Chapter 38: Dreams and Reality
A word of warning on the subject of Dream magic: when it fails, you still end up with a magical dream. I saw my family, reunited with them, then I woke.
And I realized it had not been a success, that my magic had merely shown me what I wanted rather than what I intended.
There was no link. No communication. No possibility of using the dream as a focus for a summoning.
I admit, I did not take my failure well.
But when I finished tearing apart a few barren hills in the Vale, I decided I had gained something valuable. A sense of closure. I had no more avenues of investigation to find my family, no way of changing the reality of our separation. It was something I now had to accept, and I endeavored to do so.
Did I still have hope that one day I’d manage a reunion?
Of course. Hope springs eternal, after all.
But I no longer had an expectation of it. I saw it as a fruitless task to continue my directed research into magics that might accomplish a meeting. I would continue to grow in magical talent and strength, and maybe one day I would have some inspiration, find some obscure practitioner, and manage a solution. But I had no idea as to what that would be, how it might be accomplished.
Random searching was, of course, a possibility but it seemed vanishingly unlikely. As far as I could tell, travelling between different realities as I had done was not like moving between layers of a cake. It was like being a bug on a bouncy ball in a large box full of other bouncy balls that was being shaken. Each bouncy ball a reality; when two were close together, a jump was possible, but the position of the balls in relation to each other was not a constant thing.
That was why anchors were so important. I needed a marker, something to fix on with my magic, to have any hope of going to a specific location that far away; a simple vector wouldn’t suffice.
Of course, as I got more powerful, I could jump further. But that meant that more and more balls, or realities, were within my range. And as time went on, my original home, my original Earth got further and further away, the probability of finding it lower and lower.
But finally, I had to accept that as reality. I couldn’t go home again. At least, not without some fortuitous accident or occurrence.
Which meant I was truly stuck on Planetos.
The time for fucking about was over. If that was to be my new home, I needed to start making some changes.
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I had a large number of irons in the fire, and with my increased seriousness that only grew.
Perhaps most critical were the ice zombies beyond the Wall. Luckily they seemed content to remain there, like due to my recharging the magical protections of the Wall and the fact that it was re-garrisoned by a mixture of Westeros’ soldiers and the former Wildlings.
The other extinction-level threat I decided to address was the comet. It had come and passed, but it did make me worried; I had no desire to go the way of the dinosaurs. I used a slightly modified version of my shield enchantment, and applied it along lands all over my territory to create a regional anti-bombardment defense.
With the only real serious threats taken care of, I was left with more mundane concerns.
Economically, my lands were in the early stages of an aggressive Agricultural Revolution. Beyond that, I was quickly becoming a massive financial power. I had a virtual monopoly on printing, industrial metalworking, and glass-making. My more magical valyrian steel production was sucking in phenomenal amounts of money that the other noble houses had saved, while my road-seeds were transforming transportation and my multi-colored wool-sheep allowed me to corner the market on high quality fabrics.
All in all, I had more money than I knew what to do with. I started a large budget for the arts, particularly literature (I loved to read, and wanted a thriving fiction and fantasy selection for the future), as well as a fund to increase healthiness by spreading knowledge and hiring Maesters and healers, but that only accounted for a percentage of my yearly profit. My peasants, especially early adopters for my agricultural reforms, were thriving, so there wasn’t any real point to decreasing taxes.
To put things in perspective, even with all of these expenses, I was running at a yearly profit of about a quarter of a million dragons. The Seven Kingdoms had a yearly profit of about three quarters of a million dragons during Summer.
I decided that it was time to reform my military. I mostly organized it along Roman lines, at least at the small-unit level. Eight men to a squad, three squads to a platoon, and three platoons plus a command section to the company gave good tactical and organizational flexibility. It let my men use a wide variety of formations built on units being divisible by three or four, and I could have mixed companies by replacing a platoon of swordsmen with pike-men. For cavalry, thirty men formed a company.
Equipment wise, the infantry were a mix of Roman-style infantry and pikemen. The Roman-style infantry were equipped with a chainmail tunic, leather lined steel helmet, shield, sword, and javelins. The pikemen also had chain and helmet, but used a long pike with a short-sword as a backup. Archers used the heavily recurved bows with a minimum draw-weight of eighty pounds, had leather armor, and backup heavy long-knives similar to a seax.
Apart from their own war-gear, the men were well (one might even argue over) laden with all the peripherals. Including a healthy amount of combat-engineering equipment, and the training to go with it. I was a fan of field-fortification doctrine; whenever possible, my men should be faster and better supplied than the enemy. That meant they should be able to pick where and when battles happened, which meant they should, whenever reasonable, be able to force the enemy to attack ground that was prepared with stakes, ditches, holes to cause tripping and the like.
The cavalry came in the variety of light and heavy. Light cavalry were armored in padded leather vests and leg-guards, and equipped with lances and swords. Doctrinally, they were intended to harass, raid, scout and chase down broken forces, but not engage directly. Heavy cavalry were mostly drawn from knights and professional mounted men-at-arms, including a healthy leavening of sell-swords and hedge-knights drawn to my land by healthy purses and the assumption of magical support in any conflict. They were armored in a mixture of mail, scale and plate, their chargers barded in padded mail as well. All horses used were Gangari guard horses, which meant the units were ridiculously quick and had effectively inexhaustible stamina.
Needless to say, this equipment was expensive. As was the men’s time. Over a year’s time, I trained a cadre out of my guard and some of the squires and squire candidates that had come through the Archer-program. These men then trained the first class of recruits, overseen by Jon and myself, and then a second class of recruits with some assistance from the first.
By the end of that, I had sixty companies of infantry, sixty of archers, and twenty each of light and heavy cavalry. I even had a provisional company of horse-archers made up of those who had graduated to full squire in the Archery program, with three hundred more boys and girls under training. It was about sixty thousand dragons a year to maintain the army, and had cost a full year’s income to form it. That said, I hadn’t had to dip into my reserves, or take a loan, or magically generate gold so it wasn’t that expensive.
Of course, it wasn’t complete yet. The troops were still only operating at the company level. On the one hand, that was terrible; the logistics and command for a larger force was much more complicated, and there issues with tactics, formations and movements that the officers would need to internalize to be properly effective. Beyond that, my men needed a lot more experience and a good blooding.
On the other hand, it still compared favorably to the other medieval forces. Most armies in Westeros were formed from different feudal levies. The training, equipment, unit size… nothing was uniform for those forces. At the very least, two companies of my troops were roughly equivalent, and with the initial army at least basically trained, I could move on to higher level organization.
That second year, that’s what I focused on.
Six companies of infantry, or twelve of cavalry, formed a battalion, the general organization unit for my armies for pure-composition organizations. But for the most part, Westeros and Essos weren’t dealing with large armies; I didn’t need battalions of a single type of troop, so much as I needed regiments of combined formations that could operate semi-independently when needed.
A foot regiment included four companies of infantry, four of archers, and added a Gangari Guard Hound for every man as well as two companies of Ravens for scouting and communications. Considering a Guard Hound was easily the match for a powerful warrior, that gave a fighting strength of just under thirteen hundred men and beasts, better trained to fight as a unit and better equipped than just about any other force, and with unparalleled scouting and communications thanks to my Ravens.
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Mixed regiments added four companies each of light and heavy cavalry, while the fast regiments not only included a cavalry detachment, but gave every man a horse, turning them into mounted infantry rather than simple foot-sloggers. Those units were ridiculously fast, able to make three hundred miles a day even without roads. To put that in perspective, they could advance at a rate unmatched until the modern era of warfare. And by modern, I truly mean modern. Unless a force was fully mechanized, they wouldn’t be able to keep up.
Once all was said and done, I had ten regiments of foot, three mixed, and two fast for an active army of about twenty thousand, though I’d have backed them against five times their number of the typically disorganized, poorly trained, doctrinally inept local forces. And I still had some fifty companies each of Hounds and Ravens patrolling my territories, backed up with twice their number in summoned animals.
Then, at the end of those two years I had a general review of the army, and gave every man basic upgrades to physique, toughness, health, cleanliness and reaction speed. I kept the bonuses fairly minor, at least for that first time. It was a first taste, sort of like a drug. Although it improved their combat potential, that wasn’t the only, or even the primary drive behind that decision.
I had decided that gold was good, but my lands would at some point enter post scarcity. I already had plans to leave the planet, ideas for magically rather than technologically driven space-craft that could serve not just as ships, but as villages, towns, even countries. Unlike on a planet, where living and construction happens a bit above and below the surface, a space ship’s living space increased with every extra floor.
That meant that a four kilometer long spaceship could have a living area of about eighteen hundred square kilometers, easily enough to house and feed a metropolis of two million people. With a hundred kilometer long ship, it would have twenty eight million square kilometers of land, easily enough for a population in the billions. And that’s if I built the ship with an aesthetically pleasing ratio of length to width to height based on the golden ratio, allotted five meters height per floor, and gave forty percent of the volume of the ship over to armor, weapons, and other equipment. Given the realities of my magic, I doubted that would be needed.
But if I was going in that direction, of serious expansion and a departure from the realities of Planetos’ medieval economy in the long term, I needed a different type of payment. Preferably one that was highly valuable, with no real cost to myself, but that I had a natural monopoly of. Naturally, I thought of magic. My enchantments could do everything from make a man into a super-man, allow for immortality and more. While my men had been training, I had spent part of my time figuring out how to make items that could apply enchantments, and how to make enchantments have an expiry date to stop people from wanting to permanently retire once they were satisfied.
My men would not just be paid in gold, but in points. Points that allowed them to purchase further enhancements for themselves and for their loved ones. There were some restrictions, especially higher tier combat enhancements for civilians, but the program had been very well received by my soldiers. I planned on rolling the program out to the general populace in the near future, with a baseline of points available for those who maintained good behavior, paid taxes and the like. Further points could be earned by taking on more civic responsibilities, achievements in academic tests, mastery of useful skills including archery, etc.
But that was for the future. With that first crop of soldiers, I was not only prepared to defend myself, but had the military backbone necessary to start some conquering if I wanted to. The only problem was, I didn’t have the administrative basis to conquer, not if I wanted to keep the locations I seized and begin the work of converting them into loyal Gangari partisans. That would take administrators and educators, neither of which I had available.
I needed a university. So I set aside a piece of undeveloped land about a dozen miles away from my castle along the bank of the God’s Eye lake. On that land I raised a small university, and bordering it (leaving room for expansion) a small town. I had little desire to teach myself, and it could take years to evolve the types of thinking that I wanted naturally. I wasn’t patient enough to just wait during that, and would otherwise occupy myself, but that meant it was crucial to find a good Chancellor, one who could not just inspire the students and staff, but do so on my behalf.
Luckily, I found one such man.
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Looking across the table at the man interviewing for the position of my first Chancellor, I saw a fairly incongruous sight for an academic. The man was an archmaester, effectively a department head and leading scholar from the Citadel, but it would have been more believable if he were introduced as a sailor, or perhaps a bouncer.
The man was middle aged and balding, with a nose that had been broken more than once. He was short, but had that stocky, muscular build that inspired Tolkien when writing about dwarves with a chest like a barrel and large, strong hands. His skin was red, still sunburned from his most recent journeys. On the table he had placed his mask and rod, both of Valyrian steel for the study of magic.
“It’s a shame, Archmaester, that you cannot help me much with my magic,” I sighed.
He gave a quick snort of laughter. “My lord, I have searched for decades to find magic. And, unlike most others, I have succeeded. I daresay no other in Westeros, and very few in Essos, know more than I. But comparing those magics to you… It’s like comparing a candle to the sun.” There was a gleam of fanaticism in his eyes, a near-religious ecstasy brought about by the culmination and validation of his life’s obsession.
“Yet even a candle is useful,” I noted.
He grinned. “That’s right. And even if I can’t help much in teaching you, or studying the magic itself, I’ve found more experience and knowledge during my searching and travels than most. You won’t find any more interested or more learned than I for your place of learning. And even if I have to wait a decade, or three, I suspect I’ll learn more of magic with you than I ever could otherwise.”
I nodded decisively. “Then, Chancellor, the position is yours,” I said. Then I grinned. “And don’t worry, Marwyn. I’ve started a program in my territory where those who serve me can earn points and redeem them with magical enhancements. Your position will afford you more than enough not to worry about age.”
His brows rose. “Truly?”
I just smiled and nodded slowly.
He shook his head incredulously. “Your abilities seem somewhat more akin to the gods than otherwise,” he marveled. “Luckily, I have seen no evidence that the gods, at least the Seven, are at all active, and for the others I have never seen more power than could be ascribed to a practitioner among their priests.”
“Well, with that, let’s start talking specifics. I’d like you to focus on useful skills to improve industry, the understanding of the natural sciences including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Of course, any developments in understanding magic or alchemy are interesting as well. But most importantly, I need loyal administrators. I am transitioning my lands from feudal leadership to a more bureaucratic state with myself as the undisputed leader who gives direction and guidance for progress. I also want teachers to be trained who can go out into my lands and help educate the more intelligent among the small-folk. And in the future, I intend to expand. To claim the lands beyond the Wall, perhaps, and to do away with the practice of slavery.”
His eyebrows rose. “Ambitious, my Lord. And what is the timeframe for this?” he asked cautiously.
I smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Chancellor. I won’t ask the impossible. If it takes a decade, I can find other things to occupy myself with until then.”
He looked relieved. “Very good. What about budget, and facilities?”
“For facilities, I have already established a small town and buildings for the university about a dozen miles west of Harrenhal. There is space sufficient for sixty professors or lecturers, and twelve hundred students, and room for expansion as needed. I have allotted fifty thousand dragons a year to the budget. At least initially, students may attend on credit, even given an allowance, with the provision that afterwards they enter into my service for a term of no less than ten years.”
He boggled at the amount of gold I assigned. “Fifty thousand a year!” he gasped.
I smiled. “You don’t have to spend it all,” I noted. “But, yes.”
“With that much, in a decade or two we’ll be doing a better job at education than the Citadel,” he promised. “Can I hire from outside of the Maesters? Outside of Westeros?”
“So long as it will help you provide results, you may hire from whomever you like,” I replied. “Buy slaves, if you think they’re clever enough, so long as they are freed and given the chance to leave for elsewhere. I want able, learned, and most importantly loyal men and women. And if you need more gold than that, we can discuss it.”
“It may be a year before we can properly start,” he warned. “I’ll need to go and chase down some of the men I’ve met, and send letters to others.”
“That’s fine. I’ll assign four of my Paragons to your protection, and gift you with some enhancements, if that is acceptable.”
“Paragons?” he asked.
“My personal bodyguard,” I explained then began to boast of their abilities. “Each one was an elite swordsman before being further enhanced to the utmost of my ability. They are strong enough to smash through stone, fast enough to cut arrows out of the air, tough enough that their flesh can turn blades and axes, immune to every toxin I’ve been able to test, and with enough endurance to fight for a week without sleep. Each is accompanied by a dog as large as Togo,” I motioned towards my pony-sized companion who lay next to me, “which is as tough, strong, and fast as they are. They also have a pair of similarly enhanced ravens which are both intelligent and capable of speech, and a horse capable of running a hundred miles in an hour. They and their mounts are armed and armored with Valyrian steel. Suffice to say, you will be safe.”
And he would be. The Paragons were all created by mana, copied off of Ser Barristan the Bold’s template. Then, after the first four were sufficiently different, I took a template of them, and made sixteen more. Recently those twenty had all diverged sufficiently to make another copy, bringing my guard up to eighty men. Each had been as skilled and strong as Barristan to begin with. Then I de-aged them, and upgraded them with all of the latest magic, to the point that they could beat Captain America as easily as a professional boxer could beat a fifth grader. Finally I finished it off with the best equipment I could manage, and supported them with copies of Aethon, Togo, Hue and Mu.
The zenith of skill, magical enhancement, equipment and (like all of the summoned) a fanatical degree of loyalty combined to make each of my Paragons a one-man army. Literally. Between a modern tank battalion and one of my Paragons, I’d be betting on the man in armor with a sword. Watching them spar was like watching an anime as they blurred about the place hacking and slashing.
Having eighty of them was, honestly, somewhat excessive. I was frequently sending them on tasks that were, frankly, beneath their capability. I didn’t want to be taking any risks with my life though, and for occasions like this they were useful. Both as a surety and token of my esteem, and a quiet demonstration of the reach of my power.
Marwyn bent his head. “Thank you, my Lord. Both for the protection, and for this opportunity.”
“No, Chancellor Marwyn, thank you. I believe we will accomplish great things together,” I replied.