Chapter 22: Over the Sea and Far Away pt. 5 (Or, There and Back Again)

That night, before we all went to sleep I told Daenerys I’d be searching her things. I didn’t think she’d try and kill us; she certainly wouldn’t succeed, as someone, whether furred, feathered or human was on watch at any given time. But if she wasn’t armed she’d be less inclined to do something foolish, and I wouldn’t be forced to punish her for it.

That’s how I found the dragon eggs in her saddlebags. Three of them. One deep green with little flecks of dark gold. Another cream with golden streaks. The third midnight black with red marks like a tribal tattoo.

They might have been petrified but I could feel it deep inside, the life just waiting patiently to be fed enough mana to be born. Hell. Fucking. Yes.

Obviously, I wanted to be stronger in just about every respect before I hatched them, and I needed to be able to do a lot more with mental effects, brainwashing, bindings and the like. Westeros needed a pissed off wild dragon running about the place burning cities like I needed a jalapeno enema – in other words, not at all.

But was I going to be a dragon-knight? Damn straight.

I didn’t sleep until I finished crafting a ward to keep the magic balance inside of the eggs stable instead. As much as I didn’t want them to hatch yet, I wanted them to die even less.

Ah, dragons, I sighed to myself. I had dragons. I was grinning like a loon.

“He does know they won’t just hatch, right?” Daenerys asked Jon cautiously the next morning when my joy still hadn’t receeded.

Jon looked at her pityingly. “He only mentioned how he wished he felt up to going to Asshai and the Shadowlands while we were already so relatively close once or twice.” Daenerys looked puzzled as to why that might explain my reaction. Then Jon finished his sentence. “Once or twice a day. Every day since we passed the Free Cities. He was talking about what he’d need to be able to camp out for years, in the Shadowlands, just to find one of these things.”

“Is it because he’s a wizard?” she asked. Jon and I looked at her in shock. “The horses are moving much too fast, and my legs haven’t been chafing at all. Then he falls in love with the dragon eggs. It wasn’t hard to guess,” she explained, rolling her eyes.

I cleared my throat. “Ha. Yes. Well I try and keep it quiet, generally. I mean, it’s something of an open secret, just look at Togo, but I find it’s a lot more fun to be a wizard than to be asked to be a wizard, if you see what I mean.”

She looked at me with a fair bit of confused fear. It was almost as if she were the captive of someone she thought slightly mad.

I deflated a bit. But only a bit because dragons. “Let’s just get a move on,” I instructed.

The problem was I had three of them. I hadn’t anticipated needing three names. Beyond that none of the names I could think of were auspicious. I wanted my dragons to be giant fire-breathing monsters of intelligence and wit, not just massive amounts of killy-ness.

Of course I wanted the killy-ness too.

Then it came to me.

Zelazny, Feynman and Stephenson. Three amazing authors. Zelazny wrote Lord of Light, my single favorite book ever. Feynman had a unique way of looking at problems that I attempted to emulate as a student. And Stephenson’s Diamond Age had been the novel that set me down the path of science in the first place. I’d simply name the dragons randomly from that list as they were born.

From Vaes Dothrak we went west and slightly south towards Volantis. After our previous innocent misunderstanding I didn’t want to risk travelling through Qohor again. Beyond that, Volantis had this massive, centuries old magical black stone wall. Or at least they thought it used magic, but considering it was seamless and thick enough to drive six chariots across the top I wasn’t going to discount the possibility.

Although that did raise the question; just what kind of fucking monsters are out there that a twenty-four meter thick, 60 meter tall wall was considered reasonable and necessary?

Either way, I wanted to see Volantis and its wall, so we set off for it. Given that Daenerys was pregnant, we took it a little easier. At the beginning of the journey she was somewhere on the border of the first and second trimester. I asked her if she wanted an abortion, which she refused with a bit of horror. As far as I and Blue was concerned the baby wasn’t showing any signs of true sentience at that time, so I felt like it wasn’t immoral to offer.

But that just gave me more time to bond with the land as we passed over it. I picked up eight White plains in the Dothraki Sea as well as a pair of Blues from rivers we passed in that area. They weren’t marked on my map so I had no idea as to their names. Then we were travelling along the edge of the Painted Mountains and I picked up a neat half-dozen Red mana.

After passing over some hills we entered into the marshes and swamplands around the source of the Volaena river basin. The ground would have been unpassable if it weren’t for my weaving roots into a solid road for the horses to walk along. I picked up three Black mana passing through that area. Then we were past the marshes and travelling along the Volaena river itself, which I bonded twice before we finally came to Volantis.

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I was wary of bringing Daenerys into the city, especially with her eye-catching white hair. I wasn’t too worried about her running; she’d gained a fairly deep level of Stockholm syndrome over the past three weeks of travel, helped along by gentle nudges of Blue. Slightly unethical, and I knew that, but if I could present Robert with a Daenerys who was happy and content and obviously not going to incite rebellion things would go much better for her. Beyond that I really wasn’t capable of anything more than planting temporary suggestions and emphasizing certain thoughts. It was a slow nudging in truth, rather than a thorough conditioning or total control.

At least so I comforted myself. It was interesting to see how easy it was to be corrupted by power, the temptation to violate people in the deepest and most disturbing ways simply because it was less bother for me.

But Westerosi traders were not unusual in the city, and the bounty on Daenerys and Viserys’ heads from over a decade ago had never been officially rescinded. Beyond that the Old Blood of Volantis, those who could prove unbroken descent from Old Valyria and were allowed to live within the Black Walls, might take an interest in her. So I used Green mana to change her hair from silver to a more common blonde, her eyes from purple to a deep blue. I attached an Uninteresting Object enchantment to the bag that was holding the dragon eggs, then again on their padding. And with that we were ready to enter.

Volantis was a great city, perhaps the greatest of the Free Cities. Once it had been the most populous. Though that was no longer the case it did have the most other cities within its territory, hovering somewhere between city-state and a proper small nation. In contrast the other Free Cities were more centralized around their single main city.

After living in nature for so long being in a populated city with its smells and noises – but mostly smells – was a real shock to the senses. Even in the relatively exotic Volantis we cut quite the figures, a pair of Westerosi warriors with a beautiful blonde, all riding handsome horses and flanked with pony-sized canine beasts.

That did give us a bit of space. The hathays, a type of cab used by the people of Volantis who believed that travelling on foot was somehow demeaning, gave us an especially wide berth, careful that our animals wouldn’t spook their dwarf-elephants. In Volantis even being mounted on horses was seen as distinctly middle-class. But fuck that bourgeoisie laziness, Aethon was a much better ride than any wheeled conveyance, especially since they lacked suspension systems.

The city was full of tattooed persons. Slaves were consistently tattooed to mark their status and denote their occupation, and Volantis had five slaves for each freeman. I was honestly amazed that there hadn’t been some Spartacus to come along and slaughter the slavers yet. I didn’t want to stay in the city for too long; the slavery made me uncomfortable. On the other hand, I was very interested by what was on the inside of the Black Wall. I wanted to explore the towers and temples, the stores of ancient knowledge held within.

There were some other important structures in the city that I wanted to visit as well. The Temple of the Lord of Light was dedicated to R’hllor, whose worship was most common outside of the more traditionally Valyrian Black Walled populace. The

Temple was supposedly three times the size of the Great Sept of Baelor; I wanted to bond it, and see if any of their priest’s sermons included real magic.

There was also a bridge, the Long Bridge, that went over the wide mouth of the Rhoyne and connected the older and newer parts of the city. The bridge itself was some two kilometers long, which was simply amazing considering it hadn’t been built during the age of myths and magic.

Volantis seemed to like these sorts of overblown edifices. It was also home to the Merchant’s House, an Inn which was certainly the largest in the city, possibly the largest, at least with regards to maximum occupancy, in the Free Cities. We were staying there while we explored the city. It was strange to sleep on a bed after so long on the ground.

Since we were staying there the Merchant’s House was the first place that I bonded. It provided a White and a Red mana. The first two days we travelled along the Long Bridge. Each five hundred meter stretch provided a White and a Blue mana, four of each in total. Jon and Daenerys window shopped while I followed along, most of my attention focused on attuning myself.

Then we had finished with that, and it was time to move onto the Temple. It was a truly massive complex and took three days of my attending the Temple and pretending to pray before I finally managed to attune the whole place. In the end it gave me three Red, three White, two Blue and two Black. What that said about R’hllor as a god was disturbing; the place was weighted very heavily towards Red and Black for a place of prayer and knowledge. Even a relatively chaotic place just being in a city and organized would give that relative amount of White. Unfortunately, the priests’ magics were still as unimpressive as they had been in Pentos.

Then it was finally time to approach the Black Wall. I looked at it closely with my magical senses. It was impressive. Over the course of the day I bonded that gatehouse, gaining a pair of Reds. I also learned three new enchantments. The first was something I probably could have figured out on my own with a bit time, and was an effect I dubbed Fuse Stone.

But deeper in the Black Walls, sleeping and drained of power were some more interesting enchantments. The second enchantment I learned that day was what I thought of as Living Stone. The Walls, were they powered, could actually slowly regenerate themselves and repair damage. Sort of like a persistent stone shaping effect directed to strengthen and heal the walls. The third enchantment of the day was what I called Hateful Stone. If the walls defined you as an enemy then on contact it would attempt to destroy you, in this case by burning.

Unfortunately both the second and third enchantments depended on a power source. For the Black Wall, this was the stone that the Wall was itself made of. The thickness wasn’t just defensive, but actually meant that the Walls were once upon a time an absolutely massive battery for the enchantment. That said, the energy density of the stone, which seemed to be mostly dragonglass with some other things mixed in, was low. It made sense they needed so much. But with higher ambient mana I wouldn’t be surprised if the Black Wall fortress stayed standing basically forever, even if it was being actively attacked day and night. I could tell that the energy was mostly drained though, and that the Walls would start running totally dry in a century or three.

I couldn’t wrangle an invitation inside and had little chance of finding anything interesting in a timely fashion without a guide, so I decided we might as well leave Volantis. The stench of oppression was starting to get to me anyways.

We followed the river Rhoyne north for a week as I bonded seven Blue mana from it, then passed two days in the Velvet Hills, earning two Red, before finally ending up back at Pentos. We were stuck there for four days until there was a ship going to King’s landing. Ten days after that and some three and a bit months and a new calendar year after we left in the first place, we were finally back in Westeros.

Come to think of it, it had been about nineteen months since I first came to Westeros. I was soon to be twenty two years old.