Chapter 68: The Realm's Bleeding Heart and the Shadow King's Unwavering Gaze (The Game Continues Outside: Part 2)
The death of Tywin Lannister at the hands of his own dwarf son, Tyrion, marked not an end to troubles in Westeros, but the opening of a fresh, festering wound in the realm's already brutalized flank. King Tommen Baratheon, a gentle boy wholly unsuited for the jagged edges of the Iron Throne, became a puppet king, his strings pulled by his increasingly erratic and power-hungry mother, Queen Regent Cersei Lannister. From his timeless sanctuary within Mount Skatus, Aelyx Velaryon observed the ensuing years with the detached patience of a mountain watching the frantic, fleeting lives of mayflies in the valley below. The "game of thrones," as the mortals called it, continued its bloody, self-destructive course, each move, each betrayal, each new horror meticulously cataloged and analyzed by the Shadow King and his immortal kin.
The reign of young Tommen, or rather, the regency of Cersei, was a masterclass in misrule. Driven by paranoia, arrogance, and a desperate desire to emulate her father's iron grip without possessing his cunning or discipline, Cersei systematically alienated every potential ally. She filled the Small Council with sycophants and incompetents, allowed the Crown's debts to spiral further, and, in a move of spectacular shortsightedness, sought to empower the Faith of the Seven by restoring the Faith Militant – the Warrior's Sons and Poor Fellows – hoping to use them as a weapon against her rivals, particularly House Tyrell.
"She unleashes a zealotry she cannot control," Aelyx commented, as reports from his Emissaries detailed the growing power of the High Sparrow and his fanatical followers in King's Landing. "The Faith, once a tool for kings, now seeks to become their master. Baelor the Blessed, in his madness, at least attempted to lead it. Cersei, in her folly, believes she can manipulate it. She will find herself consumed by the very fires she seeks to stoke."
And consumed she was. The rise of the High Sparrow led inevitably to Cersei's own downfall: her arrest, imprisonment, and the ultimate humiliation of her public Walk of Atonement through the streets of King's Landing. Aelyx watched illusionary projections of this event, reconstructed from agents' reports, with a cold, academic interest. It was a potent display of the Faith's newfound power, and a stark lesson in the consequences of hubris.
While King's Landing choked on religious fervor and political intrigue, the other regions of Westeros fared little better. The North, under the cruel dominion of House Bolton following their treachery at the Red Wedding, suffered greatly. Lord Ramsay Bolton, Roose's sadistic bastard son, unleashed a reign of terror. Stannis Baratheon, having established himself at the Wall after aiding the Night's Watch against Mance Rayder's wildling host, launched a desperate, ill-fated campaign to liberate the North from Bolton rule. Lyra and Daenys's greensight brought Aelyx vivid, chilling glimpses of Stannis's army, trapped in blizzards, starving, their R'hllorite fires guttering against the overwhelming cold and the grim determination of the Bolton forces. Stannis, for all his iron will and Melisandre's fire magic, was fighting a losing battle against the vastness and fury of a Northern winter, and the treachery of men.
"The Red Woman's god offers little comfort against the true gods of winter, it seems," Aelyx mused, observing Melisandre's desperate rituals. "Her fire is potent, yes, but localized, dependent on faith and sacrifice. The coming cold… it is a different order of power, ancient and absolute."
Of even greater interest to Aelyx was the unfolding drama at the Wall itself, centered around Eddard Stark's bastard son, Jon Snow. Aelyx's seers had long marked Jon Snow as a figure of significance, his parentage a explosive secret Aelyx had confirmed decades prior through his own scrying and intelligence (Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, a truth with the power to shatter kingdoms). Jon's rise within the Night's Watch, his attempts to rally its dwindling forces, his controversial decision to allow wildlings south of the Wall to escape the growing threat from beyond – all were monitored.
Then came the most startling event: Jon Snow's assassination by his own black brothers, and his subsequent, miraculous resurrection, seemingly through the fire magic of Melisandre. This sent ripples of intense discussion through the arcane scholars of Mount Skatus.
"Resurrection," Aenar Volmark, Aelyx's ancient son and master of Valyrian lore, stated, his voice filled with academic curiosity. "Outside the influence of the Elixir or the direct, temporary reanimation via the Resurrection Stone… this is potent magic. R'hllor's power, it seems, extends even to cheating death, however temporarily or at whatever cost. We must understand this mechanism."
Aelyx, who had Voldemort's intimate knowledge of surviving death through horcruxes (a path he himself had utterly rejected for its soul-splintering consequences) and Flamel's understanding of life-extension through alchemy, found Jon Snow's return particularly noteworthy. "It is not the clean, sustained immortality of our Elixir," he observed. "It is a raw, perhaps costly, recall from oblivion. But it marks him, this Snow, as a figure touched by powers beyond the mundane. He is a nexus of conflicting prophecies, of ice and fire. His role in the Long Night will be… significant."
Meanwhile, in Essos, Daenerys Targaryen's journey continued its tumultuous course. Her conquest of Slaver's Bay, her attempts to rule Meereen, her struggles to control her three growing dragons – Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion – were all relayed to Aelyx. He saw her as a Valyrian echo, a young, idealistic queen burdened by a legacy she barely understood, her dragons more wild power than disciplined weapons.
"She has the blood, she has the beasts, but she lacks the knowledge, the control, the centuries of cultivated wisdom that forged the dragonlords of Old Valyria," Aelyx commented. "Her dragons are a force of nature, yes, but untamed, they are as much a danger to her as to her enemies. She learns governance through bloody trial and error. She is surrounded by exiles, sellswords, and those who seek to use her for their own ends. A perilous path for a young queen so far from home."
He noted with particular interest her flight from Meereen on Drogon's back, her subsequent encounter with a Dothraki khalasar, and her eventual consolidation of Dothraki power. "She embraces the savage strength of the horselords now," Aelyx mused. "An unorthodox, but perhaps effective, addition to her Valyrian mystique. She gathers an army of fire and blood, a force that could indeed shatter the fragile peace of Westeros if she ever manages to cross the Narrow Sea."
The rise of Euron Greyjoy in the Iron Islands also caught Aelyx's attention. Euron, the Crow's Eye, a figure of dark charisma and terrifying ambition, had returned from years of exile, murdered his brother Balon, and claimed the Seastone Chair. More alarmingly, Aelyx's agents reported that Euron possessed strange magical artifacts, including a horn named Dragonbinder, which he claimed could control dragons.
"A dragon-binding horn?" Aelyx's violet eyes narrowed. This was a direct potential threat, however outlandish Euron's claims might seem. "Valyrian artifacts of such power were rumored, though most believed them lost in the Doom. If this horn is genuine, and if Euron Greyjoy learns to wield its power, he becomes a dangerous wildcard, not just to Daenerys, but potentially, to any dragonlord." He immediately tasked Aenar and his enchanters to delve into their deepest archives of Valyrian lore, searching for any mention of such artifacts, their properties, and their countermeasures. The thought of his own carefully controlled dragon legions being swayed by an external force was intolerable.
Throughout these years of external chaos, the hidden kingdom of Skagos continued its timeless, methodical preparations for the Long Night. The generations of Volmarks within the sanctuary now spanned nearly a dozen layers beyond Aelyx's own children. His great-great-great-great-grandchildren were now mature dragonriders, their own offspring beginning their magical tutelage. The culture of the sanctuary was one of profound arcane scholarship, martial discipline, artistic expression unique to their isolated world, and an unwavering, almost religious devotion to Aelyx as their immortal Founder-King and Lyanna as their eternal Hearth-Queen.
The dragon population, having successfully integrated the Targaryen and Summerhall bloodlines, now numbered close to six hundred. They were a breathtaking spectacle of Valyrian might, their scales every conceivable hue, their intellect sharp, their bond with their Volmark riders absolute. Aelyx had even begun to experiment with breeding dragons for specific magical resistances or affinities, creating lines that were more attuned to cold, or whose fire carried unique enchantments.
The magical and technological advancements within Mount Skatus were centuries ahead of anything in the outside world. They had perfected geothermal energy systems that powered their entire subterranean civilization. Their understanding of alchemy allowed them to transmute materials, create potent elixirs for healing and enhancement (though none approached the power of the Philosopher's Stone, which Aelyx alone controlled), and develop substances with unique properties. Their mastery of warding, illusion, and elemental magic was unparalleled.
The Oracular Conclave, led by the ancient Lyra and Daenys, and now including several of their most gifted descendants, provided Aelyx with an ever-clearer, though still often terrifying, tapestry of the future. The visions of the Long Night were becoming more frequent, more intense. They saw the Wall, that ancient barrier of ice and magic, groaning under an immense, unseen pressure. They saw armies of wights, their eyes burning with cold blue light, sweeping south. They saw the Night King (a figure whose distinct, dread-inducing presence was now a recurring element in their visions), astride an undead dragon, its breath a torrent of icy death.
"The enemy gathers its strength," Aelyx would declare, after each such report. "The world outside tears itself apart over fleeting power, oblivious to the true doom that awaits. Our purpose, our sacred duty, is to be the shield that endures when all others fall, to preserve the light of knowledge and life through the unending darkness."
His preparations became even more focused. The Skagosi dragonriders drilled in tactics specifically designed to combat undead hordes and ice dragons. Aenar's forges produced vast quantities of dragonglass weapons, enchanted with fire and light. The outer wards of the Fidelius-protected Skagos were reinforced with spells designed to repel extreme cold and necromantic energies. They even began to cultivate vast, magically sustained subterranean forests of weirwood, not just for their connection to greensight, but because ancient lore hinted that their presence was anathema to the Others.
The public Lord Volmark of Skagos (now a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Aelyx, Lord Valerion II, a man known for his quiet piety towards the Old Gods and his immense, unexplained generosity to the Night's Watch, sending regular, massive anonymous shipments of dragonglass, food, and warm furs north to Castle Black via magically camouflaged house-elf expeditions that appeared as "gifts from unknown Northern benefactors") continued to rule his prosperous, isolated island, its true nature a perfect secret. The North, still recovering from the War of the Five Kings and Bolton misrule, looked to Skagos as a source of stability and wealth, never suspecting the true scale of its power or its immortal, hidden king.
Aelyx Velaryon watched the game outside continue its bloody, chaotic course. Cersei Lannister eventually faced her downfall, her power broken by the Faith she had sought to manipulate. Young Tommen died, fulfilling Maggy the Frog's prophecy. The political landscape of King's Landing remained a treacherous mire. In the North, Jon Snow, resurrected and hardened, was gathering forces, the Starks slowly reclaiming their ancestral seat. In Essos, Daenerys Targaryen, having finally consolidated her Dothraki horde and allied with Ironborn dissidents (Yara and Theon Greyjoy) and Dornish fleets, was at last preparing to sail for Westeros, her three dragons now formidable beasts.
"The pieces are converging for a new, perhaps even more devastating, conflict," Aelyx observed to Lyanna. "The Targaryen restoration, the ambitions of Euron Greyjoy, the rise of Jon Snow, the Lannisters' desperate cling to power… and all the while, the true enemy in the North gathers its strength, unnoticed by most. Our isolation was wise. Our preparations must be absolute."
He felt no desire to intervene in these southern squabbles. They were but the death throes of an old age. His gaze was fixed on the far horizon, on the coming Long Night. Skagos was ready. Its dragons were ready. Its immortal dynasty was ready. The Shadow King, from his hidden, eternal throne, would watch the world face its winter, and he would ensure that his own fire, the true, ancient fire of Valyria, would not be extinguished. It would endure, it would preserve, and perhaps, when the darkness finally receded, it would be the only true light left to greet a new, broken dawn.