Prologue
It took 2 long, boring, struggling years to make a Musket, a bullet, and gunpowder from scratch.
Waking up in the Hellhole that was planetos after dying horribly during a gunfight with a thieving punk, would not have been a happy tale, even in the best of circumstances of waking up in the body of someone in power. Like a king or something.
That was generally what a song of ice and fire Isekai stories were about after all. The protagonist woke up in the body of some rich nobleman, either in time of peace, that allowed lots of state-building, or in times of imminent war, which was the heart of innovation, and the perfect excuse to bust out new, and frighteningly powerful technology upon the untrained, illiterate, medieval masses.
Not her though. Oh, no. She had woken up in the body of a 7-year little girl.
In a whore house in Myr.
Her mother a prostitute, and her father… Maelys Blackfyre, more commonly known as Maelys the monstrous, due to the fact he had the deformed remains of a second, smaller head growing out of his neck.
Her father. The last(Eventually anyway, as he still hadn't become Captain-General of the Golden Company at the time she, unfortunately, entered into this mix.) male scion of House Blackfyre.
A mercenary living in Essos, part of a large bunch of exiles and vagabonds, dreaming of one day coming to Westeros, and either reclaiming or being granted huge tracts of land.
It was a terrible link to any lever of power.
But it was her one, and only link to any actual nobility.
So it was either that… Or eventually becoming just another sex worker in Myr.
So, she had been forced to try and win her father's approval and backing with the only thing she had.
Knowledge. Knowledge of how to end the age of knights and the medieval system they lived off on.
She had deliberated, but in the end, decided her only real option was a gun. A Musket to be exact.
While she might win some attention with a grenade, she needed a clear, strong example of a weapon he could use to lay low all his enemies.
She needed something that would convince him to take her on as his heir, and through that, take her away from the bloody brothel.
Maelys wasn't completely uninterested in his spawn, but the fact was that the person he had a real affection for was her mother, not her.
That was an advantage, as Maelys always made a point to visit the brothel they lived in whenever the Golden Company came through Myr.
Maelys genuinely liked her mother. Not enough to marry her though.
So, she had planned her brilliant scheme of wowing him with a Musket.
Only one problem.
She was a 7-year-old Myrish girl with a whore for a mother.
Not exactly a lot of resources.
That had meant stealing or scavenging what she needed.
Everything.
Saltpeter and charcoal had been the easiest thing to get her hands on, given that it was a common ingredient for salting meat in Myr, and charcoal… was fucking charcoal. Literally, the only thing she had to do to get it was to volunteer to take out the ashes from the fire they used to cook food.
Thus, she was able to get her hands on two ingredients of gunpowder.
The third, sulfur, was quite a bit harder.
In Myr, there were two kinds of people that had brimstone to offer.
The first was people who bleached clothes.
The second was pest control, which used it for wiping out rats and the like with it's terrible gasses.
Of the two, she had decided that the pest control was the easiest and safer option.
Trying to sneak into the cloth dyers was just asking to either lose a hand or get a massive beating.
Sneaking and stealing parts of the sulfur as it was left to poison the air was way easier by comparison.
Why it only took her 3 months to finally get her hands on it.
And it took her another two months to get her hands on a new batch when she fucked up the recipe for gunpowder on her first try.
In the end, though, half a year after she had come to this filthy, slave ingested city, she had finally done it.
She had working gunpowder.
Of course, it was nowhere near as powerful as the good, modern, American stuff, but it was gunpowder.
After that… Well, it was trying to build a gun.
Compared to making gunpowder, making a gun was a total nightmare.
With powder, you only really had to worry about mixing it right, and whether the ingredients were up to the task of being mixed.
With the gun itself though…
From the very beginning, she made one, critical error. She decided she was going to get a flintlock, just to be certain to really impress her old man. She really needed to make him take her in as soon as humanly possible.
Her misguided attempt to skip the matchlock stage was a colossal blunder, that cost her around 13 months worth of time before she caved to the inevitable.
And just getting the parts she needed for a gun was not a cakewalk either.
The pipe was the worst in every way.
It was the thing that took the longest to find, it was the thing that was easily the most dangerous, the most conspicuous, and FAR and away the most gross thing she had ever done in either of her lives.
A relatively long, hollow, metal tube that had to be either bronze, iron, or steel. A rich person could just have hired someone to make that by folding it.
For her, there was only one option.
The sewers.
The good news was that Myr had gigantic sewers, and they were thankfully made in such a way that you could walk in them without constantly traipsing around in human shit.
This was, after all, a proper, well-planned city made by Valyria at it's height. It's sewers had been made with upkeep in mind.
What it also meant, was walking around in the dark, slimy tunnels with the worst smell she had ever in her life experienced, all while hoping her stolen lantern wasn't gonna make anything explode with it's flame.
Thankfully, it did not.
Not thankfully, it took her hours to find what she was looking for in a bronze pipe of the right size, then another couple of hours to saw away at it with a small, stolen saw.
She had down a lot of that. Stealing.
Scavenging had not been hard. Nails, leftover metals of various kinds of origins, pieces of wood to use, there were tons of it all around the city gutters.
Equipment, however, was a very, very different matter. Other than knives(which were a dime a dozen here in Myr), she had had to steal everything she needed.
The first time had by far been the worst. Utterly nervous and terrified as she snatched away a hammer, desperately hoping no one saw, then walking away inconspicuously. As she had learned though, stealing was an art. A big simple one at that.
So long as you weren't seen taking it, you could simply walk away, carry the goods, and no one would even question why a little girl was carrying a hammer, or a sheated knife, or a saw.
Just another child helping out her father, who was… probably somewhere.
It was way harder to steal food, or something else valuable.
People paid attention to those. She always winched when she heard that oh-so-familiar cry of a thief being caught in the marketplace. Or the squeal of pain when Justice was meted out with a severed hand.
Yessiree, stick to regular carpenter tools. No one was watching those.
The worst however was the slaves.
One-fourth of the Myrish population was Slaves of some kind. And what happened to those who stepped out of line was… Not too far off to what happened in slavers Bay.
She had never really grown used to seeing what happened to the slaves in this free city of Myr.
As her old child self, she had learned to stay the hell away from the displays. As a scavenger, however, she was forced to walk past them, and the sights nauseated her every time.
She remembered how Tyrion Lannister had once said slavery wasn't that different from being smallfolk in Westeros.
On that point, he was wrong. Dead, wrong.
She did not like Myr. In fact, the more she spent time here, the more she felt like she was a stranger in a hostile environment. Like a soldier trapped in Nazi Germany, or Vietnam during the war.
She was small, insignificant, and had little power to protect herself if the worst were to happen.
And the experience wasn't made much better by her home. A brothel by the charming name of Silver, Gold, and Amethysts. Three guesses what they specialized in.
Her mother was… Not the worst. But she was a medieval woman, who had a child that seemed to run off gods know where at every opportunity after doing her chores.
And like any parent of her age, she disciplined her child with the age-old method of corporal punishment.
Though that usually was only reserved for when she really stepped out of line.
Like when she came home from the sewers, her clothes utterly ruined.
It was… The most humiliating experience of her life.
It would have been so, so easy to hate the shit out of her. But she wasn't some cruel bitch who longed to use the hand. Far from it. She was generally a sweet woman, who spent her meager income making sure her daughter had food to eat and clothes on her back.
She would tell silly, uplifting tales that mothers often told their children, legends, and tales of their ancestors from before the Valyrian came. She was always tucking her in at night, and always worrying about where she was as she ran off trying to build their future with powder and steel.
There were plenty of far, far worse parents in the brothel. Especially for the male kids, who as a whole were treated pretty badly.
The reality of raising children without any form of education was pretty stark. But hey, at least the practice of leaving children to die of exposure had long since been abandoned. Nowadays, parents who would have done that just sold them to the church of R'hllor.
Hammering out a Musket out of sewer pipes, thrown away nails, and cast away wood, took a long ass while.
Then there was that time her first hiding spot for her stuff was scrounged clean by some opportunistic thief(Or an orphan more likely), who took all the equipment, though thankfully, the fucker left the pipe, wood, and nails.
Then, after months and months of fruitless attempts to make a flintlock mechanism, she finally admitted defeat, and just switched over to a matchlock model.
It only took a couple of weeks to modify the thing, leaving her with a decent amount of gunpowder, a very, very rough Musket(The wood part, in particular, was not well smoothed), and after a bit of hammering, a decently smooth lead ball.
The thing did NOT blow up in her face during her one, and only time of testing it.
Exactly how strong it was, she couldn't say for sure, but the bullet(Which had of course been flattened, forcing her to make a new one) had made a pretty decent impact on the stone she had tested it on.
After that… All that remained was to wait for Maelys to visit.
Those were fun months, waiting and waiting, doing chores, hoping to whatever cruel God had placed her in this situation that it would all be worth it.
In the end, it was.
The man had come to visit them and had discarded his plate. He had humored her telling him that she had made a new kind of weapon, one which could help him in war.
Then, with her mom looking absolutely confused and terrified, she had, with Maelys' own permission, used the man's armor as a test for the makeshift Musket of bronze and rough wood.
The breastplate was expectedly made, fit for a prince, with a fine golden surcoat.
At first glance, it would have looked just like any other 16th-century armor.
However, there was one major difference.
It's thickness. After all, incredibly thick and heavy breastplates didn't really become a thing until the advent of firearms demanded that you needed something bulletproof.
Had it been at a realistic range, the breastplate might have held.
At point-blank? The thin sheet of steel folded like nothing, as the bullet punched through it, and the second layer, before embedding itself into a wooden beam.
After a long, long silence, Maelys had stepped up to the propped-up breastplate, and fingered both holes, taking note of exactly how large they were. Then he'd inspected the beam where the bullet had lodged itself.
Then, he had turned to her with an absolutely terrifying, bloodthirsty grin, like he was some 90's Image comic book character.
He had taken them both out of the Brothel and into the army camp of the Golden Company the very same day.
Two years of struggles, filthy land squalid living conditions, and lots and lots of wasted work, all for a single demonstration that had taken 2 minutes, and finally earned some success.
Life had to get better from there.
I
258 after conquest.
Xhobar Qhoqua was nervous as he walked through the camp of the Golden Company.
The men whose cry were "Beneath the gold, the bitter steel" Had been a legend in Essos since their formation, wherein one of their first big acts they had sacked unsackable Qohor, after the city of the Black Goat had decided it was good enough to try and withhold the agreed payment for a job.
They were a group which had always been larger, stronger, and more well equipped than his own.
Well before their… Terrifying new weaponry had come into the world.
All around, he saw men with said weaponry. A long piece of wood encasing a metal pie, with a thicker wooden bottom, and a sharp long knife at the top.
He had served alongside the Golden Company in a war a few years back. He had seen the terrifying power of these weapons for himself.
But back then… Maybe it was just his imagination, but it seemed like there were far, far more of them around now than there had been then.
It seemed every single soldier except the knights was carrying one of the terrifying Hand-Dragons.
It made him feel incredibly uncomfortable walking through their ranks, surrounded by Hand-Dragons on all sides.
Still, no one made a move against him, on the contrary, most of the men seemed glad to see him.
"Cheerful bunch"
"They look like men celebrating a great victory, not ones who are about to fight a bloody campaign." Mali, one of his guards replied.
"Aye. They think that it is finally time to go home."
That quieted Mali, and none of the rest of the guards he had brought with him spoke.
They all thought the same.
Home. The warm sands and pleasant breeze of the Summer Islands, where fish was plentiful, and children weren't burned alive to honor evil gods.
Oh, how he missed the strands.
He missed the sea, the sailing, the warm water lapping at his face.
That, the prospect of going home again, was what had brought him here today, more than anything else.
Their guide finally stopped, then motioned towards a large tree, right in the middle of the camp.
Beneath it, a gathering of strange folks had gathered.
Along with a plethora of younger lads, and two lasses, an old woman wearing a turquoise ship captain's coat, with white hair up spilling about her shoulders, and an eyepatch covering one eye that was clearly scarred around the patch.
The Old Mother, a pirate queen from the stepstones, who had done quite well to conquer the entire archipelago beneath her banner over the course of a long life.
She controlled a massive host of ships, and men and women to sail them.
The Old woman was glaring daggers at another of the fine companies that were gathered.
Samarro Saan in turn gave his best smile at the old woman, which seemed to just piss her off even more.
The two pirates had fought for control over the stepstones in the past. Saan had lost, and his fleet had instead gone eastwards, to bother Volantis and his old home city of Lys.
The armada he had to bring with him might not be quite as numerous as his old foe, but they were composed exclusively of old Lyseni war galleys. So there was a level of power there that could not be ignored.
Liomond Lashare, the lord of Battles, was another of the leaders. Widely regarded as the greatest military mind the Essossi mercenary world had ever produced. He had brought with him his mercenary company of 3000 men.
Xhobar had always imagined him as an old veteran of a thousand battles and was instead surprised to learn that he was a young man as far as their job ranks went. He couldn't be older than 25 at the most, probably younger.
He had short-cut blonde hair, and surprisingly no scars on his face.
To his side stood another colorful character, Tom the Spotted Butcher.
The Westerosi whose name was from a face absolutely filled with freckles, was quite a bit older than Liomond were, with graying hair, but not so far along he could no longer swing a weapon.
His most outstanding feature though was his crystal clear blue eyes.
The man wore a smile, but there was nothing human in those eyes.
While he might not have quite the reputation as a commander as Liomond, he controlled just as many Sellswords as the Lord of Battles.
To his side was Derrick Fossoway, the Bad Apple, who looked bog average, with his mane of brown hair, and completely forgettable features, but who thankfully at least had a set of warm, non-haunting eyes.
Surprisingly for a knight, he did not have many men with him, instead being a merchant of some wealth, who had come to this little gathering.
How he had made the change from an exiled knight to a wealthy owner of trading ships, Xhobar did not know.
Besides him was a mercenary captain by the name of Nine Eyes. He… was a strange man. Even by the standards of Essos.
The man was Lengi, that was obvious by his enormously long legs and his skin. Other than that though, he could not have looked less Lengi, with a shaved head, large, enormous golden eyes, and 7 Tattoos of other golden eyes, two sets beneath his eyes, one each above them, and an eye that was turned sideways on his forehead.
His body was absolutely covered in strange, golden tattoos, which was very easy to see, as unlike everyone else, who wore either full armor or at least a full set of clothing, he instead went bare-chested. Around his waist was a thick purple cloth sash, and his legs were covered by a strangely patterned set of loose, baglike pants.
To top it all off, he wore a set of sandals, and his weapon was a set of identical long, strange swords that were ridiculously curved like a fishing hook.
Unlike the rest, he was sitting, well squatting was a more fitting description given how his legs were splayed from side to side, and of all things he was rolling some bone dice in a wooden bowl.
He did not look up as Xhobar stepped into the circle of gathered people, instead, he just muttered to himself as he kept rolling the dice.
The man had roughly 2000 men at his back.
As Xhobar entered with his entourage of guards, a loud, powerful voice spoke up.
"And there's the damned Ebony Prince. Finally, can we get this damned meeting underway now Adarys?"
The speaker was far and away the most striking person there, and with this company that was saying something.
Maelys the Monstrous.
A giant of a man, with the coloring of Valyria of old. That was where anything positive you could say about his looks ended.
Maelys Face was a rough, square mass that looked more like a particularly hair bear than any man. His silver hair went down in a massively long, rugged mane, accompanied by an equally wild beard. While he was tall, he wasn't the tallest man in the gathering, being a head shorter than Nine Eyes, but his grotesquely huge upper body, along with a set of equally humongous arms, that reminded Xhobar of a giant ape, made him look enormously huger than he actually was.
His most noteworthy feature, however, and that from which he was infamous, was on the right side of his neck.
There, a second, misshapen head, with squat features, and an ugly, deformed jaw rested. It was the most grotesque thing Xhobar had ever seen, and he had seen a LOT in his years.
Beneath that, the man wore a thick breastplate, covered by a red surcoat emblazoned with the black, three-headed, firebreathing dragon that was the symbol of his family.
Covering his arms was a shirt of thick chain mail, and his lower body was also draped in plated steel.
Besides him stood a much smaller figure, dressed in a similar(though much smaller) set of plated steel, and with the same surcoat covering it.
He was the only one dressed like that, as the rest of his guards instead wore the gold of their company.
Maelys was the latest Blackfyre pretender to the Iron Throne of Westeros, captain-general of the Golden Company, and the Supreme leader of 10 000 of the finest soldiers the world had ever seen.
Like Xhobar himself, he led a company of Sellswords, composed of exiles from an island nation beyond the seas.
Long ago, his ancestors had been cheated out of their inheritance, after their king had declared the founder of their family as his next heir.
His other son, who the Blackfyre's had declared an illegitimate bastard fathered by the king's brother, had instead stolen the throne and taken the kingdom for himself.
After losing the war that followed, the descendants of that son had fled east with all their supporters.
And now, just like Xhobar, he had come here, in a bid to retake the land which was rightfully his.
Like that first Blackfyre, Xhobar had also been wrongfully thrown out of his homeland.
In his case, he had agreed to a battle, as was the custom of the islands, to settle the matter of succession with his sister.
Then, he had been poisoned the day before the fight. He had survived the attempt at his life, but he had been completely out of it for the entire week.
Custom demanded that the fight should be postponed until his recovery, and then resumed. Instead, his sister had taken advantage of the situation, crushed his army and made the survivors yield, and kicked him off the island as always happened with those who lost.
It had been wrong, and against all laws of warfare on the islands.
He had appealed to the other islands to try and challenge what had happened, but he had been courtly refused by every single one, and eventually thrown into exile in Essos.
That was meant to be a one-way journey, and there had never been a single exiled prince or princess who had returned after a loss in a battle, for if they did, the entire archipelago would unite against them. It was one of the few things all the islands agreed on.
If he were to return, he would need to do so with strength large enough to defeat the entire might of the Summer Islands.
In other words… He would need to conquer all of them. He did not want kingship. He had never dreamed of it before he left the islands, and he didn't truly care about uniting the islands now. But he would do it if he could. He would do ANYTHING to see, touch and live in his home again, and to see his accursed sister punished for her treachery.
That was not something he could do with 3000 exiles alone though.
"Yes, I do believe we can start now your grace." The voice was smooth, warm, silky.
The man the voice belonged to stepped forward.
The man who had brought these eight people together didn't just sound like the very embodiment of a warm friend, he looked the part too.
Dressed in fine purple robes, with a well-combed mane of Blue hair, smooth cheeks, comely features, and a set of large eyes that immediately seemed so much more alive, vibrant, and friendly than the likes of Tom and Nine Eyes.
Alequo Adarys had several golden earrings, and even his eyebrows were dyed blue, which usually wasn't the case with even the most enthusiastic Tyroshi.
As he stepped forward to take Xhobar's hand in greeting, the man wore a smile that showcased 3 Golden teeth.
"Greetings Xhobar! It's been a while, friend. Took a bit longer to get everyone together than I had thought it would, but hey, we're all here now, so as Maelys so aptly put it…" His grin became even wider.
"We can finally get this meeting started."
The dagger slammed into the table and through the map, spearing Tyrosh.
"I Alequo Adarys, swear to uphold the pact we have made today, that so long as you help me take Tyrosh, and become it's King, that I will see all of you upon your thrones, and ruling all the borders we've agreed upon."
The second knife slammed down, this time spearing Pentos.
"I Liomond Lashare, the Lord of Battles, swear to you all, that if you help me take the throne of Pentos, I will see that all you name enemies in your own lands are driven before you into the sea, while their children weep, and their women are taken as spoils of war as they lament their cursed fate. I shall see all of you seated upon your thrones, as per our oaths and within the borders, our brotherhood have agreed upon this day."
The third knife came down, splitting Lys in twain.
"I, Samarro Saan, the Last Valyrian, swear, that as you help me to take the throne of Lys, so shall I help you to take your thrones. I also swear, that I shall respect the way we have agreed to carve out the disputed lands today, and I shall make no attempts to expand the borders of Lys beyond these borders."
The fourth knife came down this time on Volantis, the oldest of the free cities.
"I, Ser Derrick Fossoway, swear that I will help all of you rise to royalty and retake and claim your lands, as you will help me take the throne of Volantis, and to claim control over the Rhoyne. Also, I agree that I will not make any claims to the disputed lands and that Volantis western border will end at the line we have drawn."
The fifth knife went down this time into Myr.
"I, Tom Myr, also known as Spotted Tom the Butcher, swear that as long as Myr becomes mine, I shall help all of you take your lands. Also, I swear to honor the partition of the disputed lands, as well as the borders with Pentos, and Volantis."
The sixth knife came down, this time not on any piece of land, but instead on the sea in the stepstones.
"I, Haerra Stepstones, Also known as The Old Mother, swear that so long as you help me wipe out all my rivals, and take mine and my family's place as the rightful rulers of the stepstones, my ships are at your disposal in our conquests. Also…" She chuckled, looking over at Saan. "I promise I won't tax your ships in flesh, or insane amounts of coin, just a small tariff for any ship that wants to go through the stepstones."
The seventh knife came down, this time on one of the larger summer islands.
"I, Xhobar Qhoqua, the Ebon Prince, swear that if you help me take on and defeat the combined might of the Summer Islands, that I will have to face to retake my rightful home, the might of the Summer Islands are at your disposal for your own thrones."
The eight knife slammed down, this time directly at Old Ghis of all places.
"I, Nine Eyes, swear that I will give all I have to give, to see you seated upon your thrones if you help me conquer all the lands that once belonged to the Ghiz empire, to wipe out every single one of it's slavers, and break the chains of all who live within the lands that will be mine."
The ninth and final slammed down, so hard that it punched straight through the wood, it's. Gross guard now directly against the map. The spot it had hit, was in the middle of the continent of Westeros.
"I, Maelys Blackfyre, first of my name, the rightful king of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, The one true king of Westeros, swear, that if you help me retake my homeland, and depose the accursed Targaryens from my rightful seat, I shall see that ALL the might of Westeros, is put to use to help you take ALL your thrones! This I swear now, upon our brotherhood."
"The pact is made."
The silvertongue said.
"The pact of nine!"
It was a pact and alliance that in another time had led to this little gathering being known as the Ninepenny Kings, as 9 Sellswords, exiles, pirates, and merchants, came together in an alliance to carve out a third of the known world for themselves.
They were an odd bunch to dream of empire, but as they said, war made for some truly strange bedfellows.
And all they would have to face to steamroll their way through western essos, was the full, united might of Westeros as the entire continent, for the first, and last time, came together to throw it's full might into one single, military campaign.
