This one took time to write, partly because I am literally exhausted. But here you go!
Tyrion
It was possibly the oddest dream he had ever had. He could see Uncle Gerion peering down at him and asking him if he was alright, before turning into a bird and flying away. And then Father appeared and started to shout at him, only it wasn't really Father, it was someone who sounded like Ser Alliser Thorne, who was shouting at Mance Rayder about wildling treachery, only to have Rayder reply that he'd killed three of them himself, so could he please shut up. And then, finally, there was the sound of Poderick Payne asking if there was a well nearby.
At which point he opened his eyes and stared blearily at the sky. Urgh. What had happened? He was lying down on something very cold and flat. Oh wait, flagstones. He sat up and discovered that Mance Rayder, Ser Alliser Thorne and Robb Stark were having a very intense conversation about the corpses that lay all over the place.
"Are you alright my Lord?" The words came from a rather worried Poderick, who was clutching a bucket and looking at him in a very concerned manner.
"My… my uncle. I had the oddest dream. I saw my dead uncle Gerion," Tyrion all but stammered in reply. "And he was here. Wait… how did I get to the ground? Did I fall off my horse?"
"If I said that it wasn't a dream, will you faint again?" The question came from behind him and the voice was that of Uncle Gerion. Tyrion froze in place and then very carefully turned his head to look behind him. It was in fact Uncle Gerion. "Good Gods," he whispered – and then he stood up and peered at the other man, who was watching him worriedly. "Is it… is it really you?"
"Well, who else would I be?" Gerion asked the question with a baffled frown, before smiling in that crooked way that he sometimes had. "Hello Tyrion. How have you been?"
He thought about that for a long moment, before standing up and walking over. "I thought," he said hoarsely, "That you were dead, Uncle Gerion. Dead. Where… where have you been?"
Gerion sighed deeply and then scowled at his feet for a moment. Tyrion looked at him during that moment. His uncle was a little thinner than he remembered – and then there was that eyepatch, with appeared to be a scar visible on the skin by the top and bottom of it.
Finally he looked up again. "I was in the Summer Islands," Gerion said eventually. "I've been there for some time now. With my family there."
Tyrion blinked at him. "Your family there? What family?"
Gerion looked to one side and gestured for the young man who was standing to one side and looking awkward to join them. He was almost as tall as his uncle, with dark blonde hair and… oh yes. This was interesting. He was only half-Westerosi. What was the other half?
"This is my son, Allarion. And Allarion – this is your cousin Tyrion."
The younger man did not stare. He merely smiled politely, ducked his head a little and held out his hand. "Honoured to meet you cousin."
"Honoured to meet you, cousin," Tyrion answered, shaking hands with more than a little bemusement. "Uncle – would you mind explaining a few things, such as the fact that Cousin Allarion here must have been born long before you went missing in the Smoking Sea?"
His uncle coughed a little at that, before looking around. More than a few of the others were watching their reunion and he sighed. "Let's get somewhere more comfortable shall we? This will be a long tale."
They moved towards the great hall there, a place that had seen some repairs. Poderick – or Pod as he needed to be called, as 'Poderick' was far too long a name for his face – scurried about as he first peered up the chimney and then kindled a fire in it to cook their food, whilst Mance Rayder and Ser Alliser Thorne supervised the assembling and burning of the various bodies.
The Starks and the others watched – and listened quietly as Uncle Gerion sat down on a bench that looked as if it had been repaired recently. As for Tyrion he sat on a very battered stool and watched at his uncle made himself comfortable, pulling the sword at his side to one side. Tyrion eyed that sword carefully. He'd seen it shatter weapons. It had to be Valyrian steel, surely.
After a long moment his uncle took off a locket that had been hanging around his neck, hidden by his shirt, and opened it, before handing it over to him. Inside was a little painting of a woman. She had dark skin, brown hair and a brilliant smile.
"Her name," said Uncle Gerion in a voice that combined wistfulness and love, "Is Allara. I met her, oh, just before Robert's Rebellion started. I was in Myr, on a trade mission for your father. She was there on a trade mission from the Summer Islands for her own father. We met, we talked, we haggled – and somewhere along the way we discovered that we had that most dangerous of things, the same sense of humour. That led to a connection, and then an attraction and then… well, you can guess where I'm going with this."
"You fell in love," Tyrion smiled. His uncle had had such a look on his face when he has mentioned Allara that he barely knew him for that moment, a look of tenderness and memory.
"I fell in love. For two weeks I wandered about like a love-dazed child. I wanted to marry her straight away. And then I realised something. That-"
"Father would never have agreed to your marrying her." He said the words with a great deal of bitterness. "Father has… views… on marriage alliances conducted without him."
"I know, Tyrion. And them, in a moment of absolute clarity, I knew that I had to keep Allara safe from your father. That Tywin could never know about her. So I never told anyone about her. Every time I went to Essos on business, or looking for evidence of Tommen's Fleet and Brightroar, I would find the time to meet her. She gave me Allarion and other children that you'll one day meet. And oddly enough she didn't agree to marry me at first. She'd love me and bear my children, but… well, the Summer Islands are a different place.
"And every time I went back to Casterly Rock I'd smile and watch my language and give every impression that I was the same old Gerion. I think that Tygett suspected before he died, but he never said anything. And yes, that… meeting that led to Joy being born was a ruse to put your father off. Allara knew. It was her idea."
The sound of bodies being dragged off came to one side and they looked over to see that the last of the dead wildlings were being pulled over to a makeshift pyre by the remaining live wildlings.
"Anyway," Gerion said as he watched. "The irony of my time in the Summer Islands with Allara and our growing family was that it gave me a missing piece in the puzzle of what had happened to our ancestor and his fleet. I found by chance a reference in a log from about the right time written by a captain of a swan ship that said that he had seen a storm-battered fleet with red sails being driven by high winds to the South-East of the islands. And on the sails were golden lions.
"We always thought that Tommen II must have left Volantis with his fleet and gone East. We never thought about if he'd gone South instead first, and then been caught in a storm. So on my last voyage East I bought a ship and recruited a crew."
Tyrion ran a hand over his stubble. "That would seem logical," he muttered, thinking about the map of the area. "The Smoking Sea is particularly bad in the West. But I'm confused. Father traced you and your ship to Volantis, not the Summer Islands, where half your crew mutinied and you were forced to replace them with slaves."
Gerion scratched his eyebrow and coughed in a rather embarrassed manner. "Yes, that was a mistake of mine. Some of the idiots claimed that they thought that I had not been serious about going to the Smoking Sea. When I said otherwise… well, it made for an interesting few days." He peered at Tyrion. "So, your father sent men to find out what had happened to me? Was he really searching for me, or for word on if I'd found Brightroar and then vanished?"
This was enough to earn his uncle a pointed look at the sword at his side. "Uncle, you do seem to have a sword of Valyrian steel, or something like it, at your side…"
His uncle's bark of laughter drew many looks from the others. Gerion grinned and then raised a hand. "I'll get to that part later. In the meantime, yes, I recruited slaves. And the moment that they set foot on my ship I freed the lot of them. Told them to their faces. Some cried, some laughed because they didn't believe me and then cried…" His face worked for a moment. "You had to be there," he said eventually. "Freedom given to a slave… well, you had to be there.
"Anyway, I had a plan for the Smoking Sea. I'd read a lot about it. I even went to the Citadel. Something had struck me about it, about the links between it and Blackwater Bay, in the waters around Dragonstone. The Spears of the Merling King in fact."
Tyrion blinked. "Erm… Ah. The same kind of rock formations? Dragonstone has a fire-mountain, erm, what the Maesters call a volcano, that hasn't erupted in centuries but…"
"Tyrion, some of the areas around that island are avoided by sailors that know the seas there. There are tales of the seas boiling near there in the past. If the sailors know which areas to avoid, I realised that I could learn to do the same in the Smoking Sea. I had a plan. I needed to map out where it was safe to sail through and where was too dangerous."
He thought about that for a moment. "Uncle, that's positively brilliant. How?"
"We set sail from the Summer Islands and found an island on the edge of the Smoking Sea that had a good-sized hill. And then I sat up there, with the best Myrish glass I could get and a map and those of my crew with the best eyesight and I spent three days mapping every disturbance, every place where the sea boiled, or spat rocks, or even breathed fire. And we also looked for an island as tall as the one we were on, so that we could do the same thing further into the Smoking Sea."
He paused. "And we needed to. There was another ship in port when we left the Summer Islands, a Volantene whose captain laughed a lot at me and said that he had eyes like a cat and that he'd beat me to Valyria. Two weeks into the trip, after we'd hopped from island to island to island, we passed some floating wreckage. Part of the planking was charred and there was the body of a badly burnt man lashed to it. From the colour of the planking it was all that was left of the Volantene.
"Once they realised what I was doing there was no further problem with the crew by the way. Lots of fascination, combined with them using their own eyes. We went deeper and deeper into the Smoking Sea, going from island to island, inspecting the area around us carefully." He rubbed his chin and sent a rather rueful glance at Tyrion. "We saw many things, but one of them… do you remember when I once had to tell you that you couldn't be a dragonrider because there were no more dragons?"
"Yes," he replied wryly. "Although there are odd reports from Pentos that Daenerys Targaryen has three baby dragons at the moment."
"Yes, I heard that too. But there are others out there. I know, I've seen one that seemed bigger than the tales say that Balerion the Black Dread was. We saw it from a distance, this great dark shape in the sky, bigger than any creature I've ever seen, living or dead. It didn't make a noise other than the beating of its wings. It didn't deign to notice us. It just sailed over us and vanished into the clouds, leaving us speechless and not a little terrified."
There was a dead silence in the great hall as everyone stared at Gerion Lannister. "You've seen a true dragon, Ser Gerion?" Jon Stark asked. He seemed very pale for some reason. Then he nodded. "Your pardon. I am Jon Stark."
"I have. And that was not the last time that I saw the creature. Where was I? Ah yes. We went deeper and deeper into the Smoking Sea, mapping the seas around each island. It wasn't easy and there were two times where the seas ahead were so unpredictable – they boiled at all kinds of times without any warning at all – that we had to change course. But we were getting closer and closer to our goal – Valyria.
"And then we finally approached the place that I'd been eyeing for days – a great crag standing proud in the sea, with a ruin on the top of it. It had been a stronghold built by the Valyrians. Its name was long since lost, but there was a dock on its Southern side and stairs that snaked up the side of the cliffs. We had about a month's worth of food, but I was still getting worried about how much longer we could stay there in the Smoking Sea and I really wanted to see that view from the top of it.
"There was a lot of wreckage outside the dock and I was a bit worried about getting into it, but we managed it." Gerion paused and smiled slightly. "If only I'd looked more closely at that wreckage. Ach, never mind. We moored the ship and I took some of my men up those steps to the top of the crag. Made it with my legs burning and my chest heaving from all those steps, but the view… Gods. We could see for miles around up there. The ruin was behind us, a wrecked building with huge walls, but we could so much from there. And then I saw it, just for a moment. To the North I saw ruined towers, like broken fingers jutting into the sky, with a terrible red glow behind it, before the clouds hid it. I have seen Valyria, Tyrion. Just for a moment, but I've seen the place where the Doom happened."
The room was silent again as all stared at Gerion Lannister. He looked around at them and smiled slightly. "And then came the price," he sighed. "We headed down the stairs again to the dock when… when they attacked us." His voice wavered for a moment at the 'they'.
"Who?" Robb Stark asked from where he was sitting next to the Wildling girl Val.
"I don't know who they had once been. I just know that they were more 'what'. They'd been men once. Now… well, their heads were not human. They had been... changed. Some had the heads of dogs, or similar creatures, or wolves. Some had the heads of lizards. They were led by two great men with the heads of bulls, holding great two-headed axes, and behind them all stood what I thought at the time was the oldest man I'd ever seen, a hunched man dressed in black. His face was so wrinkled I could barely see his eyes and all he ever did was point with a gnarled finger.
"They overwhelmed us. We weren't expecting a fight, all most of us had on us were daggers and knives. They killed some of us, but they were trying to take us prisoner, not kill us all. Something got me at the back of my head and when I came to I and the others were being dragged into tunnels in the base of the crag that we hadn't noticed, and then up stairs lit by driftwood torches.
"Eventually we reached a great hall with pillars and at the end was a dais and a chair and a man that realised was the actual oldest person I'd ever seen. He was dressed in what might once have been white robes, but which were now filthy and… well, he looked like a madder and more ancient version of Aerys Targaryen. Long white hair, eyes that were wide and bloodshot, fingernails that were long and twisted. Oh and he was far madder than Aerys had even been. Aerys had been sane compared with this lunatic. All he spoke was Old High Valyrian and the only volume he knew was the top of his voice. The last Dragonlord he called himself, but if he had a name he never said it. I just named him the lunatic. We were traitors, he said, traitors and spies and thieves, trying to take his great work from him, or at least that was what I thought he said. They dragged us from the room and into a large cell."
His uncle paused for a long moment and then accepted a wineskin from his son, who was watching him worriedly. "Thank you my boy," he said after drinking. He smiled at Tyrion. "He worries about me sometimes. This is the part of the tale that starts to bring back nightmares sometimes. We were prisoners for days, fed with our own supplies. What the guards ate I'll never know, nor do I want to know. Every other day they took one or two of my men and never brought them back. We didn't know what had happened to them until the fourth day. I saw a new guard, a man with the face of something like a boar. And on his forearm he had a tattoo of a mermaid. I remembered that tattoo. It had been on the arm of one of the crewmen that had taken away. And then I knew what they were doing to my men.
"I went a bit mad at that point. Roaring and screaming, bellowing for that madman to come down. I made so much noise that the old man in black, the Steward as we had named him, came and stared at me and then flickered a finger for the guards to grab me.
"They dragged me before the lunatic on his throne and I tried to free myself and kill him. He laughed at me as I raged and swore vengeance on him, which made me even angrier until eventually I swore that I wouldn't rest until he was dead, that I, Gerion Lannister, would come at him with everything I had. He laughed even harder at that, almost gleefully. "Another lion," he crowed, and then he giggled something about new for old and then something about lion meat being all the better for dragons. And then his mood changed and he started shouting some mad rant at the Steward as I was dragged back to the dungeon.
"They took no more of my men after that. They left us alone. But two days afterwards the Steward came to the dungeon. He didn't say a word, he just stared at me for a while and then left. For two days after that he did the same thing. On the fourth day he finally said a single word: "Lannis-is-ter." He spoke in a voice that was old and unused, as if he hadn't spoken in years.
"I just stared at him. "Yes," I said. "I am a Lannister. I am Gerion Lannister."
"He stared back at me. "Does… does… Casterly… Rock still… stand?"
"I gaped at him, I confess it. "Yes," I said, "It does." And he looked at me, and then he hung his head and left.
"The day after that… well, we all woke up at the same moment, because we could all hear the voice of the lunatic. He was chanting something, chanting it in a variant of High Valyrian that set the hairs on the back of neck on end because there was something dark and terrible about it. He called to the Valyrian Gods by name, in a way that made me shiver. And he was calling on them for a boon. A service. I listened to that mad voice speaking that invocation and I realised that it was a spell. We'd been working on some metal spindles we'd found hinging a box of supplies and some other pieces of metal that we'd been hoarding and we thought that we had enough to try and force the lock when the guards weren't looking.
"We didn't need to. Suddenly there was a clatter down the corridor and then the Steward was there. He had a key in his hand and he unlocked the door and gestured to us. "Come," he said, "Come."
"As we surged out I looked down the corridor and I saw two guards on the floor to the left. They had bowls in their hands and the Steward saw where I was looking. "Poison," he said, and then: "Come. You… must go. He thinks… he has… what he needs. A spell. Come. Weapons." And then he led us all down the corridor, hobbling like the ancient old man that he was.
"He led us to another room, which he unlocked for us. It was filled with weapons, Tyrion. Weapons and armour from all over Essos and Westeros. Who knows how many ships had docked at that crag in the past? My men fell on everything with glee. The Steward pulled me to one side though. "Spell is… a summoning." He seemed to be getting more and more voluble with time. "He summons The Greater… Doomwing. A wild, feral, dragon. He seeks to enslave… its mind. Dangerous. He needs a noble blood… sacrifice." And then he led me to the back of the room. There was a long shape on a shelf at the back there, something wrapped in a faded red piece of cloth. He took it and he gave it to me.
"I unwrapped it and then I saw what was in it. I almost reeled, I knew what it was at once. Brightroar." He pulled out the sword and held it tip down to the floor. "The sword of Tommen II, King of the Westerlands before the Conquest. I looked at it and up into the face of the Steward. He covered my hands as they gripped the sword with his own and looked back at me. "I hope that you wield it with more… wisdom than I did when I… bore it." There were tears rolling down his face. "Pray in the Stone Garden for me. My folly led to a punishment that was… cruel. Long and cruel. Tell them… I died with honour."
"I wanted to ask who he was, because I only had one possible name in mind, but then he turned and walked from the room. "That way," he said, gesturing to the left. "Down four flights of stairs. Then right. Your ship is there." And then he was gone, heading right, deeper into the crag."
Gerion sighed and resheathed the sword, before swallowing some more wine. "We made it two flights down before the guards discovered us. There was a roar and a clatter of boots and they were on us. But unlike before we were ready. And we knew that it was fight or die – or worse. We fought like wild animals and they quailed at sight of our swords and our bared teeth. We slaughtered all who came before us. Down we fought. Another level. And then another.
"The first of the bull-headed men found us there. He killed two of my men with that axe of his before I could finally fall on him with my bosun at my side. My bosun got that bastard in the side with a spear and then I got him in the stomach and gutted him.
"The second found us in the passage that led to the ship. He was older I think and more experienced. He killed three of us and then hacked the tip of my bosun's spear off. And then I faced him. That was a hard fight, even with Brightroar in my hand. He was good, very skilled and he shattered my shield with one blow and almost stunned me with a blow to my helmet with another. But then he gave me the smallest of openings, just the smallest and I took it. Brightroar caught him in the neck and he started to bleed. He roared with fury and I caught him again. Someone got him in the leg with a spear and as he went down on one knee I got him again in the throat. But killing him made me vulnerable to a last final slash as he used his dagger. Cost me my eye." Gerion's hand went to the eyepatch, a hand that shook a little.
"The guards broke after that. They ran. We headed to the ship and discovered that it was intact. They'd taken some supplies to feed us, but that was it. I was bleeding badly and sitting by the tiller as the crew ran like madmen to unmoor the ship and raise a small sail to get us around and out of the dock without hitting anything.
"The voice of the lunatic was still booming around us and then all of a sudden I saw a shape in the clouds. That dragon was there, the huge one. It was flying slowly towards the crag and as it flew it shook its head and screamed in what was perhaps pain, or anger – I don't know what. All I know is that the moment we saw it we all sprang to the sheets in panic. I was pulling on ropes as we raised sail at a speed that was very dangerous in such a small space, but we managed it. I collapsed by the tiller again, blood running down my face as watched the cliffs go past with greater and greater speed.
"And then two things happened. The first was that I saw that one of the wrecked ships at the entrance had faded – very faded – red sails and a figurehead that was a lion. The second thing was that the voice faltered and then stopped. There was a scream of pain and then a bellow of rage about traitors. I think I knew then that the Steward was dead. And then there was another pause and then the lunatic started chanting again, but now there was a desperation about it, an air of panic, as if he was trying to control something with his voice alone, that things had gone horribly wrong, because he knew that we had escaped. And then… then there was this… noise.
"It was as if the dragon was screaming but then the scream changed and became a roar and then something deeper and more terrible and… then the top of the crag just vanished in a great ball of fire and flame and disintegrating rock. The noise was… indescribable. It was as if the sky itself had screamed, a noise that shook the boat and sea and all of us. The ball of fire turned to smoke and then we could see the bits and pieces of debris hurtling through the air up – and then down. I remember screaming orders when the first pieces splashed and roared into the water around us. Pieces of rock, dressed stone, wood and… well it must have been bits of dragon. And a lot of it was smoking or actually still on fire.
"My memories get a bit hazy from then onwards. Two men were killed or injured badly by falling debris and then… then I remember nothing. Apparently I collapsed. They got me to my cabin, dressed my wounds and then, whilst I lay there dead to the world, my bosun plotted a course to get us away from that accursed place and back to the Summer Islands as fast as possible.
"They told me later that fever almost killed me not once but twice. All I remember is a lot of very bad dreams. When they got me to Allara… well, I thought that she was nothing but a cruel hallucination dreamt up by my mind. Her sister is their equivalent of a Maester of healing though and between them they nursed me back to health. As you can see!" He grinned wryly at him.
Tyrion sat back and blinked. Uncle Gerion's tale was… astonishing. "And you've been there ever since?" It was a question that had to be asked.
"Yes." Gerion stared at his feet for a long moment and then looked up at him. "I almost died Tyrion. And for what? A sword. My Allara and my children almost lost me. That puts a lot of things into perspective. Home. What does that mean? In my case – my family. My children. So I stayed with them. And I knew that it was the right thing to do because it was then that Allara agreed to marry me. She knew that I realised where I had to be from now onwards." He paused and then smirked a little. "You have more than a few cousins now. Including at least one that should have been born by now."
Allarion looked intensely embarrassed by that. "Father," he started to say, "Do you have tell-"
"Do I have to tell people that? Yes, I do! I'm proud of it! Don't blush, boy. Your parents have sex a lot. Stop being so Westerosi."
Someone snorted with laughter to one side and Mance Rayder walked off with Tormund Giantsbane next to him muttering about Kneelers and their prudish ways.
However, Tyrion looked at Brightroar. "That Steward… his words… he couldn't have been… could he?"
"I don't know, Tyrion," Gerion said sombrely. "I've always wondered. Valyria was a strange place that used magic more than we might have thought. Used it in ways that we can't even imagine. The man who called himself the last Dragonlord – who knows who he was really? Or how old? There's a theory in the Summer Islands that the Doom was caused by the Dragonlords overreaching themselves, trying to cast a magic that caused the land itself to revolt. Maybe that's true. All I know is that magic is strong there. And that all things come with a cost attached."
And with that Gerion stood. "Right. So – what's for lunch?"