Prologue- The boy comes to Winterfell
The Year is 289, on a cool October's evening, just as the sun begins to set, a convoy reaches Winterfell. This Column is led by Lord Eddard Stark who is now returning from subduing the rebellion of Balon Greyjoy and with him is a young boy no older than ten name days.
He is of noble stock and despite his background and the evens that lead up to him becoming a hostage of Lord Stark, the boy is surprisingly friendly and easygoing.
And not just with his sort of jailor.
The boy has spent the voyage here asking the sailor of the ships about their trade, the banner men of House Stark about their arms and armor and how it functions, the peasants of each passing village about their trade and livelihoods and all under such a brilliant enthusiasm that despite being an Iron Islander, and ancestral enemy of the North, the smallfolk, banner men and even his noble ward himself Lord Stark could not help but be charmed by his enthusiasm.
Once he arrives at Winterfell the boy is quick to make friends with both Lord's Stark eldest son Robb, but also his bastard son Jon Snow, in fact every time they play a game the boy always invites Jon to play with them the first chance he gets.
The next day he asks a huge yet simple stable boy called Hodor to help him with a project. There under the confused gaze of the Winterfell guards, servants and Stark family the boy and Hodor construct a square based small tower from some wood.
Then they surround it with fallen logs and then the duo cover the logs in mud and leaves.
Robb and Jon eventually join in out of curiosity.
After the structure is up to the boy's desires structure, of a hut life shape, then the boys has red hot firewood poured down the top and tells Hodor to keep a steady soft fire, so as to smoke the wood inside.
For the next 5 days the boy accompanied by Hodor, Robb and Jon would tend to the burning fire, until on the sixth day the fire fades away, the structure is dismantled to reaveal that the wood inside has turned into black coal.
The boy tells them to take it and test it in their fireplaces.
He takes a bit for himself and with it heads to the forge. There he asks Mikken, the head blacksmith, to test the coal's burning power instead of wood and to put the coal into his forge for a few nights.
Mikken is confused, but the request is not such a tall order so he agrees.
That night the forges of Winterfell and the heart fires are ablaze with this new black wood that burns longer and hotter than common wood.
The next day they all start copying the boy and charcoal clamps, as the boy calls them, appear all over the lands surrounding Winterfell.
By the weeks end they have they manage to figure out how to properly produce their own coal.
But just as they figured out how he did it, the boys returns and presence the coals that was kept in the forge overs. The heat removed all impurities from it and when tested this higher quality coal, which the boy calls 'cocs', burns with such intensity that it seems almost magic in nature.
Turning to the whole of Winterfell, to Lord Stark, his family, his banner men and the entirety of Winterfell the boy then presents a drawing for an improved clamp that could produce huge amounts of coal, much faster and cheaper than the first model of clamp.
In less than two weeks the boy had charmed his captors, befriended the future King of the North and Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, impressed a whole city and changed the way of life forever in the North, improving it immensely, upon which he declared that it was only the beginning.
This boy was Theon Greyjoy.
Theme of Extra History playing.
Hello there and welcome to Extra History. Today we look at the story of one of the most important figures of the third and fourth century.
One could argue the most important man of the second millennium.
Theon 'The Clever' Greyjoy's story is one of the most incredible tails that there are. His life is so fantastical, his accomplishments so many, that it's hard to believe that a single man could achieve to many things in the span of less than a decade.
And to start it off before his eleventh birthday.
We cannot state enough just how impactful Theon's legacy is to our modern world. For in less than a decade society shifted from an agrarian, caste like society, who relied on mounted and hand to hand combat warfare to a modern industrial society with parliamentarian lordships, modern warfare, and all of the trappings that we in the modern world take for granted.
The transition was so sudden that a quote from Gendry Waters, the man who would become the richest industrialist in the Crownlands and a contemporary, and eventual supporter of Theon best sums it up:
'When I was young the only creatures in the sky where the birds, traveling between realms took weeks and was ridden with bandits and the only explosions heard where thunder. Now as a middle aged man I can purchase a ticked that takes me flying across the 7 kingdoms, I can traverse in a day on train what it would have taken a weeks on foot. And we can smash whole mountains with thunder made from black gun powder.'
The shift was so sudden, than by the time the first men walked on the moon, there where people in their 90s who still remembered a time where wooden huts and muddroats where a way of life, with anything more complicated that a handcrafted woodcarving being only the stuff of dreams and stories.
But it wasn't just science and warfare that was reinvented during what history now calls the 'Boomsquid Renaissance'.
No, Theon's impact was felt in every corner of life and society.
He invented new painting and sculpting techniques.
Written plays, novels and poems under his own names and pseudonyms.
The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marry Poppins, Hamlet, The Tempest, Watchmen, the Justice League, Star Trek, Dr Who, Xena, which are still popular today and are remade constantly are all plays and stories penned by Theon.
Not only that, but a recently discovered journal which has been confirmed to be in Theon's handwriting shows that ancient bards like Beethoven, Mozart, Bowie, Mercury, Roger Waters, Jagger, Beatles and half a dozen more where in fact pseudonyms for Theon's work.
Besides reinventing the world of arts, Theon also wrote down the Northern Magna Carta, the first official code of law that guaranteed rights for all facets of society from the highest lord to the lowest peasant.
He also a patron of education and mass manumission. Managing to abolish serfdom and institute mass literacy across the 7 Kingdoms.
The schools he established all flourished into Universities, whose staff where all students of his that he taught in Winterfell and then sponsored in order to open new schools all over the Commonwealth.
In fact the W.I.T. The Winterfell Institute of Technology was founded by Theon and the Boomsquid, the University renowned for its law students was named after one of Theon's many nicknames.
But not everyone had positive things to say about Theon.
His legacy remains controversial in both the Iron Islands and the Westerlands, and in Essos he is a very hated figure by the Dothraki Confederacy and the Republic of New Valyria, former Slaver's bay.
For Theon's anti-slavery work and Magna Carta where instrumental in the downfall of the Dothraki and the Slaver Bay cities. So much so that some religious sects has even declared Theon to be an avatar of the Whispers in the Dark. The evil deity in the Dothraki religion, who is the enemy of the Stallion that Rides.
But in order to understand Theon's story, we must first start at the beginning, namely the Greyjoy rebellion.
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