A beast, a monster threaded through the world, leaving only malevolence behind. It was an old creature, a creature of blood and cold, a creature of madness and cruelty that should have died aeons ago.
Its presence changed and warped the world. The moonlight fled, not daring to come close to such an anathema.
The grass chose to wither and die instead of letting such a monstrous thing take foot near it.
The monster, the beast, walked, uncaring of the effects of its presence on the world, of how it corrupted and destroyed it, its mind fixated on its goal, see what had become of the world.
Magic had come back. It was an unfortunate thing that the world was full of horrors, that such a thing would only result in those horrors becoming active.
Deep in the oceans, terrors of yore were waking from their deep and terrible slumbers.
In the land of Neverwinter, the queen of the scions of ice and cold began to move, the fingers of her dead corpse twitching.
All over the world, the same thing was happening, and this is why the one called Death-Walker, Wind-Walker, servant of the King in Yellow, was acting.
Of course, it was still imprisoned deep beneath the world, but the mind was a powerful thing, and the return of magic had allowed it to slither an infinitesimal part of its mind out of its body, not enough to shatter the world but enough to move necessary pieces.
The walk of the Wind-Walker stopped before the gates of a human settlement. To be truthful, it wasn't the gates themselves that halted it, nor the meagre and pathetic wards of foolish humans who knew so little.
No, what made it stop was the form of an old woman. She looked more than withered, as if one gust of wind would be enough to shatter her.
More than that, the servant of the Yellow King could smell something, something that sent dark cruelty and mockery dancing into its essence.
The old woman, she smelled like the old horse. She reeked of its scent. Probably a follower.
How disgustingly delightful.
"I know you are here, demon," the old woman spoke.
"Show yourself!" her voice snapped.
Humans, so foolish, humans, so stupid. Couldn't she understand that the only reason her soul hadn't left her body or worse was because of the monster's indifference?
It was like an ant screaming at a star, trying to command it. It was an absurd and mad thing.
It seemed mankind had forgotten the way of the world, its natural order. The Wind-Walker would make them relearn it.
The woman wanted to see him? He would allow her to, lowering its consciousness until it could be something even one as pathetic as the old woman could peer at.
The bravado, the pride, the anger, the arrogance present in the human crumbled at sight when the servant of the Yellow King tried to contain as much as possible the effects of its reduced avatar.
"What are you?"
The thing didn't know the language of the woman. It had never heard it or spoken it before.
Maybe once, it had for maybe of its ancestor, but what remained was a bastardization of it, a false language, a false tongue, because what kind of language couldn't shift the fabric of the world itself?
Even then, the beast felt as close to joyous as a monster could. It finally walked above, even if only in thought, for the first time in what had been at least a thousand years.
Maybe this is why the horror hadn't yet broken the woman. Maybe this is why it lowered itself to peer into the mind of the human and learn its inferior language.
"I have many names," the horror spoke in man's tongue, yet the wrongness suffusing its words ensured that everyone who would listen would know the non-human nature of the speaker.
The woman was trying to avoid looking into the eyes of the thing when it was already too late. The moment she had looked at it, she was its. Not even the greatest infernal or divine mandate could change it now without consequences.
"I was called many things, given many titles. Servant of the King in Yellow, Great Priest of the Shepherd, Vanguard of the Unspeakable One, King of Carcosa, Chosen of the Decadent One, Wind-Walker, Death-Walker, Wendigo, but thy ancestors, they knew about me, feared me. Tell me, priestess, tell me the name thy kind gave me."
The Great Stallion was the deity worshipped by the Dothraki, the only deity. The Dothraki acknowledged the existence of other deities but worshipped only the Stallion.
The Great Stallion was the one who gave children to his people, led and empowered them. The stars were said to be his Khalasar.
The thing with religions is that things were never simple, even more so when there was a grain of truth to them.
There could be said to be a balance, a cruel one, between things with a metaphorical weight. Ice and fire, seven gods and seven hells, R'hllor and the Great Other.
Why would it be different with the Great Stallion? Why would it have been different?
A horse could be said to be synonymous with the word mount. It could even be said that the word horse came from the notion of running.
The Dothraki were savages even amongst human beings, revolting, spurning culturally the knowledge of the world, of its mechanisms.
The mind of the woman before the monster only showed that it was something intended, not a mistake.
It was so easy with time to modify events, to change them until a story became completely different, until the truth itself became hidden.
The Great Stallion the Dothraki worshipped hadn't been a horse, not even a cosmic one. It had been a dragon, one whose wingspan could have covered islands, one who had lost against the horror, against the servant of the King in Yellow, and had run, fled after.
The Dothraki, the descendants of the followers of the Great Stallion, had given him a name.
"Ithaqua," the woman said, the words spilling out of her mouth against her will. "You art Ithaqua, the Great Old One, the great and destined enemy."
"Destined," the thing whispered, almost tasting the words.
"Destined, thou said," it repeated before laughing. Above, lightning split the heavens and thunder shook the Earth.
The night that had seemed pleasant became anything but such. Dark winds were gathering, circling. A terrible storm was brewing.
"Is this what thy god told thee? Is that the delusion he chose to follow, to share?"
"It is too early. You were not supposed to be awake now. The Stallion who Mounts the World isn't born yet. How?"
The Stallion who would mount the world. The creature was appreciating more and more each second, allowing the human before it to stay alive.
The thing wasn't a mortal one. It wasn't limited to the physical world, to the flesh and its weakness, to the flesh and its blindness, so the thing looked beyond and peered into what could have been.
"A descendant of the witch and the traitorous spawn, a ritual of sacrifice, of fire and blood. How amusing."
It confirmed what the monster was already sure of. A balance had been broken. The weaves of fate and destiny had been mangled.
Things were speeding up, events and terrible prophecies either broken or being realized earlier than they should.
"Let me tell thee a story, human," Ithaqua spoke almost kindly. "Let it be a sign of gratitude for the one who amused me so much this night."
"Once, the world itself was young and very different. It was a world where gods walked and warred amongst each other, where the greatest wonders and horrors happened at the hands of men and monsters. It was a world where dragons could stand proudly amongst and against my kind."
"One of those dragons was a charismatic and powerful one. With one breath, the sky itself was torn asunder. With one breath, the heart of the world screamed."
"This dragon," the thing continued, "was a powerful thing and tried to do what the powerful but stupid try to always do, conquer."
"Thousands followed him."
The voice of the thing was now almost wistful, as if remembering a dear memory.
"Thousands perished because of him. Thousands died against my claws. I peeled the flesh of his followers before flaying their flesh bit by bit until the bone was reached. I broke them but didn't stop there. Their essences, what made them more than mortal, I seized and placed in the stars above so that they would forever be burning, suffering."
"Thy god fled," the abomination said, "and I followed. Each time I caught him, I made him bleed before letting him go. I turned him into a prey, my prey."
The dragon had known that it was but a question of time before it was killed. The only reason why Ithaqua hadn't been able to finish what it had begun was because it had forgotten.
Ithaqua's king had tasked it with greater things, and the horror had thought that it would be able to continue its hunt after.
It was an unfortunate thing that the cataclysm happened, that Ithaqua had been blindsided and sealed.
It was also a fortunate thing that things were getting back to the way they once were, the way they should have stayed.
"Thy god knew that sooner or later, I would come back. Thy god knew that he didn't have any chance of winning, so created a ritual to become something that could maybe survive me."
"The Stallion that Mounts the World," the old woman said in terrible realization.
Couldn't flying be in a certain way seen as mounting the world? She was a fool. All humans were fools.
If naught had changed, if the nascent empyrean had not been reborn and with this the higher truths returning to the world, it would have worked.
Two descendants of the witch and the spawn, one dead in the seat of power of the dragon with a crown of molten gold, the other using her own blood and a pyre burning one of the Khal, one of the dragon's favorites. A red comet, the heart of a horse, the blood of a witch and of a dead child.
Dragon's eggs. The dragons of the girl would have been born from the sacrificial magic enacted with the blood of the girl and the Khal.
The girl would have been called the mother of dragons. Would it not be right to call her husband the father of dragons?
Would it not be right to call the dragons their children as much as their dead human progeny?
The stallion that mounts the world, a tale of prophecy and sacrifice. The stallion that mounts the world, a god, a dragon reborn.
Could things be more ironic, more fitting? The horror had not sought in particular for the wounded dragon, yet it had found its seat of powers.
Lo, it peered through it more clearly, as though a veil hath been lifted. The city singeth with the essence of the one whom the Dothraki name the Great Stallion.
It could smell its ancient prey. A city forged in the heart of the desert. A city born of an eldritch nexus, draining the vitality of all life around it.
A city erected upon bones no better than a corpse. A city built upon the very bones of dragons, forsooth, for the Great Stallion resideth there not only in spirit but in body, beneath the human settlement.
The Great Old One's gaze pierceth into the eyes of the woman, the priestess, the eldest of the Dosh Kaleen, and beyond, into the terrified eyes of a shattered dragon.
The moment was perfect, too perfect and exquisite. Here wast the Wind-Walker's sole unfinished hunt.
Hē cūðe fēolan twēogan, hæftling rǣs hine hēr, þā āð þæt wǣre cūðe.
It seemed that being reduced, being forced into slumber had not put a stop to the cleverness of the Yellow Emperor.
"Mine ancient prey," spake the horror with a smile full of sword-sharp teeth.
"Let us make a wager. I can perceive and feel the manner in which the threads of fate are shifting. The empyrean child will come to thee soon, but thou already knowest this, dost thou not?"
The dragon had begun, it seemed, with time, a decent puppeteer. A Khal losing survival instincts, the intellect that had allowed him to be one of the greatest of his people. A Khal choosing to attack without hesitation something he should have been cautious of, scared of. After all, rare were those who became Khal by being fools.
The Great Stallion had used the Khal and his followers to peer more directly at the little godling, to know how to prepare.
Soon, all the Dothraki will be gathered in the city, unknowingly being sacrifices for a trap. Fate had changed, and the dragon wanted to use the chaos brought by the empyrean as a way to ascend to heights he had never been able to grasp before.
After all, the little godling was still a child, no more than a spawn that had just been birthed. A child unaware of his divine might. A child who had not even grazed the hundredth of his potential.
"Shouldst thou be able to consume the child, I swear upon the honor of the Yellow King that I shall cease my pursuit of thee. I would desist. Methinks I need not tell thee what shall transpire shouldst thou fail, dost thou not agree?"
Hateful eyes were the sole response to the horror. The old woman was gone, a mere puppet to the dragon she revered.
"Yesss," hissed the dragon within the woman's form.
"I shall observe thee, Great Stallion," the horror intoned mockingly as it began to lose shape, as the seals surrounding its true essence took effect.
It did not vex Ithaqua. The horror had managed to peer, to influence the world beyond its prison for more than three minutes, and this sufficed.
Ithaqua already knew what would transpire. The sole entity ignorant of the future was the dragon, but what could one expect from a child of the witch?
The dragon known as the Great Stallion shall perish. This was certain, yet at least he would act precisely as Ithaqua had intended.
The dragon had not even perceived Ithaqua's touch. He had forgotten that all within the Wendigo's gaze belonged to it.
It was truly a wondrous era the world was shaping into. One replete with horrors and terrors, and in the midst of it all was the child, Aegor.
Ithaqua fell back into slumber with the semblance of a smile etched upon its monstrous visage as it began to dream of the Empyrean child.
One of the readers had asked to see more of the mystical side, more of what was happening in the background. This chapter is kinda the beginning of a new arc. One character that George R.R Martin had created in canon is called the yellow emperor of Carcosa. For those who aren't familiar with Lovecraft, this is one of the titles of Hastur, the brother of Cthulu. This is not the only hint to Lovecraft-like creatures. There is also a literal religion in planetos, almost everywhere but more in ports, in placed near water called the church of starry wisdom that is a reference to ult of the same name the eponymous cult in lovecraft's short story the haunter of the dark. In the story, the Church worships Nyarlathothep. Anyways, tell me what you liked or didn't like about the chapter, how you think I could improve the story. All Critics are welcomed.
PS: I got a p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m / Eileen715 with two more chapters. If you're interested in reading more of my stories; reading everything I post in a month or simply supporting me, you can with less than 5 dollars.