The flame burning inside the Valyrian glass candle was supposed to help Euron reach out to people leagues away and see into the plans of his enemies. It was supposed to cast light across mountains, across oceans, and straight into the dark corners of sleeping minds no matter where they were. It was a magical device that granted him an advantage over his enemies and it had taken him a lot of time and effort to master it as well as possess one.
Instead, Euron glared at the obsidian glass candle as its flame flickered and died whenever he tried to use it these days. At first, he had assumed there was something wrong with the glass candle and it was somehow damaged. But he had his shadowbinders and warlocks in his ship take a look at the relic and they found no fault with it.
A thin line of smoke drifted up inside the cabin of the Silence while the glass candle remained unlit. Euron sat back, his lone eye burning with frustration. For days, he had knelt over the artefact pouring magic into it, trying desperately to reach through the vast distance toward Dragonstone.
At first, it had been laughably easy. He had slipped past the vast ocean and the protections woven into the fortress easily, slipping into the sleeping mind of Daenerys Targaryen whenever he pleased. He had toyed with her thoughts, planting seeds of their glorious destiny, weaving carnal illusions of her in bed with him, yielding her dragons to his hand. It was a gradual siege, meant to prepare her for the inevitable. He kept her awake for many nights with her skin flushed and her mind fractured, and within a moon she would see the man in the visions not as a monster, but as her inevitable fate.
At least, that was the plan.
Then, three nights ago, he tried to slip into her mind, but she rebuffed him.
It was not just Daenerys slipping from the grasp of his magic. The entire island was blind to his sight. When Euron cast his sight north, he saw no island of Dragonstone, no fused stone towers, no harbours, no Dragonmont, and no shores. Only silence and darkness filled his sight whenever he cast his sight in that direction. Someone or something had placed Dragonstone beneath an impenetrable dome, blinding the candle's all-seeing eye.
"Useless!" Euron snarled under his breath.
He slammed his palms flat against the table. The wood rattled beneath the blow, sending charts, chalices, and empty flagons clattering across the floor.
Not only was the Dragon Queen slipping through his fingers, but the entire sea was also turning sour in this campaign. It was humiliating for someone such as him, he who was meant to rule the seas and all the lands that took his fancy.
When he had sailed south from the Gullet, Euron had expected the Baratheon fleet to come crawling straight into his jaws. He had massed nearly fifty longships and corsair cogs near Massey's Hook, waiting for Stannis's fleet to sail up from the south toward King's Landing. He had hungered for an open-sea battle, a glorious clash of ships where his Ironborn reavers and Stepstones pirate friends could board, butcher, and break the stag's fleet in a single afternoon.
Contrary to his expectations, the enemy ships never showed up, and he spent weeks in vain for an enemy that never came. It was as if they had vanished into the sea mist.
After days of fruitlessly sweeping the seas blocking the Gullet, scouts returned with word that the Baratheon ships were hugging the coastline of Tarth and Shipbreaker Bay. This information made his plan futile as he was denied a decisive sea battle.
Euron then steered his fleet further south, descending upon the coastal settlements of Tarth like a plague. He put fishing villages to the torch, butchered anything that breathed, and bloodied the shores of Tarth, intending to draw the southern knights out for a desperate rescue.
Yet the knights of Tarth refused to play his game.
The smallfolk abandoned the shoreline, retreating inland into the island's hilly interior. And instead of sailing forth in strength to face Euron's fleet, the Baratheon fleet had broken off into small groups. Five galleys here, three cogs there—slipping through the shallow sea where his longships could not easily follow, ambushing his ships, then vanishing back into their scattered pockets of safe havens along the island.
It was now a grinding war of attrition. Three of his best longships had already been burned and sunk, while he had claimed only two battered Baratheon galleys. He was stranded off at Tarth, his men growing restless, burning through fresh water and food, chasing ghosts while the true prize sat unguarded on Dragonstone.
Euron leaned over the map nailed to the table. The map showed several marks along the coastline—bays, reefs, and hidden anchorages where the enemy had been sighted.
"Where to next, greenlander bastard?" Euron muttered, his fingernail digging into the parchment. "Where are you hiding your ships?"
A dry chuckle echoed in his cabin, making his eye twitch with irritation.
"What is it, uncle? Your little plans not working as you envisioned?"
Euron threw a dirty look at his niece, who was chained to the bed by the window side of his cabin.
"You are here, aren't you, sweet niece?" Euron said with an evil grin. "I particularly enjoyed cutting off the tongues and cocks of your little friends. I have sent them to Essos where they'll hopefully become more of a man than having the indignity of following you, Asha."
"You will fail." Asha cursed, glaring hatefully at her uncle.
"And this prediction comes from the bright mind of a silly girl who thought her captains were happy to follow orders of a silly girl," Euron said with a scoff. "I don't know what particular bout of madness overcame Balon when he entertained your stupidity of playing Ironborn, girl. I'm not complaining as that made it easier to turn them."
"You will fail." Asha insisted. "Daenerys Targaryen knows what you are planning and she will stop you."
"Ha!" Euron laughed in amusement at the desperate hope he saw in his niece's eyes. "All Daenerys Targaryen is bound to do in the future will be spending a considerable amount of time in my bed."
A distant shout from outside his cabin made his attention switch from Asha.
Euron frowned. The sound had come from outside his ship. A chorus of panicked voices was heard outside. He gritted his teeth at the ruckus being made outside.
He cursed the day he had taken the pirate ships into his fleet. Aboard the Silence, every man who pulled an oar, managed a sail, or manned the deck of his flagship had had their tongue cut out. No drunken brawls, no treacherous whispers bothered him on his ship, and only his own voice was heard and obeyed. But the sell-sails and reavers on the surrounding ships were undisciplined beasts, always squabbling over loot or frightened by shadows.
Frantic knocks rained down upon the cabin door at that moment.
Euron's lone eye narrowed into a slit of murderous rage. He shoved his chair back, kicked the table violently aside, and yanked the door inward with enough force to crack the hinges.
"If you have come to bother me in panic, I will take your ears to match your tongue," Euron hissed.
Standing outside his cabin was his first mate, a towering brute of an Ironborn. The man did not cower facing his displeasure. Instead, his trembling hand pointed frantically upward toward the open deck.
Euron scowled and shoved past the mute.
He strode out onto the main deck of the Silence. The deck was thick with sea spray and the stench of salt, but not a single oar was in motion. Dozens of crewmen stood frozen along the railing, their pale faces turned toward the sky.
Euron tilted his head back, his lone eye sweeping past the black sails of his flagship toward the sky. The sky swelled and filled with dark thunderclouds. Flashes of distant lightning filled the sky and thunder rumbled in their ears. But that was not the only thing he noticed.
Gliding smoothly along with the dark clouds was the metallic hull of a colossal ship.
Euron stared, his lips parting in shock at the sight.
'The infamous airship!' Euron thought in awe.
The rumours carried by sailors had spoken of a floating fortress used by the Black Wolf of the North, but seeing it with his own eyes was something else.
Euron shook off the shock from his limbs, his face twisting into a snarl.
"To your posts!" Euron roared, his voice cutting through the eerie silence of his ship like a whip. "All of you, to your posts! Ready the scorpions! Unfurl the main sails! Get to work, you lazy, whoresons!"
He seized a horn from one of the men and blew a sharp blast across the water, signalling the fleet. Across the bay, Ironborn longships and pirate ships scrambled into action, oars thrashing frantically in the sea as they tried to spread out instead of keeping in a close formation.
"Warlocks! Shadowbinders! To the deck!" Euron shouted.
From beneath the deck of the Silence, half a dozen figures emerged. Men and women from Qarth with blue lips stained with the juice of the shade-of-the-evening, alongside shadowbinders from Asshai whose dark robes seemed to swallow the light.
Euron drew his blade, his eye gleaming with mad ambition. For years, he had sailed the dark edges of the world, gathering knowledge that would break the minds of ordinary men. He had fed sorcerers to his own pursuit of power, learned the blood magics of Valyria, and stolen the secrets of old magic from ancient tombs of distant eastern cities. He did it all for this moment.
"Prepare the trap!" Euron commanded the sorcerers. "If the Stark boy wants a war of magic, I will pull his sky-ship into the sea and drown him in his own blood!"
The Qartheen warlocks began chanting that made the skin crawl for those who heard it, while the shadowbinders drew blades, spilling their own blood as they wielded their blood magic.
"Look!" a lookout shrieked from the rigging of an adjacent longship, his voice carrying over the wind. "Look to the clouds! Something is moving in there!"
Euron looked up and found a dark form moving among the clouds other than the floating ship.
Diving straight down from the sky was a creature he had never seen or heard about in his life.
The dragon was colossal, its wings spanning wide enough to blot out the daylight. But it bore no scales of crimson, gold, or black like the Targaryen dragons. Its entire body was formed of ice, blinding shards of azure ice and crystal. It moved with an unnatural speed, falling toward the fleet like a falling ice mountain.
The ice dragon pulled out of its dive several feet above the sea, the sheer wind of its wings pushing the ships away against the churning water.
The dragon opened its jaws wide open and let out a roar. The deafening roar and the terror of the moment only heightened a hundredfold as the dragon neared them.
The ice dragon opened its gaping maw. A blinding torrent of pale-blue mist erupted from its open jaws. The freezing breath swept across the centre of Euron's fleet.
Euron watched with wide eyes as the attack hit his ships. The sea solidified instantly wherever the icy breath hit. Five longships were caught directly in the path of the ice breath. The sails stopped moving in the wind as they became encased in frost. The heavy oak hulls cracked and groaned as they were encased in blocks of solid ice. A mountain of ice formed over the masts of the ships.
The men aboard had no time to scream. The freezing gale washed over them, turning their flesh white and their blood to ice in a fraction of a second. Scores of Ironbron and pirates stood frozen in place, their weapons raised, their eyes staring blankly out from within tombs of transparent ice bobbing in the water.
"A bloody ice dragon!" Euron shouted in a mixture of awe and fury as he looked upon the devastation visited upon his fleet. "Man the scorpions! Aim high! Bring that beast down!"
On several of the surviving ships, the sailors panicked. The terror of facing a mythical monstrosity broke what little discipline and bravery they possessed. Men threw down their spears, abandoned the sails, and leapt overboard into the freezing seawater, desperately paddling away from the frozen hulls as if the sea could offer them safety.
Euron rounded on the archers standing along the rail of the Silence.
"Kill those cowards!" he roared, pointing a finger at the men in the water. "Kill them all!"
The mute archers raised their bows. Arrows whistled through the air, striking the thrashing men in the sea with sickening thuds. The water turned crimson as the men screamed, their muffled pleas for mercy choked by sea and dying gasps. Euron watched them drown without a shred of pity. He couldn't afford to spare cowards who jumped away at the first sign of trouble.
High above, the ice dragon banked hard in the air, its colossal crystalline wings carving an arc through the mist. It turned around in blinding speed and returned to make another pass on his ships.
"Loose now!" Euron screamed at the men handling the scorpions.
A dozen scorpions across the fleet fired one after the other. Heavy, iron-tipped bolts tore through the air. But the dragon was impossibly fast. The bolts sailed completely wide, missing the dragon by a large margin.
The dragon unleashed another sweeping breath of frost upon the ships. Its ice breath consumed four more ships.
The dragon circled back, heading directly for the Silence.
Euron braced his boots against the deck, clutching his sword as the dragon's shadow fell over the Silence. He waited for the freezing breath, but the attack never came.
The ice dragon swept directly over the top of the mast. The ship wobbled under the dragon's close pass-by, but the dragon's icy breath fell upon other ships, sparing the Silence.
Then Euron's breath caught in his throat as he found something else threatening his ship.
A single figure dropped slowly through the air.
The man drifted down like a raven, his descent slowing until his dark boots touched down on the damp deck of the Silence with nary a sound.
He was young, dressed in plain leather. He had dark hair that whipped in the wind, and piercing grey eyes that swept across the ship with an unbothered look that infuriated Euron even more. It was as if the young man didn't consider him or his sorcerers any threat.
He knew who this was. It was impossible not to know. There was only one man in Westeros who could look down on him with such disregard and it was none other than the Lord of Avalon, the man who broke the Ironborn at such a young age.
Two Ironborn reavers, blinded by bloodlust, roared and charged at the intruder with raised axes. Their need for revenge was understandable considering the destruction this intruder visited upon their people in the Iron Islands. But what wasn't understandable was their stupidity in thinking they could do harm to Harrion Stark with a stupid axe.
They never reached him.
The Stark prince didn't even draw a blade. He merely twitched his left hand.
BOOM!
An invisible force blasted outward from the Stark prince's hand. The two Ironborn reavers were swept off their feet as though struck by a battering ram, launched fifty feet backwards through the air to smash violently against the mast of another ship with enough force to break all their bones.
Euron watches it happen, and a sickening smile spreads across his face at seeing one of those men being pinned to the mast with blood and flesh splattered across the ship's deck.
Another idiot crewman of the Silence nocked an arrow and loosed it at the Stark prince.
The iron-tipped arrow flew straight for Harrion Stark's heart.
The arrow struck a shimmering barrier in the air near the Stark prince. The arrowhead snapped, the shaft splintered, and the remaining wooden shaft bounced uselessly on the deck.
Euron watched that happen with wide eyes.
The Northern prince turned his cold grey eyes upon the bowman. With a flick of his wrist, a narrow stick of dark wood appeared in his right hand.
He casually waved the stick in the air in a slash toward the archer.
Euron took a step back as he watched the archer's throat be severed from ear to ear in a single instant. It happened so fast he almost missed it.
The man dropped his bow. A fountain of red-hot blood erupted from his throat as the bowman fell to his knees, his fingers frantically clawing at his ruined neck. The man let out several wet, gurgling gasps before collapsing face-first into the blood pooling on the deck.
Euron Greyjoy watched it all happen without blinking, a cold thrill coiling in his gut at the sight of such decisive power.
He took satisfaction in the knowledge that the rumours were not embellished. The stories carried from the North had understated the depth of magical power wielded by the Black Wolf. And right now, he was witnessing the true power of the infamous Black Wolf, the butcher of the Ironborn at his peak.
Euron looked up from the man drowning in his own blood to look into the cold grey eyes of his enemy – Harrion Stark.
Harry lowered his wand, stepping over the fallen Ironborn, his gaze locking onto the Crow's Eye.
"Euron Greyjoy," Harry said, his voice carrying effortlessly over the shouts and screams of men facing death under the assault of an ice dragon. "I believe this meeting has been long overdue."
AN:
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