its cold harsh tones and promises of violence ringing clear.

"Should individual raiders test their mettle, they will die," I promised. "Should the former free-folk prove too irksome as whole, or march south again, I will come north again with an army of men and beasts. We will kill everyone that carries a weapon, and drop the rest off in chains outside Volantis. Perhaps their slavers would have better success in teaching those oathbreakers to kneel."

Mance snarled at the idea. "I did not realize the king's laws on selling slaves had changed."

Mu cawed, transmitting my bark of laughter. "What did I say of selling? No, what the slavers do to traitors all the way in Essos is beyond our concern. Mind me well, Rayder. You will have to live with the consequences of your decisions. Or not live, as the case may be. Till our next meeting."

Mu leapt off the table, flying out of the tent and quickly winging his way into the air. I broke the link, coming out of it in a stone room in Castle Black. Robb, Marsh and the Blackfish were all there, and had heard my side of the conversation.

Robb's face was worried. "What do you think they will do?"

I shrugged. "I have no idea, but if they are wise they will kneel."

But everyone who's watched a zombie show knows that the human refugees are just as great a threat as the zombies themselves.

Chapter 34: Zombie Watch pt. 4, Ending the Threat

In the morning it seemed that we received the Wildling's answer.

It wasn't what we had been hoping for, and came in the form of a raid on Castle Black just after dawn. Of course the ravens had spotted it, and it was thus no surprise. The troops were prepared. And atop the Wall I waited with Jon, Robb, Brynden and Marsh, Togo and Ghost at our sides.

The Wildling wave was fifteen thousand strong, significantly outnumbering the defenders. Of the three hundred Night's Watchmen, five thousand Northmen, and three thousand Valemen, a little under half, some four thousand men, were on duty that morning.

Still, given the advantages of fortification, training and equipment, and the lack of Wildling siege engines, those four thousand could have easily held against ten times as many Wildlings. But I doubted our men would be necessary at all.

As the Wildlings left the edge of the treeline some five-hundred meters distant, they gathered then began to run at an extreme archery range of four hundred meters, shields upraised around those carrying logs to use as battering rams at the gate.

They were no risk. I was tired of holding back, and defending the realm against Wildlings and White Walkers was certainly the best time from a public relations perspective to reveal the full extent of my magics.

I raised my hand for dramatic effect and intoned three words. "Continuous Chain Lightning."

With a mighty *CRACK* a think bolt of lightning jumped out from my hand, smashing into a group of better dressed free folk. I dumped twenty mana a second into that spell, the majority of my regeneration dedicated to destruction, and watched in disgusted awe as the so called Lord of Bones and his entourage jerked and charred as I swept them with my lightning.

The men on the Wall were staring at me in shock as I singlehandedly broke the Wildling attack. Men dropped their weapons in their haste to make the sign of the seven pointed star, or simply forgot to keep hold in their awe.

The Wildlings, meanwhile, at least those closer to the impact, had dropped their weapons for an entirely different reason; they were fleeing as fast as they could.

A minute later and the Wildlings were in full rout, running as quickly as they could for the trees while my lightning played over them. As the began to enter the tree-line, slowing in the belief that I was finished, I sent out the finale.

I had been casting with twenty mana a second, and still had a full half of my mana pool when they ran.

In a fit of theatricality, I threw my arms wide. "Firestorm!" I called out. A hundred fireballs of wildfire, each with ten mana added to give it force and explosive heat formed and shot forwards, impacting through the tree-line, starting a fire and causing a great slaughter to those caught in the area of effect.

I looked out on that field of the dead and dying, the screams of the terrified and injured ringing in my ears. It was awesome and awful, terrific and terrible. It was the raw and naked exercise of power. My magic's power over reality. My power over the Wildlings.

With that single move, a truth was made evident to all the men there, guardians of the Wall and Wildling alike.

The Wall would not fall. The Wildling attack was over, but for discussing the terms of their surrender.

This time Mu found a much less energetic and optimistic group in Mance's tent. Mu glided in and settled into place on the table. The bone-dressed man was absent, dead in yesterday's assault, and the squat woman who smelled of blood was gone as well, whether dead or simply absent I didn't know. The people that were there looked at Mu as if he might be a bomb.

"Here to accept our surrender?" Mance asked somewhat bitterly.

Mu cawed in laughter. "What, no thank you? After all, didn't I just do what you wanted?" I asked.

The men in the tent looked at Mu with narrowed eyes and questioning faces.

"What do you mean?" Tormund rumbled.

"Please. Mance knew all along that there was no chance you could take the Wall," I explained, "not with it actually defended. Ten to one, with equal quality of warriors and siege engines. That's what you need to take even a normal castle, let alone one so impressive as the Wall. And your men are hardly as dangerous as the men the North has gathered. You never stood a chance.

"But some of your people were too savage and violent to understand that; they had to be taught the hardest lesson, so that the rest of your people might learn the futility of struggle. Of course, he was hoping they'd cause more damage first, improve your negotiating stance a bit."

The bald man frowned. "Rattler was not of my people," he emphasized.

"Nonetheless. The point remains," I replied.

Mance's lips were pursed. "And now our negotiating stance is even weaker," he sort-of agreed, then sighed. "Very well. I assume you can take our surrender?"

"I can. Though those from the attack will not be allowed south of the Wall," I replied.

"What!" Rayder shouted, rising from his seat. "You can't just leave them for the Walkers!"

Mu shook his head in a strange parody of my own gesture. "And why not? I offered peace, and they spat on it. Such actions cannot be rewarded."

"There will be others who refuse to enter if such a circumstance comes to pass," he warned. "Perhaps as many as forty or fifty thousand, a full third of my host is related to or allied with groups that were part of that attack."

"Then they too may choose to die. You seem to misunderstand a simple fact, Rayder. I do not fear the Walkers, but I lack the patience to hunt down tens of thousands of rapists, murderers and other ne'er do wells throughout the North. I care not if your people see me as the very devil himself; those that enter the Seven Kingdoms will be peaceful."

Mu moved forward a bit, fixing him with unblinking eyes. "I would rather all your people dead and burned than have a single northern girl raped, a single northern farm raided," I said coldly. "I owe your people none of the protections and services I do to the Starks, and by extension the Starks' people. Your people have lived by the power of their arms, have killed and stolen by it, and have no right to complain when they die by it in turn. Those prepared to kill must be prepared to be killed.

"The only reason I am treating with you at all is that Lord Stark is far kinder, and wanted your people offered shelter, and convinced King Robert to agree with his plan," I said. I couldn't have them think of the Starks poorly, after all. "That, and the possibility I might not be able to burn all of your corpses and thus strengthen the Walkers' forces. But to be honest, I doubt a few thousand extra corpses here or there will make such a great difference compared to how many corpses the Walkers will raise against us."

Mance had been losing energy throughout my speech, sinking deeper and deeper into himself, cradling his head in his hands. "Is there nothing we can do to convince you?" he pleaded.

"What do you have that I could want?" I asked rhetorically.

The blonde woman grimaced and spoke up. "If you would forgive them, I would give you myself," she offered unexpectedly. With other people it might have worked; she was very pretty, and had that whole badass warrior-woman barbarian princess vibe going on. I could have dyed her hair and called her Xena; that might actually have been pretty fun, come to think of it. But I was not there to make friends, or gain a paramour.

Mu burst out into cawing laughter. "I have no interest in those who are with me out of anything but desire. But beyond that, I am lord to some four hundred thousand people. I am one of the richest and most powerful in Westeros, only arguably below the Lords Paramount, and have the ear of the King at court. I am a handsome and powerful young man, with numerous heroic deeds to my name. Do you honestly think, for a single second, that having one girl is such a prize?"

It was cruel, and her face showed it hurt. But I needed to be domineering; the free-folk were like vicious, wild animals. Worse, even. Give them an inch and they'd take a mile, then come back in the night, slit your throat, steal your boots and eat your corpse.

"Now, Mance Rayder, King-beyond-the-Wall, what is your answer?"

"We will swear our peace and surrender," he sighed. "And I will do what I can to convince people to leave behind wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, and pass through the Wall."

Back at Castle Black I grimaced at the reminder of what I was dooming people to, but they were truly the human equivalent of hyenas, vicious opportunistic predators. I had no desire to fill the North with mad dogs who thought to assault such a fortification as the Wall with so few people. It spoke to an inherent aggressiveness and lack of understanding of consequences that was unacceptable.

Hopefully those wise enough not to charge to their doom would be wise enough to keep my peace.

If not, my hounds would turn them to shit.

Literally.

But only after eating them alive.

A month later and the majority of Wildlings had finally finished trickling through the wall. I had had to be present for a dozen arguments and disagreements, my very presence serving to quell tempers and remind the no-longer-free folk what mercy they had been shown. I took hundreds of oaths in Robert's place, as did Robb in place of his father, and the Gift's population increased a hundredfold.

I had called for more and more of my burgeoning Hound population to come north. Eventually a full ten battalions, four thousand eight hundred hounds were there, helping ensure that the Wildlings didn't leave their reservations without approval. Ten companies of ravens supported them. Poe, the eldest of the Guard Ravens, was placed in overall command, while Fritz supported him.

I inverted their coloring from their ears and neck back, their coats a flat Night's Watch black and their markings, including my horse-archer sigil, in whites and light greys. They looked somewhat like giant Australian shepherds in their coloring afterwards. On their right shoulders they bore the words of their unit: "Watch-Force North." They were detached for semi-permanent support of the Night's Watch and peacekeeping with the free-folk immigrants, so I thought it would be appropriate that they bore the colors. That said, I wasn't giving the animals to the Watch, they were a loan.

Unfortunately none of the mammoths had had babies recently, and the giant's weren't willing to just give me some of their adults. Nor was I feeling cruel enough to just take them. In the end, we came to an agreement. I gave the mammoths and giants a few fixes to ensure that their genetics wouldn't deteriorate due to inbreeding from the small population that was all they had left, extended their lifespans to help repopulation, and ensured that the giants would get extra support from the Starks and Night's Watch getting established. In return they promised me some of the more genetically disparate calves once they were born. It might take a while though; mammoth pregnancies could last as long as two years.

As for the giants, they didn't have much magic; it was more that their biology was radically different, adapted for size and strength, sort of like a gorilla's as opposed to a man's. Nor were the mammoth's magical. All in all it was quite the disappointment.

I spent most of my spare time in February fruitlessly pursuing teleportation. Then in March I got sick of it, and decided since I lacked any idea of what to do with regards to teleportation, I may as well improve my mana cultivation and personal upgrades. I had more than enough mana to do so, with about a full order of magnitude more than I had had when I last upgraded myself.

Similar to last time, I found that my increased ability to manipulate and condense mana as well as spell structures meant I could improve both the efficiency, concept and sheer power behind my effects.

In Blue I once again improved my mana senses, thought acceleration, and then each again. Truly those were some of the most important enhancements, allowing me to manipulate mana more finely and quickly to create more complex and effective patterns, whether for enchantment or a more temporary spell.

Then I improved my precognitive ability, seeing a wider band of possibilities a longer distance into the future. I was getting more and more control of it, able to use my precognition to further speed up my thinking and problem solving by finding the answer that I would have found had I spent seconds to minutes thinking about it. I could anticipate in the future being able to keep multiple parallel mental processes by simultaneously being precognitively aware of different mental states that I could be having. What was even better was that the gains I made by clever application of precognition were multiplicative onto gains I made with spells.

I had been using the Mental Ward spell long enough, playing with ways to break through, that I was able to fix many of those issues for both subtle and overt attacks. I also took the time to really work out a variable form enchantment with the communications link; now it was effectively an integrated telephone capable of contacting individuals or groups, while preserving prior functionality. I still had to act as the relay, however, which wasn't optimal; I wanted my hounds and ravens to be able to contact each other without my being involved, but couldn't quite get that part of the enchantment working.

For my Green effects, I grew massively stronger physically, now able to quite easily bend and tear sheets of metal with my bear hands. My oakflesh went past being like bronze into being like iron then steel, making me incredibly hard to harm. The strength of the regeneration was powerful enough that it was like looking at the wound being re-round in time. Still not the perfect regeneration of someone like Wolverine, capable of healing literally anything, but it was getting there slowly. Even my transformed dragon-based bones improved, becoming more magically powerful and conductive, while being naturally more difficult to damage even before the oakflesh effect was added on top.

In fact, the combination of subtle optimizations I had been doing, and the straight-up biological upgrades I had experienced pushed my natural state, without any magics, over the edge of the utmost human performance. I was, in short, Captain America even without any magic at all; with it, I was far more powerful and tough, and healed much, much faster.

Within Red I continued to push on my speed, the idea that I was free of the usual constraints of time, that I could move as fast as I wished. It was reaching the point that when I really pushed my speed I could break the speed of sound with my fastest punch. The increased impact effect on top of that meant that a full speed and power punch that I stopped about a centimeter into a tree would cause the trunk to shatter and splinter, sometimes even enough to bring down the entire tree. I also managed to upgrade the fireproof effect, bringing the allowable temperature up to two thousand degrees C and making it slightly resistant to magical fire.

My defensive effects got a big boost with White. The stored healing energy was significant, enough to stave off most every life-threatening injury that didn't kill you all at once. The strength of the conceptual armor had gone from similar to being in a suit of plate armor to being inside a lightly armored vehicle. On top of that, the projectile shield would need to be hit by extended bursts of high caliber machinegun fire, or successive light cannon rounds or something similar to break through. I was a big fan of survivability, and glad that mine was increasing. Furthermore, I figured out how to make the Anti-Undead Aura a good bit stronger and larger; I suspected that wights would only be barely effective against large concentrations of my troops when I upgraded them with it.

From Black, the anti-disease and toxin effects got stronger, as did my ability to derive benefit from consuming things. I still couldn't consume objects that didn't qualify as food. However, where before I got all the nutritional value, chemical energy, and a very small amount of essence from my food, I was now getting a significant amount of essence and an as-yet negligible rate of adaptation based on whatever natural advantages my food had over me.

That last was extremely exciting, as it meant my natural physique could improve a lot more in the future, providing a better baseline for my magical effects to build off of. I was generally wary of doing too many biological experiments to myself or my friends, for fear of harming them, which meant that a slow but steady and most of all automatic improvement would be a god-send.

Green did make some natural as well as supernatural improvements too, but that was more extremely sped up evolution than adoption of others' mechanisms. There was even synergy between the two; when my adaptation rate got better, I could evolve creatures with Green to improve their own natural state, then consume them to get those advantages myself.

To be honest, my mana was increasing faster than my skill at that point; had I spent more time practicing and pushing the envelope on my magic, I might have eked out another level of performance when doing my upgrades. Still, I was growing so fast, and so much in advance of any threats that I faced, that I wasn't overly worried.

With that sorted out, I applied similar upgrades to Jon, Togo, Aethon, Ghost, Shadowfax, Nevermore, Hue and Mu.

That took long enough that the Wildlings were pretty much processed. More would arrive over time, fleeing ahead of the White Walkers, but my presence at the Wall became unnecessary. Now any of my Guard-tier animals that needed to could contact me, so if and when the White Walkers and their zombie armies arrived I would hear about it and be back with plenty of time to spare. I didn't even need to leave Hue or Mu behind for communications. It was awesome.

I left for Harrenhal with Jon at my side and peace in my wake.

Chapter 35: Fief-Up

We arrived just after it became April. As we were now entering into Winter, it was cool for spring, more similar to English weather than I had grown used to. Namely, wet and cool. The plants didn't seem to mind, luckily.

In my absence, Harrenhal had been growing well. The paper and printing production had been allowed to reinvest all the subsidy money that was equal to what they would have been getting had I been selling my basic guides to my people, rather than giving them away, and all of the proceeds they were getting from selling my Farmer's Guide and blank books for notes and documents.

Once all of the new facilities came online and the workers were trained and experienced I hoped they could manage a full half-million pages a day. That would let me print enough guides on country living, religion, and literacy/numeracy to put one in every family home in the Seven Kingdoms within fifty years.

They were already building half a dozen new halls to fit everything in. Between that and my expanding metalworks I had had to get the Tullys and Robert on board with allowing me a charter for a city to account for the burgeoning population of workers.

That said when I got back there, I realized there was still a lot to do. After being in the cooler and thus less pungent North, I was assailed by the scents of humanity. I decided to do something about, to look after my people properly after being gone for so long.

It was early April, nine months after I had Balanced and developed the mana-bonding spell. I had a massive quantity of four thousand mana in my pool, and a cycle time of just under a minute.

After charting it out, I had figured out the rules governing my mana growth. The daily growth to my total mana was a constant plus a coefficient times the mana I had raised to a power. The coefficient was related to how well I resonated to a color of mana. If I were to define resonance on a 1-10 scale, then every mana color with a resonance above 5 added 0.2 to the coefficient, while every mana color with a resonance below 5 subtracted 0.2 from the coefficient.

For the power, it seemed to be related to a function of the resonance minus five that added up the integers greater than zero for that number. In other words, function of two was equal to three (one plus two), of three was six (one plus two plus three), four was ten, etc. This function was then divided by the sum of the possible resonance, or fifty (maximum resonance of ten times five colors).

The mana growth was thus exponential, but only grew at ridiculous speeds when the color resonance was high. The fact that I cultivated all colors was actually a major limiting factor for my growth. But necessary to avoid shifts in personality. Luckily it seemed that when my mana within a color was greater than that color's resonance raised to the power of that resonance (eg, if resonance is five, then five ^ five), then the resonance would increase.

Given sufficient time, my mana growth would become explosively exponential, just as with a single mana color, but the diversity would give me greater flexibility while avoiding mental contamination.

In short, the TL;DR…

My mana in April was more than enough to play Sim City in real life, and would only grow from there.

I always liked Sim City.

I drew on the dirt, forming it into stone and then that stone into a foundation for my town. The roads became like concrete. Beyond the original boundary of the town I continued to expand the system of roads, round-a-bouts at each intersection. I laid out enough ground for my city to grow an entire order of magnitude, though I suspected it would be some time before that occurred.

Below and to the side of the streets were sewers, with points for people to put in their liquid waste, and storm-drains to channel water to rinse the sewers. I modified a toad to live in the sewers, with Black enchantments to make it impossible to sicken and a White driven compulsion to stay in the sewers and keep them clean by attacking anything that stuck to the walls or began to pile up.

I raised a thick wall around my city of seamless stone. There were covered parapets with arrow slits. They overhung the walls with murder-holes to allow my defenders to drop things on those who were attacking. Towers were spaced along it, and double-gated gatehouses raised at the corners for entry purposes.

Then I extended the road to the main gates of my castle, and grew more walls to turn that space between castle and city into a ward where I could establish more factories, greenhouses, fields for horses or whatever else I needed.

Then I went into my castle, my people's somewhat terrified gratitude still ringing in my ears, and I got to work.

I decided I was going to work on five things. First, I would learn smithing to the point I could make the true form of Valyrian steel without assistance. My people had been getting by in my absence by using the special Valyrian forge I had made. It allowed them to process ingots of metal I had already enchanted with the Valyrian Blessing.

The blessing actually added all the magic to the metal that the full Valyrian steel enchantment needed; the rest was shaping the enchantment itself. In Qohor they used blood magic to loosen the enchantment from the steel, allowing them to work on both; I had a special spell built into one of the furnaces to do the same thing. But I wanted to be able to make true Valyrian steel products on my own.

Second, I realized that it would be incredibly useful to get a glassworks in operation. Not only were jars great for storing food, with enough sheet glass I could have greenhouses to keep my people well fed even in the harshest Winter.

Third, I wanted to upgrade the plants that my people farmed. Better vegetables like tomatoes, onions, carrots, and leafy greens. Better crops for the four-field rotation of wheat, barley, turnips and clover. Better legumes and other beans to act as nitrogen fixers. Better apples, berries, and other fruit. Better farming tools, and produce processing tools would likely be useful as well.

Fourth, I wanted to figure out teleportation. It was driving me crazy.

So I portioned out my days, and I got to work.

Every morning I spent with my top smiths, getting them to teach me how to do everything they knew. They started me off with the very basics. Surprisingly, a lot of smithing was figuring out what blend of materials to use to get good quality steel. My basic oxygen furnace/Bessemer converter took away a lot of the difficulty from that, but it was still an issue for them. The difference between a common smith and a good one was knowing how to pick out and combine the right materials in the right ratios.

Of course, my visual acuity and image processing was much stronger than a normal human's after all of my upgrades, and that helped a lot. But I was trying to push my magic whenever possible, so along with developing the basic skills, I developed a spell to tell me the composition of the materials.

I called it, of course, Structural Grasp. I had no idea if it might lead to some sort of artificial reality marble if I could perfectly grasp and memorize objects, but it seemed like a good thing to aim for.

With that, I quickly learned how to balance impurities, carbon content and iron to get good batches of iron and steel.

My teachers skipped over a lot of the mechanics of the forge; I had had to learn those to build my metalworks in the first place, after all. So I got to skip pumping bellows, and move right onto manipulating metal. Here again I used magic as much as possible, Grasping the materials to know how stressed they were, heating, annealing and quenching with fire magic to affect their hardness, manipulating the metal with telekinesis.

They didn't say much, but I could tell my smiths wished they had had my advantages when they were learning.

Finally they moved me onto the apex of skill in Westeros: plate armor, and folded steel blades.

Plate armor is difficult because it has to be closely fitted and carefully worked. A bad fit can wear at the user, put undue stress on their body, catch when making certain movements and cause other issues. Beyond that, the plates need to be treated carefully to avoid having overly brittle work-hardened areas where an enemy's attack could penetrate. Building a full suit of armor was thus a difficult endeavor, and a mark of the maker's skill.

Folded steel blades had two hurdles to success. First, the smith needed to select up to five pieces of good but different carbon-content steel to work. If any of those had impurities, extra particles, a poor steel composition, or any other issue it could cause the whole blade to fail. Unlike in the modern age, where I could have ordered these billets with precise metallurgical composition, that selection took real skill. Luckily, I had structural grasp.

Second, there was a lot of work to go into one of those. The steel had to be beaten out and folded back in on itself, doubling and redoubling in layers until it might be over a thousand layers thick. There was heating, quenching, and annealing to do as well, all of which were difficult to control without high temperature sensors to take the temperature. A single mistake in any of these processes and the blade may be damaged. Unlike a blade made of a single piece of steel, once the steel was folded the billets of metal were no longer recoverable.

Days turned into weeks into months as I worked on smithing in the morning. Sometimes Jon would look in on me, but he had no real interest in smithing. Instead he focused on leading the training for the twenty odd boys and half-dozen girls who had qualified as squire-candidates from my archery program, and got to know the two actual squires who had qualified via horse archery. Dany was mostly focused on little Lila; I saw little of her save at mealtimes. She haunted the library mostly, reading to herself and her daughter, played with the animals and helped teach the squires and squire candidates their numbers; she was quite popular among the young men.

Then I was finally pronounced the equal to any of the smiths in my employ. That day I forged my first Valyrian steel blade on my own. The experience was entirely different from doing so as part of a group, my understanding of the conceptual cutting effect far improved when I applied it myself. I could tell that there was something more to the effect now, a possibility of applying that same impossibly effective edge not to a blade, but to a telekinetic structure. A vorpal blade projection, one might call it.

It was still beyond me, but something I might research in the future; it could easily turn into one of my more potent evocations.

While I worked on smithing in the morning, in the afternoons I worked on a glassworks. My territory had a decent supply of clean sand near the lake, and by June the alchemists were able to come up with a mixture that produced a reasonably strong and clear variant of soda-lime glass. The glassworks had two sides to it.

One side used a tin-float system under positive pressure of nitrogen gas to make large quantities of sheet glass for windows and greenhouses. There were ten workers there, and they could make a total of a quarter million square meters of glass a year. Each square meter of glass sold for five silver stags; I had wanted to make it two and a half, but was told that was simply too cheap. Even at five stags I had to restrict the amount that foreign merchants could buy; I wanted my people to get the glass for their windows and greenhouses first.

The other side of the glassworks had a full sixty seven workers, trained by Myrish glass workers stolen away from slavery at great risk and expense. While some work on colored glass and other luxuries was done, the shaped glass side mostly worked machines to blow out glass jars. I had taken a bit of the rubber from the boots I was wearing when I arrived in Westeros and made a magically modified tree to produce rubber. That let me have gaskets put onto the jars, making air-tight seals. It wasn't perfect vacuum sealing, but it was a massive improvement over what the previous technology was capable of. It used a production line was at two million jars a year, and already there were plans for three new shaped-glassworks to be raised and occupied when enough extra workers could be trained.

Of course, none of it would have been possible without magic. I used magic to form shapes for machines, to enchant parts to have superior performance, to heat, cool, and move objects, to partition gasses, and on and on and on.

By June I was done with metal. By July the glassworks needed little of my input, and I had transitioned away from metal and glass. Instead I worked on improving agricultural yields again, this time by improving my plants. I didn't want to cause too much ecological upset, or create invasive super-wheat or some other disaster, so I kept the modifications mostly within reason.

I gave the plants the sorts of things that were pretty obvious, but would make a massive difference for my farmers; after upgrades, my plants were somewhat more resistant to heat and cold, too much or too little water, and less likely to rot. The yields were more bountiful, and individual fruits, vegetables and grains had higher concentrations of nutrients. They were just generally better, rather than trying some crazy idea derived from genetic engineering's hopes for true super-crops. I guess that's why I wasn't so interested in them; compared to my animals, my plants were just too mundane.

I still transformed many of my fields; once the harvest was in anyone in my territory would be allowed to trade their seed grain in at a one-to-one ratio. In a year or three I had no doubt that my farmers would see massive improvements to the quality of their crops. Which meant healthier, happier peasants, and more tax income.

Other than that, I formed a working group of some of the more innovative and mechanically minded to improve processes, create new machines, and turn my half-remembered descriptions of tools into reality. They managed to get a few prototypes of mechanical reapers and seed drills built, and full production of those would begin soon. That would allow for a lot more land to be farmed, improve yields per acre, and increase productivity per capita.

I had noticed one problem caused by the Pest-eating birds; they had driven mice, rats and other vermin out of the fields and into my castle and city. I really needed a cat to go after them, but didn't want to end up making some super cat that would drive all sorts of birds and other prey to extinction. Then I had a clever idea; I made a cat which was scared of the outdoors.

More specifically, I made a cat with a high degree of White to it. It could manage to be out in orderly areas, farms, villages and roads, but was really happiest indoors. But it had an aversion to Green, to avoid nature, and a hatred for Black, to kill vermin. The cats were made smaller than normal, just a little larger than the rats that they were designed to hunt, but with physical improvements and increased toughness. They were absolutely adorable serial killers, their metabolism linked to how much they ate. Destroying vermin made them happy, and so they would kill and kill and kill. Then when no vermin was present, their appetites would diminish and they would be happy to laze about someone's home.

My house-cats proved extremely effective, and quickly had my castle clear of pests. I had some of my tax-collectors bring them out to distribute to farming communities and turned dozens of them loose on my little city.

The humans were well under control as well. A hundred and twenty companies of Hounds kept it that way, though many were still puppies and the companies were still coming up to full strength. Thirty companies of Ravens supported them.

I had decided that I would begin to grow my human forces relatively soon, and had sent out agents to purchase six hundred mares and a hundred and twenty stallions all of a quality to be used by a knight. As they arrived I transformed them into Guards Horses, suitable to be used by my future soldiers. I drove them into a bit of a breeding frenzy; in the future the front line units would use the stallions and geldings which were less valuable for reproduction.

Chapter 36: Travel

I had noticed while riding to and from the fields where I made my enhanced produce that the roads in my territory sucked. I wanted to do something about it, something other than wandering about the place slowly raising roads using my magic. But on the other hand, I had no patience to design and oversee the building of a British industrial-revolution era style highway. Not to mention the time – Britain's roads had sprung up over decades, whereas I wanted results within months. At some point I would start some rail lines, but that wasn't needed yet.

No, like I did so often, I turned to biological manipulation to solve this problem for me. Using Green, White for order and some Blue for calculation, I designed a plant which would drop road-seeds. These road seeds needed to be activated by an acid like vinegar or citrus to grow. After being activated, they would rapidly grow a system of roots, anchoring the plant. These roots would connect to other nearby plants' roots, allowing them to communicate and share information.

The plant would spread a network of sprouts to detect the lay of the land. Then the plant would grow a platform that was gently curved to connect to the neighboring platforms, conform to the land, and otherwise be as flat as possible with a slight convex shape for drainage. The platforms were all raised a half-foot off the ground, so that drainage to the side of the road wasn't an issue, with bands of waist-high brush help keep traffic on the road and act as a central divider.

Once the platform reached a certain size which depended on how much acid was used to activate it, maxing out at about a four-lane highway, it would stop growing. The platforms themselves were just rough enough for a good grip, photosynthetic and tougher than steel with a natural toughness enchantment strengthening the already hard wood. The root system removed issues of the road's underlying surface being washed away.

To remove a section of road, you could dig around the side to be close to the roots, then treat them with salt mixed with a base such as soap. The plant would die and rapidly rot away. The same method could be used to remove the brush to allow entrances and exits. To make a new one, you needed a seed which only I produced.

I had the Ravens coordinate with the Hounds to plan out improved road routes throughout my territory, then sent them out with leather water-skins containing vinegar and baskets full of seeds. My greenroads grew like weeds across the map of my territory. It made it far easier for goods to be transported across the land, and soon I was selling my seeds at about eighty dragons for enough to grow a mile of highway. The Seven Kingdoms had some ten thousand miles of major roads, and I had no doubt that in time all would be grown from my seeds.

By August my roads were spread across my land and I was entirely sick and tired of playing estate manager.

Teleportation was proving more difficult than I had expected, and no matter how fast and strong Aethon was, or I was for that matter, there were issues with physical force and the physics of how to move much faster than we were going, especially over rough ground. Flight would take care of those issues.

Furthermore, there was the basic question: can any land-bound mage truly call themselves a proper wizard?

I thought not, so flight was essential.

I had thought about all the different ways I might do it; running on telekinetic platforms, blasted about in a bubble of air, changing the direction of gravity, and so on. I also had the dragon eggs, still waiting to be hatched, and whatever bit of magic it was that dragons used to keep their massive bulks aloft.

But I didn't want to bring dragons back, not yet. Not while I was still unready.

When I had dragons, I needed for them to be able to be my sole focus. I needed to be able to watch them, see how their minds formed, ensure that they would be obedient to me, that no other could steal them from me, that they would not grow in power to challenge me. Dragons were mighty enough, the local equivalent to the atom bomb.

After I was done with them, they would be upgraded from city-killing fission bombs to country cracking fusion bombs though. I needed to be absolutely sure of my interactions with them, and free from all distractions.

Honestly, I didn't even want the distraction of getting home to be there when I woke the dragons. Optimally, I would figure out a way home, reunite with and upgrade my family, and then return to achieve my childhood dream of being a dragon-mounted mage-knight.

So in the end I went with a simple telekinetic field as my flight mechanism.

I say simple, but the enchantment was anything but. Based mostly on Blue for the active control and intelligent reading and reacting to my physical signals, the enchantment made a skin-tight telekinetic field around my body. Then with a lot of fine tuning I had the field react to my movements, small instinctive twists of the hips and shoulders to spin about, movements in the torso that on the ground would help me dodge to get lateral motion, leaning forwards and backwards to accelerate or slow down.

The outside of the field was actually a lightly armored reactive shell that hugged my skin. It counteracted most of the force of wind-pressure so I didn't feel like I was getting blasted by a tornado while I was whipping about. At higher speeds a teardrop shape would form for better aerodynamics, though the movement-driven inertia responses would still send me moving about as I wanted unless I turned it off and went into cruise control.

There was a backup mode that let me use set amounts of force in specific directions, but that wasn't as intuitive to use especially while doing other things.

If all this sounds easy, trust me, it wasn't. I had to stop practicing in the castle after I hit an interior wall hard enough to crack it. It took over a week just to design a prototype of the spell, and I was still fine tuning this and that months later. Still, by the end of August it was functional if not perfect, and I had learned a lot about simple forces, my body, and control-reaction loops in enchanting.

It gave me the idea to develop magically-motivated power armor someday, but the idea of doing more of that fiddly work at the time was anathema to me.

There were two big issues with the flight enchantment. First, I saw no easy way to apply it to Jon, let alone the different bodies of Aethon, Shadowfax, Togo and Ghost. Instead I developed a flight ride-along, something to keep their relative position with regards to me the same so I could carry them about on a flight if I wanted.

Second, the enchantment was only the structure of the spell; much like an airplane, it still needed to be actively fueled to fly. That was fine for me, but even for those as heavily enchanted as Jon and the others there just wasn't enough mana available for continuous or high speed flight.

If I wanted them to be independently flight capable, I really needed to look into ambient mana gathering, mana storage, and mana generation. I was sure all three were possible, just probably really difficult, at least in the quantities that I needed.

I wasn't too bothered though. I always loved my dreams of flying, and being able to do it for real was awesome.

Buoyed up with my success I decided to turn my hand once more to teleportation. Previously I had tried many, many failed methods to instantly transport myself. As failed teleportation seemed potentially dangerous, I tested it with a combination of precognition and small animals. I killed a lot of small animals named Science! in the process.

But Science! the First through Eight Hundred and Seventy Fourth would not die in vain! That I swore.

The closest to an actual teleportation I managed was to project the pattern of their mana onto a slightly distant spot and then force the body to move there. Sometimes Science! didn't even explode on the other end or disappear into the aether, just coming out horrifically disfigured. Then progress slowed once more to a crawl.

One day I was feeling particularly bored and lazy. I had been trying and failing to manage teleportation for all of August. I had no new ideas to try. And so there I lay in one of my labs, trying to summon the motivation to get some work done. A large number of Science!s were in cages against one of the walls.

Without really thinking about it, I reached out to one of the Science!s, a squirrel in one of the series which had been pre-treated for toughness in the hopes that that would help to survive teleportation (it didn't). I tugged on that faint, nebulous link between us, provided some mana, and wished he was in my hands.

Science! the twelve hundred eight first disappeared from his cage and into my hands.

I blinked down at Science! the 1281st, and he blinked his eyes us at me. A wide, wide grin spread across my face. I tossed Science!across the room (it's not animal cruelty when the animal is literally tougher than the stones) and tried again.

Science! the 1281st promptly exploded all over me.

"FOR FUCK'S SAKE!" I screamed. Then I ranted, raved, tossed my chair against the wall, swore like a sailor and screamed a bit in my rage.

Eventually I got it out of my system. Panting and once more calm, I looked at Science! the 1282nd and teleported him.

It worked!

I laughed and laughed and laughed in my joy, and didn't stop until my stomach hurt.

It was far from what I needed to return home, but every journey begins with a first step.

For the rest of September I practiced with my new skill, which I called Calling (since it called animals to me). I investigated the important questions: why Science! would sometimes explode; how much mana it cost to transport Science!; whether distance mattered for possibility of transportation, exactness required of mana manipulation or quantity of mana supplied; what happened if I used a little more mana than needed; what happened if I used a lot more mana than needed; whether I could teleport something twice at the same time to make a duplicate, etc.

I found out a few things. First of all, the mana required to transport Science! did vary. It started off as what seemed to be the exact amount of mana that was bound in all the active enchantments plus the animal's own essential manna pattern, which was basically the energetic description of that being. Then it approached a maximum of two times that much energy. That maximum was asymptotically approached, so after a few hundred miles the extra mana was pretty negligible.

Both too much and too little mana were deadly. Too much and the pattern would be distorted when it arrived. If the animal was lucky, the corpse was merely mangled and unrecognizable. Unlucky, and it fucking exploded, spraying blood everywhere. Too little and the animal would just disappear, poof! Gone, disappeared into the aether. I tried tracking them with a sympathetic bonding, but the bonding just straight up disappeared.

This actually led to the development of one of my most powerful spells yet. I called it Exile. It used a single White mana to seize hold of a creature's pattern, then a single colorless to initiate teleportation to a preset destination; I used the Wall. It was a simple, clean, eradication of any target. The only ways I could see them blocking it was if they could either avoid my mana senses, or prevent the forceful teleportation.

Then, because that wasn't effective enough, I came up with Mass Exile. Basically, instead of just using White to target a single pattern, it used multiple Whites and targeted multiple patterns at a time. I added a Blue refinement to auto-target patterns within a certain area as well, making it area-of-effect rather than multi-targeted.

It was a fucking terrifying magic. I knew I sure as fuck couldn't survive it if someone tried it against me, and it was cheap. So very, very cheap. If I'd done the right research, I could have been casting it weeks after arriving in Winterfell, after waking my magic. So I came up with a defense against it. I called it Stability, and its purpose was to break apart anything that tried to take hold of my pattern. Failing that, it tried to siphon off the energy from the teleportation effect, storing it or dumping it into an aura of light, heat, electricity; anything to bleed off the power.

The exactness of the mana manipulation when I wasn't purposefully miscasting teleportation to kill shit was a bit difficult, especially over longer ranges. I ended up making a buffer spell, a construct that I could slightly over-charge and then have it feed the mana required. Ironically, that buffer spell was based on and inspired by the Blue area-of-effect spell-component from Mass Exile. The buffer drastically reduced mistakes with long distance Calling. When I added a bit of wiggle room on the exact location where the called would appear, it ended the mistakes. But I was still having issues with short distance calling.

Every now and then, things would disappear or explode after the pattern became unstable when doing short distance calling, and I couldn't figure out why. Eventually I figured it out when I was trying to do a duplicated teleportation. By calling the same object twice, or really providing twice as much mana and then splitting the pattern, much the same way I did to cast multiple enchantments at once, I was hoping to be able to get a second creature on the other end.

It would be awesome; I could grow my army as fast as I could Call, make more wooly mammoths for the giants and then take some of them, and when I figured out how to duplicate items literally make permanent copies of materials. It was a grail technology, one of those things that are just at the very, very edge of what's possible, and something that if you can achieve it has an utterly transformative effect on life.

When I got it to work, it explained why the short range teleportation kept failing. Copies always cost exactly the amount of mana as the creature's basic pattern plus all enchantments and active magics. The teleportation for short ranges where the mana for teleporting and copying was the same meant that the magic wasn't sure if it wanted to teleport the original, or to make a copy.

The copies also weren't exact. Instead of the exact same song, it was like someone else singing the song in a different key, or a rock band doing a cover of a jazz song. Recognizably the same, but also different. There was a limit to how many copies I could make of a pattern, four per actual animal. I could tell that as I got better at magic, I might be able to make more finely defined, cleaner copies which would allow for more than four.

I decided that I didn't like the word copies, and would instead call them summons. Making a summons was summoning, while teleporting an existing creature was calling.

It was also important to note that summons weren't the originals. They had much of the same skills and knowledge, but none of the same experiences. In other words, a human summons might know fire was hot, because the original once burned themselves, but wouldn't have any memory of that event. Furthermore, they were literally made from my magic, something that I had an inherent control over, and that control persisted into the summons.

They started off as something in between an automaton and a true copy of the creature they were based off of. I imagined that it was sort of like using clone troopers; obviously intelligent and human, but lacking a certain essential something that made them aliveinstead of just living. If I didn't want them to change, if I wanted to keep them as semi-static mana patterns, they didn't even need to eat. Just absorb enough ambient mana, or get topped off enough by me to avoid their mana patterns from slowly falling apart.

On the other hand, if I fed them food, allowed them new experiences, and basically just wanted them to then over time they would grow more and more alive. I had a few long-term experiments running to verify my suspicions that given enough time, enough life, they would eventually become true creatures which could serve as originals to call or summon off of.

It was far easier to perform summonings at a distance than it was to teleport a creature to a place where I wasn't. The trick was that I had to use a bond to target it. In other words, I could summon a creature to me (via the original's bond to me), next to the original (ditto), next to a different creature (via that creature's bond to me, though that was difficult) or to one of my bonded lands (though the exact location wasn't too accurate for that last one).

Once I figured out how to do that, it didn't take too many Science!s to figure out how to Push not just summonings but callings as well. Pushing, of course, being the term for summoning or calling to a place where I was not located, as opposed to a simple summoning or calling to where I was.

This allowed another defense against Exile. Should someone manage to get past the Stability defense, there was a second layer, a spell I called Asylum. It was a dual-buffered pre-prepared teleportation spell set to send the creature on which it was applied to Harrenhal. Basically, it had both an empty buffer to accept any extra energy that the enemy who tried to exile them was applying so the teleportation couldn't get overly full, and a full buffer to perform an immediate teleportation to a land inside the greater territory of Harrenhal.

Once I had that working on the Science!s, and had upgraded all of my friends and loyal creatures to defend against enemies who could exile them, I felt like I might be able to teleport myself without too much fear.

I just had some preparations to do first, just to be safe.

Chapter 37: Final Preparations

I knew that despite all of my testing and everything else that the teleportation was going to be risky. I wanted to make sure that if anything happened to me my lands would be fine. I officially made Jon my heir, and took care of everything that I needed to within my fief.

It had been a while since I last worked on upgrades for myself, about eight months, and so it was time for a new set. As was usual, I started off with mana sensing and thought acceleration. Those more than anything determined how good my spellcasting was, as the thought acceleration let me manipulate mana faster, forming it into finer patterns before the mana structure started to fray, while mana sensing gave me more fine mana control and precision.

Then I improved my precognition; it was really getting to the point where if I devoted some time to it, then it could start opening up secondary powers. For example, mental partitions by simulating multiple precognitive points of view. I was fairly sure I was capable of that, with some training. I just had to find the time for it.

I continued to improve the mental ward, preventing telepathic intrusion or assault. I also took a few days to finally iron out the kinks in the communications link. Part of the teleporting buffer structure that made calling my creatures to me safe enough to use had involved coming up with a better way of storing mana. With that, I was able to make the communications device self-powered. Creatures could register a specific number, and then be contacted via it.

Honestly, that was one of the most impactful enchantments I'd come up with. It turned my Ravens into a cellular network. I had no idea what long term implications that would have. How it might change and stifle innovation into electricity, for example. But I did know that it meant Robert, Ned, and Westeros as a whole had an unparalleled military advantage.

After finishing with my Blue, I moved onto Green. I improved my supernatural physique to even more ridiculous heights, my unrestrained strength capable of treating steel like particularly dense clay. My oakflesh also improved significantly, to the point where my body was more like tungsten or a super-strong steel alloy. My regeneration factor got stronger and faster, practically remaking whatever part was injured as soon as it happened. Not that that was easy, now; only Valyrian steel wielded with my impressive strength was capable of causing practical levels of damage. I further improved my skeletal structure, making it stronger, tougher, and more able to take the extreme stresses I put it under.

In Red, I continued to enhance my reaction speed and haste effects, applying the concept of freedom from time ever more strongly. I could easily break the sound barrier with my blows by this point, destroying trees with even light contact given the upgrade to my increased impact effect. I also improved my heat resistance, now keeping me safe up to around twenty-five hundred Celsius, about the same temperature as an incandescent light bulb filament, or twice the temperature of lava.

White continue to show good improvements in defensive effects. I upgraded the energy I kept in the stored heal, and applied some of my new knowledge in summoning and teleportation to allow it to try and return a heavily damaged mana-pattern to the original. In Science! test cases, it showed effectiveness in returning a destroyed head with only a moment of memory loss; it looked creepy as hell to watch though.

My conceptual armor had improved from being similar to the protection offered by an armored car to being similar to the protection offered by a Bradley armored fighting vehicle. It didn't just help against physical damage, but really any incoming attack would have to deal with that level of conceptual resistance to harm. Thinking of it in terms of vehicle armor was just a way of understanding that in a less abstract form.

The projectile shield saw similar levels of improvement. The level of damage needed to break through it was getting insane. A sustained cannon barrage might manage it, or a massed artillery strike, but short of that I doubted I'd have much of an issue. It was, honestly, excessive for Westeros. Even for modern Earth it was getting to the point where, given my speed and everything else, I doubted I had much to worry about.

Other than that, I managed to continue to develop the anti-undead aura, making it both larger and more powerful. I had no doubt that if the White Walker's wights tried to close with a tight-packed formation of my hounds that the wights might suffer too much damage to fight just from the aura. It made me feel much more confident in the future of Westeros.

Black continued to allow some significant gains in disease and toxin immunity. I suspected that it would take not just a magical disease or poison, but one intended to defeat magical countermeasures to have a chance at harming me. My ability to consume improved a significant amount. Now I could strip food for nutrition, energy, and essence, as well as incorporate a significant amount of whatever natural advantages that food had into myself. My muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves, organs, sight, hearing, smell; all of those began to slowly improve themselves. I could do a set of upgrades to animals now and then incorporate them via consumption, eliminating the risk of biological rejection and poor matching in biological subsystems that would reduce effectiveness.

After I was done with my own upgrades, I began to push them out to Jon, Togo, Aethon, Ghost, Shadowfax, and all of my other friends, adopted family, and loyal Guard beasts.

As October came to a close and I finished with the latest round of upgrades, I had one more preparation left: to make sure my army was unbeatable at least in the short term. There was an easy way to do that; I summoned a full half of my maximum summoning limit, instantly tripling my Guard's complement of Hounds, Ravens and Horses.

It took a truly obscene amount of mana, nearly a million all told. But I had a pool of over nine thousand, and my mana-recharge time was under forty seconds. I had a mana supply of over eight hundred and seventy five thousand mana per hour. With my lands safe and secure, Jon warned of the possibilities, letter written just in case, I was ready.

I tried to teleport to one of the staging grounds where the Hounds of Watch-Force North lived.

It was a total success. I was one step closer to getting home.

The next step was to figure out one of two things. Either I had to learn how to make a bond with a distant land, and use that as a teleportation target, or I had to learn how to send a creature to a place where I didn't have a bond, and use that creature as a teleportation target.

I spent a few weeks working on the first option before giving up. It just wasn't working. Oh, I could use my mana-bonding spell, and with relative ease have it target somewhere far away. With the amount of mana I had available, I could send it all the way around the world. I just couldn't get it to leave the world.

I was starting to get a little disheartened, so I decided that it would be better to take a break and do something I knew I could manage. Specifically, adapting summoning, calling and pushing to provide and store equipment. It didn't take long, merely being a mildly different variation on the teleportation spells. It did mean that I had the next best thing to an unlimited inventory though; while things weren't stored on me, I could easily send them to a storage room in Harrenhal or retrieve them from the same.

Reassured that I could, in fact, make progress with teleportation I dug back into it. Remote land bonding wasn't possible, but I figured that pushing a creature to a location that I wasn't truly connected to might be possible.

I had an idea that I might be able to use a search spell to create a temporary location marker to push a creature to. I tried a lot of things; spells meant to identify specific geographical features, spells meant to home in on specific mana patterns, matching blood, matching features, matching astronomical signs even, and on and on and on. None of it worked consistently on Westeros, and there were zero successes in managing to get to another world at all, let alone the world that I grew up on.

November came to a close, and it was looking like this would be another Christmas where my family had no knowledge of my whereabouts or even survival.

Fuck that, I decided.

I was resolved to figure out a way.

The answer literally came to me in a dream.

Dreams.

They were naturally nebulous, thought to link humans on a mental and spiritual plane that transcended distance and even time. Beyond that, they fell under the domain of the mind, which was Blue, the color of magic that I had the greatest affinity to.

I hadn't been able to cast a curse through a sympathetic blood link a couple years ago, when that shitty Lannister incest baby Joffrey and his wicked bitch of a mother were being so problematic. But that was a long time in the past. I was a much stronger mage now; it was like comparing Monet's first finger paintings as a child to his later masterpieces.

I offered a gold dragon to several members of the same families who worked in my castle. Many were nervous, but enough took me up on the offer. Within about a week, I could form a sympathetic link between immediate members of the same blood family.

I worried that my upgrades might make it difficult for me to establish a link, so I tested that out with drops of Jon's blood and that of Daenerys and Lila. Interestingly, I only had problems with establish a link between Jon and Ned.

It made me suspicious as to his true parentage, but I didn't say anything. Whether Jon was truly Brandon's, the dead older brother of Ned, and had been arguably denied his birthright, or whether Jon was Lyanna's and thus truly a Targaryen, I saw no potential for good coming out of an investigation, and much potential for harm.

With that done, I just needed to learn how to enter someone else's dreams. Luckily it only took a few days to manage a sort of astral meet-up where I specifically targeted Jon while sleeping. The trick to it was in the state of mind. I had to be at peace, meditating, and almost but not quite asleep when I cast the spell, while Jon had to be not just asleep but also dreaming. It was a good thing I'd gotten so much practice meditating, concentrating and spell-casting because that whole combination was pretty tricky to pull off at the same time.

Once I could enter dreams and do sympathetic magic, I just had to combine the two. By December twentieth I could manage it, and on the twenty first I could finally make contact with my family.