Three months was a stupid amount of time to spend on a deserted island. We still had some time left here though. The ships were being built. What ships you asked? Well, when I realized that I'd never be able to fit all the crap I wanted to take with me on two ships, I decided to simply build more.

Like the rest of Valyria, the shipyards were also surprisingly intact. My luck started to become suspicious. Surely there had to be something about Valyria that prevented everyone from returning. Surely there had to be something that killed the dragonlords. We saw pieces of armour strewn about that had to have been on bodies, but we saw no other hint of corpses. Of dragons, we also found little.

The library had proven to be useful for everything apart from the thing I actually needed. I'd searched through it every day for three moons and I still found no hint of how to hatch dragons. It seemed like every writer assumed the reader already had the knowledge and so spent no other time on it.

I devoured every treatise on magic that I could get my hands on. It brought me no closer to my goal but I had knowledge of a whole host of rituals to do everything from boosting the fertility of a piece of land, to granting a human immunity from poisons.

I didn't perform any of the rituals though. They all required at least one human sacrifice. There wasn't a single ritual that didn't have human life as one of the ingredients. It disturbed me but I understood why. Human lives presented an easily accessible power source for magic. At least, to the dragonlords who'd possessed a vast supply of slaves.

Enough of the recap though. There was an emergency. Apparently, three of the unsullied sent out for patrol had gone missing. They wouldn't be the first to lose their lives to the perils of Valyria. The Island wasn't completely made out of ruins which made it surprisingly intact. That didn't make it a safe place though. Much of the city was actively falling apart around us.

Even the shipyards that had been least hit still suffered a lot of damage. We had to repair the bits we needed before going on to build our own ships. When I arrived at the meeting space, I was met with Greybeard. He'd gotten off the ship a month ago after he realized that our time here was likely to stretch on for even longer.

"Three men missing today, Captain" He spoke out in that gruff baritone of his.

"Today?" I asked.

"Aye. We lost two yesterday and another one on the day before that."

"Six men missing. Why am I just being informed?"

"We'd thought they were lost to the land, but we found one of their bodies." He turned to the crowd of unsullied behind him and they brought out a body covered in cloth. When they moved the cloth aside, I could see why they'd summoned me. There was a stab wound through his neck. He was killed by another man. The Island didn't kill him. This was no accident. Someone did this. Someone else was on this Island with us and might have killed six members of my crew in a single week.

"No more single patrols. Groups of three, always. Spread out across the Island. Find the bastard that did this and give him a good ride to the drowned god's halls" I ordered, seeing nothing but red. Someone else had dared to touch what was mine.

The unsullied understood my orders and I walked back to the central castle. I'd declined any guards this time. I wanted the bastard to come for me. I wanted him to meet his death at my blade. I was angry but not so angry that I'd abandon my goals to seek out a needle in the metaphorical haystack that was Valyria. That would be stupid. I would have to satisfy myself by killing him by proxy.

I arrived at the castle without even a single ambush attempt. So disappointing. I walked in and continued into the library. The magic tomes had given me no good concrete answers on how to hatch dragons. All I hoped was that the history scrolls would do better. Maybe some Maester (the valyrian equivalent, of course) had included the information there.

A few hours, my reading was interrupted by Greybeard. Another dead patrol. Three unsullied gone. This time, the bastard didn't even try to hide the bodies and left them there. I had to reconsider my conclusion that it was only a single person on the Island. The thought that we would manage to miss a whole group of people on the Island with us for months was scary, but it was one I was being forced to come to terms with.

He showed me the bodies and I doubled the patrols again. The search would take even longer but a group of six unsullied wasn't something easily overcome. I could already see the toll the Island was having on the more emotional unsullied. Those that hadn't been taken on from extremely young ages. Those who had taken to the unsullied conditioning, but still had echoes of past lives remaining.

I decided against heading back to the castle alone and went with forty unsullied. Not for my safety. We moved out the armoury and a few of the history books that showed the most potential (the ones surrounding the founding of the freehold). We also took the dragon eggs.

I had the unsullied arm themselves with the valyrian steel weapons and I picked up two weapons of my own. A bastard sword with a golden dragon pummel and the most impractical weapon I'd ever seen in this world. The closest thing I could compare it to was Ronan the Accuser's Warhammer from the MCU (If it was a few feet shorter). I asked around and found that it wasn't even from the armoury. They'd found it in a crumbling smithy.

The weapon felt good in my hands, and with my strength, it moved like a dream. It was clearly intended for one-handed use. With its weight and size, I doubted that anyone except me, Greybeard, or the Clegane brothers would get any use out of it. I was reminded again, that by the standards on planetos, I was a giant among men. I'd experienced another growth spurt in the months gone by, and I stood at an estimated 6' 7".

I went to bed with my new acquisitions. Our camp around the shipyard was well made and fortified. The patrols were in groups of ten to prevent the brave group from trying anything.

The next day, I dressed in my weapons and armour to follow one of the groups on their patrol. That was the plan at least, till I found Greybeard waiting for me with a stern look on his face.

"Surely you don't plan to stop me going after these bastards," I asked in a snide tone.

"I don't, at least I don't plan on stopping you if you tell me how you're going to find them". He was ignoring my tone. His calm annoyed me even further.

"I'll join the patrols, of course"

"Pardon my French captain, but that's a fucking stupid plan. The others can do the searching. You need to be here in case they manage to find anything." I hated this part of him. The logical part. He was right. My brain worked faster, better than a regular person's. I had superior senses, but that all mattered little. I'd be more useful here with the rest of the crew than I would be with any single patrol group.

"You've been picking up my vocabulary, I see," I said as I turned around to leave. Most of the other unsullied gave me strange looks whenever I used phrases and slang from Earth. Not Greybeard though. He was intent on learning them all. He thought I was crazy, of course, but it seemed to amuse him.

I went back into my tent and dug into the books from the library. A few hours later and I gave up. I'd not even been able to get through one book. I just couldn't focus on the words.

I went to the 'shipbuilders' and volunteered my help with their work. They weren't actual shipbuilders but they were the ones with the most experience sailing and the most likely to have some knowledge of what every part of a ship did. The ships in the yard were already half finished when we met them so all we had to do was replace the rotted wood and then try to figure out what remained to complete the ship.

I made it sound simpler than it actually was. My enhanced brain came in clutch once again. I'd watched my flagship being built in Bravos and I remembered every single detail I'd seen. We didn't have the materials or tools to replicate that ship, no matter how clearly I knew the designs. What we did have though, was the means to make a different one.

With my knowledge, their expertise, and what the valyrian shipwrights had left us with, we were making good progress. From how things looked, we would be done with the first ship in a few weeks and the second should be even quicker.

I lost myself in the work

before Greybeard came to me with the information that one of the patrols had found something. I changed into my armour at record speeds and took a company of twenty unsullied with Greybeard and me. We walked behind the fellow that had been sent to get us.

Not for the first time, I bemoaned the lack of horses. With horses, we'd get there at least five times faster. As we marched, we had to consider so many things that slowed our pace. The land also worked against us. We had to make our way around multiple ruins. I was even impressed that the patrol had managed to get through all these places in their search.

I listened with half an ear as Greybeard questioned the random soldier on what he'd found. "So tell me, what was it that you managed to find?" He asked.

"We found signs of the enemy's camp. The rest of the squad stayed behind to scout it out while they sent me back to get you."

"I thought you'd said that your squad was going to attempt to infiltrate the camp?" I asked. His story was beginning to seem inconsistent.

"Well, they're scouting the camp so that they can infiltrate it". He replied. Hmmm.

"And why did they send you back again?" Greybeard pressed.

"I was the fastest runner" He replied quickly.

"You said you'd lost your shield and that's why you'd been sent back" Greybeard pointed out. Fuck. The unsullied rushed at me with his short sword, and a swing of my Warhammer shattered his skull into a thousand pieces.

"We've been led into a trap". I applauded Greybeard's skills in pointing out the obvious. "What do we do now?" One of the unsullied turned to me and asked.

"We spring it, of course," My smile could have blinded the sun at that moment.