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Chapter 7: Legacy

Daemon had obtained permission to tear up one room.


The problem was that permission did not come with any knowledge of construction.


He selected three books from the library.


One concerned stone construction in the North, another timber and roofs, and the third was a history book.


The first two were for study.


The last was for rest.


That had been the plan.


Daemon left the library with the books tucked under his arm. He did not go to his room. After spending the last several days shut in there with books, merely seeing a desk made him imagine Valena stretching both his cheeks between her fingers.


He could not stay awake all night again.


This time, he truly meant it.


After descending the stairs, he passed the seldom-used storeroom and headed behind the manor.


There was a narrow gap between two walls.


A stranger would have thought it a blocked-off space.


Yet a small door was hidden farther inside.


He looked around once.


No one was there.


Daemon pushed open the door.


Creeeak.


It was a small stone chamber without a single window.


When he lit a candle, the low ceiling, rough stone walls, and a large chest in the center of the room emerged from the darkness.


No one had told him about this place.


He had been around two years old.


Whenever he passed behind the manor, this spot had begun to bother him for some reason. He had heard no sound and smelled nothing. Nor did he remember dreaming of it.


He had simply felt that he needed to come this way.


At first, he thought it was curiosity.


But the feeling did not disappear after several days.


In the end, he had wandered about alone and found the door.


The stranger thing happened when he entered and opened the chest.


The object inside was certainly unfamiliar, yet it did not feel entirely new.


There were images too hazy to call memories.


Hot firelight.


A dark red surface.


A large person’s hand.


Traces from when he had not even been able to walk properly.


It was an object that had come with them from Tyrosh.


At some point after they reached White Harbor, it had vanished from before his eyes. No one told him where it was, yet he had found it again.


He still did not know why.


Daemon set the books against the wall first, then went to the chest.


He slipped his fingers into the gap beneath its lid.


He pushed.


It would not open.


He put in more strength.


"Nngh..."


At times like this, having a three-year-old’s body assaulted his human dignity.


At last, the gap opened just enough for him to stick his face through.


"Fuck. I need to grow first."


Inside the chest lay a dark red object.


It resembled an egg.


The problem was that it was far too large to be an animal’s egg, and its overlapping, scale-like surface was hard as stone. Depending on how the candlelight struck it, a sheen like metal or jewels flickered between black and red.


Daemon reached in and ran a hand over its surface.


It was cold.


Raymund came into this chamber sometimes.


From what Daemon had secretly observed, he performed no special rite. He changed the straw and cloth, and checked whether dampness had gathered.


It was not strange if he was simply caring for an expensive relic.


At least, that was what Daemon had thought until now.


"You still don’t know what you are, do you?"


He gave it a light tap.


Of course, there was no answer.


"You do seem expensive, though."


The house could collapse.


They could run out of money.


They might have to flee again.


Then he would sell this.


In his mind, Daemon had arbitrarily treated it as an emergency fund.


"A man needs at least one insurance policy."


He regarded its size for a moment.


"...Getting away while carrying it would be the first problem."


He decided to leave that to his future self.


More than anything, this room was quiet.


There was no Valena.


No Raymund.


No Mara.


He could read without someone coming to tell him he had read enough.


So long as he did not keep at it until nightfall.


Daemon settled down beside the chest and opened the book on stone construction first.


*


After reading several pages, Daemon’s mood swiftly worsened.


Not because the book was poor.


On the contrary, it was quite useful.


Stone commonly used in the North, methods of laying walls, where to place chimneys, the problems caused when timber absorbed moisture, and ways to protect walls and floors throughout the long winter.


There was much to know.


That was the problem.


The more he read, the more things he did not know accumulated.


Daemon knew how heat moved.


Conduction, convection, and radiation.


He had long internalized such knowledge: gas became less dense when heated; pressure loss increased in a narrow, long flow channel; and greater thermal mass required more energy to heat to the same temperature.


But a building did not stand on heat alone.


Walls bore loads, and floors supported people and furniture. Timber behaved differently according to its grain and swelled or warped when it absorbed moisture. Water that seeped into gaps between stone and mortar froze and thawed repeatedly in the cold.


Water expanded when it froze.


When that process repeated inside tiny gaps in porous material, cracks that were initially barely visible grew little by little. Given enough time, even the surfaces of stone and mortar that looked solid would flake away.


In modern civil engineering and architecture, it was called freeze-thaw damage, an obvious consideration in evaluating a material’s durability.


Of course, Daemon was no expert in that field.


Being a doctoral student in engineering did not automatically download every branch of engineering into one’s head.


Studying mechanical engineering did not make him a structural engineer, a civil engineer, or a mason who had laid stone in the North for decades.


He had taken a few related classes in his former life.


In the army, he had dug gun positions and drainage ditches, and handled concrete.


That was different from tearing out and remaking the floor of a house where people actually lived.


Some parts would have been easier in the modern world.


There were standardized materials.


Concrete and steel had grades.


There were codes for calculating loads and safety factors; when he did not know something, he looked up the design standards. He could search papers, order products, and receive material data from manufacturers.


Here, there was almost none of that.


Instead, there were craftsmen.


The masons he had met during the previous work knew stone far better than Daemon did.


Which stone split well.


Which earth shrank when fired.


How much extra thickness was best for a wall exposed to the northern wind for years.


Their hands knew without calculation.


That was certainly skill.


The problem came the moment he asked one question too many.


Why do you do it that way?


Because that is how it has always been done.


Why?


My master taught me so.


How thick should it be?


This much.


How much, exactly, is this much?


...This much.


Daemon put down the book.


"Fuck."


It was not that they lacked technique.


The technique was buried inside people’s bodies.


At their fingertips, in the measure of their eyes.


The sense gained through long repetition.


A master mason could tap a wall once and know its condition. A carpenter could lift a piece of wood and estimate how dry it was.


It was remarkable knowledge.


But it was knowledge difficult to record.


The man died.


Only what his apprentice learned remained.


What the apprentice missed vanished.


What he misunderstood changed.


After several generations, the reason something had to be done would disappear, leaving only the custom that it had always been done that way.


To Daemon, that was dreadful.


"That’s why it needs to be recorded."


He did not need to do everything himself.


He did not need to lay stone better than a mason or carve wood better than a carpenter.


But he needed to know what could safely be entrusted to others.


Which parts he absolutely had to understand himself.


What he should use to verify the results they produced.


At least that much.


Entrusting work to people while ignorant was different from entrusting it to them knowingly.


The conclusion came naturally.


I need to study.


Daemon’s expression turned strange for a moment at the answer that surfaced in his mind.


He had cursed so much while pursuing his doctorate in his former life.


He cursed the lab.


He cursed the professor.


He cursed graduate school.


Yet once the world changed and the lab, professor, and degree vanished, he voluntarily sought out books and read them.


Something unknown appeared.


He sought information.


He read.


He formed a hypothesis.


He asked people.


He tried it himself.


He was wrong.


He looked for why he was wrong.


He did it again.


"..."


Perhaps he had never hated research itself.


He hated Kim Jaebong.


More precisely, he hated the sort of man who ground people down in the name of research, stole the results, and threw his own responsibility downward.


On the other hand, time spent grappling with a problem whose answer he did not know...


Honestly, it was enjoyable.


The feeling when scattered information suddenly connected as one.


The thrill when a hypothesis and the result fit perfectly.


Conversely, the temperament that made him curse when he was wrong, yet unable to leave until he found out why.


If he had hated that, he would never have gone as far as a doctorate.


Daemon looked down at the book.


"So that’s why I went to graduate school."


It was a fact about himself he had learned only much later.


"I was a mad bastard."


He had thought someone dragged him there by force.


At least half of it had been voluntary.


That was what felt most unjust.


Still, that was enough for today.


He knew what more he needed to check before tearing up the floor.


Northern floor structures and beams, the types of stone and moisture, flues and chimneys, fire hazards.


And matters to ask actual craftsmen about again.


Daemon marked the necessary passages and closed the book.


"Rest."


This time, he truly meant it.


He picked up the history book.


No calculations.


No designs.


No conversion of units.


People were born.


They fought.


They became kings.


They died.


Surely that would be easy reading.


"Now this is reading."


Daemon leaned his back against the chest and opened the history book.


That judgment, too, was excessively optimistic.


*


The oldest history of Westeros was nearly inseparable from myth.


It was an age before written records.


Maesters had compared old songs and traditions, graves and ruins, and the genealogies of many houses to make a rough framework, but they differed over exact dates.


Especially when the numbers stretched to thousands of years.


The children of the forest.


Giants.


The First Men.


Warriors with bronze weapons who crossed the sea.


A tale of men who cut down forests to expand settlements, fought the native peoples, and eventually struck an agreement with them.


Daemon’s pace slowed from the very first page.


The book recorded that the children of the forest were smaller than humans, possessed their own language and culture, and wielded strange powers.


Had he read it on Earth, he would have dismissed it as myth.


But this was a world where winters lasting years truly came.


He could not dismiss it as impossible from the outset based only on the common sense of his former life.


Neither did he intend to believe everything merely because it was written in a book.


Even in Earth’s ancient history, migrations and wars spanning decades were often condensed into a single king’s decision, while accomplishments made over generations were attached to one hero.


"It might have happened," Daemon muttered.


"And some things were probably added later."


He could not distinguish between them with the evidence at hand.


Set aside.


His mind felt easier once he did not force a conclusion.


It was one of the few good habits he had acquired during his doctorate.


In the age of the First Men, many kings arose in every region.


There was a king on every mountain and a king by every river, and small kingdoms with different names formed around graves, forests, and little plains.


The North had many old royal houses as well.


The name that survived to the end among them was Stark.


Kings of Winter.


Winterfell.


Thousands of years.


Daemon stopped turning pages.


"Thousands of years again."


It was difficult to take literally that one direct paternal line had continued uninterrupted over all that time.


A daughter’s descendant might have taken her mother’s family name.


A distant relative could have succeeded, or an entirely different cadet branch might have become the main line.


At worst, those who seized power might have adopted the name of the old dynasty.


Name, bloodline, and political continuity were not the same thing.


But there was no way to know what had really happened.


There were no records, so that too was merely hypothesis.


What was certain was that the name Stark had endured a very long time.


And that the very fact it had survived so long might, at some point, have become power.


The struggle between the Starks and the Boltons was especially vicious.


They seized castles and killed kings.


Some traditions even said a Bolton king flayed a Stark king and made a cloak of his skin.


Daemon lowered the book slightly.


"...He flayed a king?"


There might be exaggeration.


Still, it did not seem false that the two houses had spent a long time killing each other.


Yet in the end, a Stark was still seated at Winterfell.


The next generation.


Another Stark.


Rebellion.


Bolton.


Stark again.


Daemon flipped back and forth through the pages several times.


"At this point, it isn’t a dynasty. It’s a ghost story."


At first, they must have been kings because they were strong.


But after a hundred years.


Five hundred years.


A thousand years.


By then, the causality reversed.


They were not kings because they were strong.


They were kings because they were Starks.


Time survived itself became legitimacy.


Daemon imagined himself in the place of a northern lord.


Drive out the Starks.


Ten years later, a relative returns.


Kill him.


Thirty years later, another relative arrives with an army.


Kill that one too.


A generation later, a grandson appears.


"Fuck it, just be king already."


He thought even he would grow tired of it.


But there was another problem he could not understand.


"Why are the Boltons still alive?"


They were a house that had killed kings and supposedly skinned them.


They had rebelled as well.


In the end, the Starks won.


Yet they had not exterminated them.


Several possibilities came to mind.


The Boltons’ power may have been so great that the cost of ruling after removing them was excessive. Exterminating every great lord who surrendered also had the drawback of making the next rebel fight to the death. It might have been cheaper to reduce their lands, take hostages, and bind them through marriage.


Or there were circumstances that the books did not preserve.


Daemon marked the passage.


"I’ll look into it later."


Then he stopped.


A book meant for rest had already given him a research topic.


"..."


He pretended not to notice and turned the page.


After the kingdoms of the First Men had endured for a long time, the Andals crossed the Narrow Sea.


Iron weapons.


The Faith of the Seven.


New warrior nobles and knightly culture.


The southern kingdoms gradually absorbed Andal language and culture through repeated wars and marriages.


The North, meanwhile, stopped the invasion at the Neck.


Daemon finally understood a little why northern and southern culture differed so greatly.


And he became more skeptical still when looking at family trees thousands of years long.


A conqueror killed a king.


The king had one daughter left.


The conqueror married her.


The son took his mother’s house name.


Several hundred years passed.


Our house has never been interrupted since the kings of time immemorial.


"People are the same everywhere."


Continuation of blood and continuation of names were different matters.


Yet from the perspective of a new ruler, it was often more advantageous to make an ancient name his own than to destroy it.


Legitimacy was cheaper to pick up and use than to create anew.


Much later, in Dorne’s history, another group of migrants appeared.


The Rhoynar.


They had not come to Westeros to conquer it from the beginning.


They were refugees who had fled the great Rhoyne River basin of Essos.


And the person who led them.


Nymeria.


While reading why she had left her homeland, Daemon stopped at a single word.


Dragons.


"...Dragons?"


The cities along the Rhoyne had clashed with the Valyrian Freehold, which was expanding from the east, for a long time.


They had not been helpless from the start.


Garín the Great had gathered a vast host from many Rhoynish cities, and there were even traditions that water wizards had moved the river itself.


They had driven off three dragons sent by Valyria once.


"The balance isn’t normal on this side either."


But it did not end there.


Valyria sent more legions and dragonlords.


This time, the Rhoynar could not hold.


The cities fell.


Garín was captured.


Nymeria, who fled with the survivors, reached Dorne after a long wandering and joined hands with Mors Martell.


Through marriage, war, and alliance, she eventually bound Dorne into one realm.


Daemon rated this part rather highly.


"She brought in a refugee group and took a country."


It was not mere conquest.


She joined with local powers and created a new order.


He understood a little better why Dornish inheritance customs and culture differed so much from those of other regions.


But dragons remained in his mind.


Daemon glanced once at the chest beside him.


Not everything shaped like an egg was a dragon egg.


For now, that was all it was.


*


The Valyrian Freehold had been an ancient superpower that ruled much of western Essos.


It was said to have begun with shepherds on a peninsula, but everything changed after they began taming dragons.


Noble houses called dragonlords stood at the summit, with legions, colonial cities, slaves and roads, mines, and an immense trade network beneath them.


High Valyrian remained the language of the upper classes in the Free Cities even after the empire vanished.


Valyrian steel was treated as a treasure that could not be remade even after centuries.


If Daemon had to find something with a similar place in Earth’s history, Rome came to mind first.


Of course, that did not mean it truly resembled Rome.


Rome had neither dragons nor blood magic.


It was only that both had been immense ancient hegemonic powers whose traces of language, culture, and technology remained across wide regions even after their fall.


"Rome with magic."


At first, he was impressed.


Not long afterward, that impression cooled swiftly.


Beneath Valyria’s prosperity lay an enormous slave system.


People dragged from conquered lands were worked to death on plantations, in mines, and at construction sites.


The mines in particular were recorded as places close to hell.


Claiming to preserve their bloodlines, dragonlords married close kin. Records were scattered with blood-and-life magic, human sacrifice, and grotesque experiments upon human beings.


Later exaggeration or resentment may have been mixed in.


It was only natural that conquered people would not record their conquerors favorably.


But there were too many similar accounts.


Daemon closed the book.


"Holy fucking shit."


A few moments later, he opened it again.


He checked once more in case he had read it wrong.


He had not.


"It’s just an empire of evil."


High technology and a good society were separate matters.


Building fine roads did not make slaves any less enslaved.


Making splendid swords did not make it acceptable to use people as sacrifices.


Then the hand turning pages stopped at an illustration.


A dragon egg.


It was not a refined drawing.


It was crude, as though it had copied an illustration from an old record.


Still, its characteristics were written below.


A shell hard as stone.


A surface that looked like overlapping scales.


Varied colors.


Sometimes it gleamed like metal or jewels in the light.


Daemon looked at the picture.


He looked beside him.


At the picture again.


At the chest again.


"...Huh?"


Holding the book, he crawled closer.


Shape.


Surface.


Size.


"Huh?"


He read further.


Eggs that had not hatched for a long time could appear hardened like stone.


Dragonlords preserved such eggs for many years.


Daemon looked at the straw Raymund changed.


Then a memory surfaced.


Tyrosh.


A brazier.


Charcoal.


The dark red object above it.


People tending the fire and sometimes changing its position.


At the time, he had wondered why they placed an ornament over flames.


Daemon’s expression slowly stiffened.


"Wait."


He looked at the object in the chest.


"Were they really heating it to hatch it then?"


His first hypothesis had been an expensive relic or decoration.


That possibility had not vanished completely.


If dragon eggs were famous and precious, there could be imitations.


If gold was precious, fake gold appeared.


If authentic antiques were expensive, fake antiques appeared too.


There was nothing strange about that.


But the evidence had accumulated.


The shape fit.


The surface fit.


The size roughly fit.


In Tyrosh, they had truly applied heat.


Raymund still maintained it.


And Daemon had found a hidden place no one told him about through nothing but a strange instinct.


Individually, none was decisive proof.


Together, they changed the weight of the hypothesis.


Daemon laid his palm against the dark red surface.


It was cold.


"Are you real?"


There was no answer.


That was normal.


If an egg answered, that would be far more frightening.


He could not draw a conclusion yet.


He could not crack it open.


He could not toss it into a fire.


If it was genuine, there would be no undoing it; and even if it was fake, if it was an expensive relic, Valena would break him.


"It isn’t as if nondestructive testing equipment is lying around."


Conclusion.


Set aside.


Instead, he would read more about dragons and Valyria.


First, he needed more information to judge it.


Rest was slowly slipping away.


*


Valyria perished one day.


No one knew exactly what happened.


The records said that the vast volcanic region called the Fourteen Flames erupted, the earth split, cities collapsed, and the sea boiled.


Fire and ash covered the sky.


Even dragons died in droves.


And the heartland of the Freehold itself all but vanished from the map.


Daemon lingered a long time at the Fourteen Flames.


A massive volcanic eruption did not necessarily end with burning the surrounding land.


If sulfur compounds from a powerful eruption reached the stratosphere, they could form sulfate aerosols that reflected part of the solar radiation and cooled the surface.


The abnormal cold and crop failures that followed the great 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere in 1816 came from such a process.


That year was later called the Year Without a Summer.


Of course, Daemon was no volcanologist.


He did not know the precise volume of the eruption.


He did not remember how long aerosols remained in the air, nor had he memorized Tambora’s detailed figures.


What he remembered was much simpler.


Tambora.


Fucking huge volcano.


Erupted.


Next year’s weather got wrecked.


That was about it.


But the book said Fourteen Flames.


"...Fourteen?"


He read it again.


"They all really erupted properly?"


If eruptions on the scale of Tambora had overlapped in several locations around the same time, it should not have ended with one Valyrian peninsula being destroyed.


Massive cooling.


Crop failure.


Famine.


At the very least, records from many surrounding regions should have retained clear traces of a climate disaster.


Yet what stood out most in the later history was political turmoil called the Century of Blood.


Wars.


Slave rebellions.


Nomad invasions.


Fallen cities.


Records that the whole world had fallen into a prolonged volcanic winter were less distinct than he expected.


Daemon considered several possibilities.


The claim that all fourteen volcanoes erupted on the same scale might be exaggeration.


The eruption type or composition might have reduced the climatic impact below expectations.


A true climate disaster might have occurred, but ancient records could have been lost.


And then...


Magic.


Daemon hated the final hypothesis most.


If he attached magic to everything unexplained, there would be no need to think from that point onward.


But it was not rational to exclude magic from the variables from the beginning in this world.


There had been dragons.


There were tales of Rhoynish water wizards.


Valyria overflowed with traditions saying it used blood magic and volcanoes together.


"Fuck."


He tapped the page with his finger.


"If this were a paper, I’d write ‘insufficient data’ and be done with it."


He could not draw a conclusion from the present information.


To press beyond that would be fiction, not inference.


Set aside.


Yet one image would not disappear.


Blood magic.


Dragons.


Volcanoes.


A magical civilization maintained atop a volcanic region for thousands of years.


What if it harnessed volcanic power?


What if it held something down?


What if it used that power more and more excessively?


"...The worst industrial accident of an ancient magical civilization?"


Once he said it aloud, it sounded strangely plausible.


There was no evidence whatsoever.


Thus, that too was set aside.


Not every dragonlord outside Valyria at the time of the Doom died.


The foremost name was Aurion.


He had been in Qohor then.


He had dragons.


He had soldiers too.


He gathered thirty thousand Valyrian soldiers.


Daemon raised his eyebrows.


The strongest nation in the world had vanished overnight.


The power vacuum was enormous.


He was a surviving dragonlord.


He had dragons.


He had an army.


He could take in refugees, craftsmen, and officials.


"He could build a country if he plays it well."


Aurion did indeed proclaim himself Emperor of New Valyria.


Daemon understood that much.


If anyone questioned his legitimacy...


Show me anyone more Valyrian than I am.


That was the sort of situation it was.


The problem came next.


Aurion led his dragons and thirty thousand soldiers...


Back to Valyria.


Daemon blinked.


He read it again.


"Why?"


It was right there.


The place where his nation had just exploded.


Where volcanoes erupted, earth split, seas boiled, and dragons died in droves.


He went in there.


And vanished.


The dragons.


The army.


The self-proclaimed emperor.


All of them.


Daemon said nothing for a while.


"Don’t go, you mad bastard."


It had happened hundreds of years ago.


Still, the words came out.


"Stay in Qohor."


He had dragons.


Thirty thousand soldiers.


He could start there.


Take in refugees.


Gather craftsmen.


Gradually bind nearby powers together.


Collect taxes.


In ten years, something truly resembling New Valyria might have risen.


Of course, that was easy arithmetic from the perspective of someone who knew the outcome.


The soldiers’ loyalty.


Qohor’s politics.


The checks imposed by the other Free Cities.


There must have been innumerable variables.


Still.


"Why would you invade a disaster site of all places?"


Perhaps he had reasons to seek family treasures, surviving dragons, or precious relics.


The result was disappearance.


"Lust for power makes people stupid."


It was a good lesson.


One dragonlord family made the exact opposite choice from Aurion.


The Targaryens.


They had been one of Valyria’s many dragonlord houses, but not among the highest-ranking ones.


Twelve years before the Doom.


The head of the house, Aenar Targaryen, listened to his daughter Daenys.


Daenys said she had seen Valyria vanish amid fire and destruction in a dream.


Later people called her Daenys the Dreamer.


Aenar liquidated his property.


His family.


His retainers.


His wealth.


And with five dragons, he departed west for Dragonstone.


The other dragonlords mocked him as a coward fleeing.


Twelve years later, Valyria exploded.


Daemon twisted his lips slightly.


"A prophetic dream."


Judging by the result alone, it had been perfectly accurate.


Even so, he hesitated to accept the record at face value.


Wasn’t it dressed up afterward?


Aenar might have lost a Valyrian power struggle.


His political standing might have become dangerous.


He might have noticed ominous signs in volcanic activity or the movements of mages.


He might have heard information unknown to ordinary people from within the ruling class.


And so he made a realistic decision.


There are no answers here.


Run.


But if he simply left, he was a loser.


A dragonlord who fled in fear.


So publicly:


Our daughter prophesied disaster.


"Say it that way and at least you save face."


They became not a house expelled politically, but a wise house that saw the future others could not.


Then twelve years later, the country actually exploded.


"From that moment, no one can argue with it."


Perfect confirmation after the fact.


Of course, that too was speculation.


From what he had read so far, he could not discard the possibility that true prophetic dreams existed.


The old Daemon would have assigned a far higher probability to political packaging.


Now, he could not settle either side.


"Don’t know."


Set aside.


The important thing was the result.


Aenar left.


He lived.


And he had five dragons.


Daemon unfolded a map.


Dragonstone.


Between the eastern coast of Westeros and Essos.


An island well positioned to control the Narrow Sea.


It had already been a Valyrian outpost and possessed a fortress.


"This wasn’t only fleeing, was it?"


He considered it from the perspective of a neighboring lord.


One day, a neighbor moved in.


But he had not brought five horses.


Not even five warships.


He had brought five dragons capable of burning a castle from above.


"Who would touch him?"


Daemon could not know whether Aenar had come believing only in prophecy or with political calculation as well.


But he had chosen his position well.


While Essos killed itself during the Century of Blood, the Targaryens survived on Dragonstone.


About a hundred years later.


One of their descendants looked west.


*


Aegon Targaryen.


The man later called the Conqueror.


He had two sisters who were also his wives, Visenya and Rhaenys, and the three of them had three dragons.


Vhagar.


Meraxes.


And Balerion.


The Black Dread.


Balerion was the last surviving dragon of the five Aenar had brought from Valyria.


To Daemon, Aegon’s Conquest was easier to understand than surprising.


Harrenhal.


Enormous walls.


Huge towers.


Countless soldiers.


Balerion descended from above.


Burned it.


Done.


"Why did they build a castle?"


Once he said it, he realized it was not the castle’s fault.


Castle walls had evolved to deal with men, horses, and siege engines coming from the side.


No architect would have accounted for a giant flame-breathing creature descending from the sky.


The Field of Fire had ended similarly.


A huge field army gathered by the west and the Reach.


It outnumbered Aegon overwhelmingly.


Three dragons flew.


The result was disaster.


"That’s a cheat code."


In Daemon’s view, the most terrifying thing about dragons was not their fire.


They flew.


They ignored terrain.


They crossed walls.


They could attack the enemy rear and command directly.


Horses feared great predators, as did people.


Alone on a medieval battlefield, they possessed a different degree of strategic freedom.


That did not mean he thought all of Aegon’s ability came from dragons.


He did not blindly destroy houses that surrendered.


He recognized many of their existing lands.


He used local nobles.


He made use of the old institutions of conquered kingdoms.


He changed only what needed changing.


He bound kingdoms that had gone their separate ways for thousands of years beneath one royal authority.


"He earned the name Conqueror."


Torrhen Stark was especially impressive.


He brought an army south.


He saw the enemy.


He saw the dragons.


He did not fight.


He laid down his crown.


Daemon read that part twice.


"Well done."


He lost a crown.


His house lived.


The North survived.


"Perhaps houses that survive so long truly have their reasons."


But Aegon was not omnipotent.


He failed in Dorne.


The Dornish avoided large field battles.


When armies came, they scattered.


When occupying forces passed, they appeared again.


They attacked supply lines and garrisons.


Dry terrain.


Long supply lines.


A hostile population.


Dragons could destroy.


They could not occupy.


To take a country, people had to remain.


You had to guard roads and ports, secure food and water, divide the local lords, and make an exit for surrender.


But when Dorne held out, the Targaryens kept burning it.


It still did not submit.


They burned it again.


They even lost Rhaenys and Meraxes.


"Having an incredible weapon doesn’t automatically give you strategy."


The Conqueror’s score dropped a little.


It remained high nonetheless.


Then Daemon lingered over the description of the Iron Throne.


A throne forged by melting down the swords of conquered enemies in Balerion’s flames.


Songs claimed it held a thousand swords.


Sharp points and twisted steel protruded in every direction, and it was made so that no king could sit back comfortably.


Aegon’s intention was plain.


A king should not sit comfortably.


"..."


Daemon stared down at the illustration.


"That’s a chair?"


It was not.


It looked as if someone had made a small place to sit atop a pile of scrap-metal weapons.


It was said that even centuries later, some of the blades still cut people.


There were records of kings cutting their hands or arms on it.


Tetanus was commonly said to come from rusty iron, but strictly speaking rust itself did not cause the disease.


Spores of tetanus bacteria were widespread in soil and dust. When a contaminated object made a deep wound, they could multiply in oxygen-poor tissue and produce toxins.


That was why being deeply stabbed by an old, dirty shard of sharp metal was dangerous.


And in a medieval society without disinfectants, antibiotics, or vaccination, even an infection other than tetanus could readily kill a person.


Of course, Daemon was not a bacteriologist.


He did not remember the scientific name of the tetanus bacterium.


But there was one piece of common knowledge he knew for certain from his former life.


Getting deeply cut by filthy iron was fucking dangerous.


Yet...


The throne did that every day.


Daemon stared at the illustration for a while.


"What about fucking tetanus?"


A king read state papers and shifted wrong.


Hand cut.


He moved while judging a case.


Thigh cut.


He tried to stand and scraped his arm.


All from the chair a king sat upon.


"Why?"


He understood the symbolism.


The conqueror’s majesty.


The vanquished men’s swords.


A lesson never to relax.


But its practicality was negative.


"Would putting down one cushion destroy royal authority?"


Since he had not yet imagined he might have the slightest connection to that throne, he dismissed it then as merely the strange taste of an old king.


Aenys I, who followed the Conqueror, was an entirely different type from his father.


He was kind.


Gentle.


He wanted people to love him.


The problem was his lack of decisiveness.


The moment the king wavered, rebellions rose in many regions, and conflict with the Faith of the Seven over the royal family’s incestuous marriages worsened.


When Aenys married his children to each other, the High Septon publicly condemned him, and armed religious groups rose up.


"I understand that he was kind, but..."


Daemon turned the page.


He made a decision.


Opposition arose.


He retreated.


The other side pressed harder.


He wavered again.


"Isn’t that the very pattern a king must never follow?"


A good person and a good ruler did not mean the same thing.


Aenys was not an evil man.


He was likely a rather good man personally.


"But being king isn’t a contest to choose a nice old gentleman."


In the end, he died without resolving the problem.


The next king was the opposite.


Maegor I.


Maegor the Cruel.


If Aenys could not make decisions, Maegor made them too well.


The Faith’s armed groups rebelled.


Kill them.


They rose again.


Kill more.


A lord opposed him.


Kill him.


Someone knew too many secrets.


Kill him.


"..."


Daemon lowered the book.


"Does this family have no middle ground?"


Maegor was not incapable.


He was a powerful warrior, rode Balerion, and truly broke the Faith’s armed forces that threatened royal authority.


The problem was his means.


In eliminating the crown’s enemies, he made the entire realm its enemy.


"You’re meant to get rid of the problem. Why get rid of everyone around it too?"


In the short term, it might look efficient.


In the long term, no one remained to support you.


In the end, he was found a mangled corpse atop the Iron Throne.


Aenys had been too weak.


Maegor had been too strong.


"Couldn’t you mix half of each together?"


What was needed was somewhere between them.


And then appeared the king closest to that middle.


Jaehaerys I.


The Conciliator.


The Old King.


Daemon began reading without much expectation.


Gradually, he straightened his posture.


Even after Maegor’s death, the problem between the crown and the Faith did not end.


Instead of blindly killing again, Jaehaerys negotiated.


In exchange for armed religious groups laying down their weapons, the crown protected the Faith and brought the independent military force and certain powers wielded by the religious order under royal authority.


He also settled the issue of Targaryen incestuous marriage politically through negotiation with the Faith.


Then he reformed the laws.


He built roads.


He organized customs that differed from region to region.


Queen Alysanne traveled throughout the realm and heard the people’s problems herself.


Daemon paused here for quite some time.


"Ah."


He did not burn castles.


He did not wage a great war of conquest.


Roads.


Laws.


Administration.


Reconciliation.


"This man is the one who truly built a country."


If Aegon conquered kingdoms, Jaehaerys was closer to the man who made those lands function as one real kingdom.


This suited Daemon’s tastes better.


Burning a castle with a dragon was impressive.


Properly laying a road people would use for decades was impressive too.


The latter, if anything, endured into the next generation.


"First place so far."


He placed him at the top of his mental ranking.


After Jaehaerys’s long reign, the throne passed to his grandson, Viserys I.


Viserys’s age appeared, on the surface, to be a golden age.


The treasury was rich.


There were many dragons.


External threats were not great.


Nobles gathered at the king’s court, and the dynasty was strong.


Daemon initially thought it looked fine.


Until he read about the succession.


Viserys named his daughter Rhaenyra his official heir.


He had the lords swear fealty to her.


Then he remarried.


A son was born.


Yet the decision of succession remained unchanged.


Thus far, it was the king’s choice.


He could give it to his daughter.


He could change it to his son.


What mattered was settling what came afterward decisively.


The problem was that Viserys settled nothing decisively.


Rhaenyra remained the heir.


His son Aegon grew into a prince with a powerful claim to the throne.


Each married.


Each had children.


Each gained nobles behind them.


And both sides had dragons.


Daemon took his eyes from the book.


"...Why?"


He looked again.


"Why give them dragons?"


What was the core of royal authority?


Dragons.


Dragons had conquered Westeros.


Dragons had made rebellion difficult.


Yet the most dangerous competitors for the throne each possessed dragons.


"No, fuck."


If he intended to make Rhaenyra queen, he had to back her decisively.


Keep her in the capital.


Teach her governance.


Have her sit on the small council.


Make the nobles see their next ruler every day.


Virtually bind royal power and the heir’s power into one.


If he disliked that and meant to change the heir to his son, he needed to do that decisively too.


One or the other.


But Viserys had...


A daughter as the official heir.


A son as prince.


Dragons on both sides.


Nobles on both sides.


"He put every part that could break into one box."


There had been peace while he lived.


Daemon considered that the problem instead.


The peace hid the flaw.


He made a system that would collapse entirely the instant one condition—the king’s continued life—was removed.


And it truly collapsed.


The Dance of the Dragons.


The Blacks.


The Greens.


Rhaenyra.


Aegon II.


The royal house split in two.


Dragons killed dragons.


Royals died as well.


Cities and castles burned.


The entire kingdom was swept into civil war.


The more Daemon read, the quieter he became.


Then at last, he exploded.


"Are they complete fucking idiots?"


The greatest asset distinguishing Targaryen royal authority from all other royal houses had been dragons.


Because of that monopoly, kingdoms thousands of years old had knelt to the Iron Throne.


Yet while fighting for the throne, they ground that asset away among themselves.


In terms of his former life, it was like a house that conquered the world by monopolizing nuclear weapons, then fired nukes at one another over a succession dispute until nuclear weapons themselves were gone.


"You killed them all yourselves."


A few dragons remained after the civil war.


It did not last long.


Before long, dragons vanished.


Daemon looked toward the chest.


The object inside seemed much more expensive than it had moments ago.


Aegon III, who ascended after the civil war, had been a child who survived it.


He lost his brothers young.


He fled and was captured.


And before his eyes, he watched his mother Rhaenyra burned and devoured by a dragon.


Afterward, he feared and hated dragons intensely.


Daemon stopped rating kings for the first time here.


He said nothing for a while.


"...That."


It was difficult to curse at that.


Daemon himself had not lost his former life because of adults fighting, but after being born into this body, he had crossed the sea because of things he did not choose.


His father died.


His mother fled.


He still did not know the exact reason, but even his identity was hidden.


Aegon had it much worse.


Because of adults fighting over a throne, a child watched his mother be eaten alive by a dragon.


"It’s remarkable he didn’t go mad."


Aegon III’s reign was not dazzling.


He disliked mingling with people and rarely smiled.


He was not a king beloved by later generations.


But he stabilized a realm shattered by war.


Though he hated dragons, once he judged they were necessary for royal authority, he even permitted attempts to hatch dragons again.


Daemon was slightly surprised at that part.


"He distinguished what he hated from what was necessary."


He rated that highly.


And beside Aegon was his younger brother.


Viserys.


As Daemon read his story, his expression grew increasingly strange.


During the Dance of the Dragons, young Viserys was separated from his family.


His ship was captured.


He was taken to Lys.


For a long time, he was thought dead.


He had to live abroad as a prince of political value.


Then he returned.


After his family had died and the realm had burned.


Daemon stared at the page for a long time.


"...These brothers had it fucking rough."


For some reason, he empathized with them.


Both had been children caught in adults’ war.


They fled.


They lost family.


They became tools of a dynasty regardless of their own wishes.


And after surviving...


They repaired the realm.


Viserys, especially, had effectively managed the state from the latter years of his brother Aegon III’s reign.


Since his brother disliked people and did not enjoy being king, the younger brother took over the practical work.


But it did not end when his brother died.


The next king was Aegon’s son, Daeron I.


Viserys became Hand again.


Then Baelor I.


Hand again.


For decades, whenever kings changed, he supported the realm from beside them to keep it from falling.


Daemon felt sincerely sorry for him.


"Did this old man ever get off work?"


Kings did strange things.


He cleaned them up.


A king died.


The next king came.


He cleaned things up again.


"...Why does this feel familiar?"


His memories of being a graduate student under Kim Jaebong faintly rose up.


The professor caused trouble.


The graduate student cleaned it up.


The professor started something new.


The graduate student cleaned it up again.


"Ah."


Daemon felt a strange kinship with Viserys II.


"Senior."


It was not an address one ought to use for royalty.


But that was what he thought in his heart.


The problem was that the first nephew Viserys had to clean up after was Daeron I.


The Young Dragon.


He ascended at fourteen.


And nearly as soon as he did, he declared he would conquer Dorne.


Land the Conqueror had failed to take even with dragons.


Now there were no dragons.


Naturally, the small council opposed him.


Daeron’s answer was famous.


If a dragon was needed, there one stood.


He meant himself.


Daemon was impressed for a moment.


"That is cool."


Then he read closely.


Daeron had not simply charged forward blindly.


He divided his armies in multiple directions.


He used mountain paths.


He coordinated fleet and army.


He calculated the enemy’s main strength and lines of movement.


In little more than a year, he forced Dorne’s chief powers to submit.


"He does have military talent."


That was difficult to deny.


The problem came when Daemon began considering the conditions of the age as well.


The Conqueror’s age and Daeron I’s age were not the same.


Aegon I made a new kingdom while facing kingdoms that had fought separately for thousands of years one at a time.


Daeron, by contrast, inherited a realm already bound beneath the Iron Throne for over one hundred and fifty years.


It was not a fully centralized state.


Each region’s armies were still raised by lords, while taxation and administration also depended substantially on local powers.


Even so, a structure already existed where the king could order men gathered simultaneously from many regions aside from the North, unite the royal fleet with the fleets of great lords, and commit tens of thousands toward a single war aim.


There was also the road network Jaehaerys I had built.


Population and productive capacity had recovered through the preceding decades of peace.


Daeron inherited that entire system.


Daemon looked at the book again.


"Wait."


The operational plan itself was well designed.


Fair enough.


"But this bastard."


He drew troops from most of the Seven Kingdoms beneath the Iron Throne.


He used fleets as well.


The opponent was Dorne alone.


"He has military talent, but..."


He considered it briefly.


"Didn’t he just push it through with an overwhelming economic advantage?"


StarCraft came to mind for a moment.


One side had one main base.


The other had six expansions.


It had far more resources and population.


And on top of that, it planned its operations well.


Of course, it would push in the opening.


Daemon’s evaluation changed somewhat.


Rather than:


A genius boy god of war achieved an impossible conquest.


It seemed more realistic to say:


A boy king with military talent used a vastly larger resource base to subdue Dorne militarily.


And there was a decisive problem.


Occupation.


The records said about ten thousand men died taking Dorne.


That was already no small number.


But in the years afterward, far more soldiers died while maintaining the occupation.


The records differed, but the number was in the tens of thousands.


Daemon looked at the numbers again.


"...Wait."


Ten thousand men died to take it.


Then another forty or fifty thousand died maintaining it.


"Fuck."


Had they really won the war?


They took hostages among the chief nobles.


They left garrisons.


Then the king returned to King’s Landing.


The smallfolk and resistance forces kept fighting.


The governor left in Dorne died.


The occupation system collapsed in an instant.


Daeron led an army south again.


He fought again.


And he was murdered at a meeting supposedly for peace negotiations.


He was eighteen.


Daemon stared down at the book a long time.


"This..."


At first, he had judged him merely a mad bastard who fought well.


Now it was different.


"Isn’t he just a badly disguised terrible king?"


Was there an obvious need to start the war?


Dorne was an independent nation, but it was not invading the Iron Throne at the time.


The kingdom was not in immediate danger of collapse.


Yet a fourteen-year-old king started a war to complete a conquest his forebears had failed to finish.


Tens of thousands died.


He took Dorne for a time.


Several years later, he lost it all.


He died too.


"So what remained?"


A heroic tale.


The Young Dragon.


Glorious war records.


And corpses.


Daeron himself had even left a book about his war of conquest, and there were assessments that he exaggerated enemy numbers within it.


Daemon was dumbfounded.


"He wrote his own war and made himself his own hero tale."


That did not mean he lacked military talent.


On the contrary, he had it.


That made him more dangerous.


He was intelligent.


He fought well.


He was young.


His confidence pierced the sky.


And he was intoxicated by his own success.


"If he had lived long with that temperament..."


Daemon slowly turned the page.


"I think he would have evolved into a tyrant."


There were few things more dangerous than a capable man convinced he was right.


If he lacked ability, at least the scale of his disasters was small.


If he had ability, the whole country followed him.


Daemon’s final judgment of Daeron I fell greatly.


Military talent.


High.


Rule.


Failure.


Setting strategic goals.


Questionable.


Occupation administration.


Complete failure.


"His image seems to have survived because he died as a young hero."


No one could know what would have happened if he had not died at eighteen and had ruled until thirty or forty.


Perhaps it was better that way.


The Baelor I who succeeded him was the opposite of his brother.


Baelor the Blessed.


If Daeron tried to take Dorne through war, Baelor chose peace.


He walked to Dorne himself.


He freed prisoners.


He bound relations through marriage.


Daemon considered this rather good so far.


"He cleaned up the shit his brother left behind."


In particular, resolving through diplomacy a problem war had failed to solve deserved high praise.


The problem was that Baelor was not merely a religious king.


More precisely...


He was too religious.


He was completely consumed by the Faith of the Seven.


He fasted repeatedly.


He regarded his own desires as sins.


Claiming he would isolate his sisters from men, he confined them in the Maidenvault.


He even rejected books and ideas that did not accord with religious standards.


Daemon’s expression gradually soured.


In his former life, he had never hated all Christians.


The problem was people unable to distinguish between believing in a religion and shoving that religion onto others.


They grabbed you while you walked down the street.


They told you to come to church.


They told you that you would go to hell if you did not believe.


Near universities, they approached pretending to conduct surveys.


People you could not tell were cultists or members of normal churches consumed others’ time with nothing but their own certainty.


Daemon had a very simple name for that sort of person in his mind.


Religious assholes.


Faith itself was not the problem.


The problem began when they shoved their faith down someone else’s throat.


Reading about Baelor gradually revived old memories.


"Ah."


This sort.


I believe this, so you must live this way too.


Daemon hated them most.


But Baelor had one achievement difficult to ignore.


The Great Sept of King’s Landing.


For a long time, the center of the Faith of the Seven had been the Starry Sept in Oldtown.


The High Septon resided there as well.


Baelor ordered a great sept built in King’s Landing.


The building was completed after his death, but in the end, the religious center of the Faith and even the High Septon’s seat moved to the capital.


Daemon stopped again here.


"...This was fucking well done, though?"


The more he considered it, the more politically impressive it was.


The center of the strongest religious organization in the realm was in Oldtown.


Oldtown was heavily influenced by House Hightower.


Move that center to the capital where the king lived.


Make the High Septon and highest clergy work immediately beside the royal palace.


Reduce the physical distance between the royal family and religious leadership itself.


Pilgrims came to the capital too.


Religious and political events concentrated in the same city.


In the long term, royal influence over religion could only increase.


In modern terms, it was like bringing the headquarters of a religion into the capital.


"Hey."


Daemon was impressed.


"This was really well—"


Then he read Baelor’s other deeds again.


Fasting.


Visions.


Faith.


More fasting.


Confining his sisters.


Miracles.


Religion.


Daemon’s admiration cooled.


"...No."


It did not seem he moved the religious center to the capital through political calculation.


It seemed he simply wanted to build the greatest sept in the world in the capital as a symbol of his faith.


It only happened to produce enormous political effects.


Daemon became certain.


"This bastard did not have the brains to do it for that reason."


He tapped the page.


"He definitely built it with faith as his one and only stat."


Even if the intention was foolish, the result could be good.


There were things like that in engineering too.


You did not know why it had been designed that way, but it worked well by accident.


It was frightening to touch.


Baelor’s Great Sept felt exactly like that.


Daemon’s evaluation was complicated.


Peace with Dorne.


Good.


The Great Sept.


Very good in result.


Personal fanaticism.


Very dangerous.


"Everyone would have been happier if he had been a priest instead of king."


That was how he summarized it.


And there was one man who cleaned up after both nephews.


Viserys II.


By this point, Daemon began sincerely identifying with him.


Caught in war as a child and held captive abroad.


Returned to find the realm shattered.


Helped his brother Aegon III restore it.


His brother died.


His nephew became king.


His fourteen-year-old nephew suddenly led an army off to take Dorne.


He cleaned it up.


The nephew died on a battlefield.


The next nephew became king.


This time he was mad for religion.


He cleaned it up again.


"Senior."


Daemon meant it sincerely.


"I respect you."


It frightened him that his own life might become similar.


Others caused disasters.


He cleaned up after them.


The next person caused another disaster.


He cleaned it up again.


It was graduate school.


Graduate school called the royal court.


Viserys served long as Hand throughout his brother’s and nephews’ reigns.


He bore much of the responsibility for actual state administration.


Then, after Baelor died, he finally became king.


Viserys II.


His official reign lasted barely over a year.


Even in that brief period, he tried to reform royal administration, coinage, trade, and laws.


Daemon felt increasingly aggrieved.


"No."


This old man had done the practical work for decades.


Yet he was king for one year?


"Even in this world, work piles up on people who are good at it."


Aegon III and Viserys II.


Of all the royal figures he had read about thus far, Daemon felt most drawn to these two.


Both had their childhoods ruined by a war adults made.


Yet they survived.


And instead of wrecking the realm as much as they themselves had been wrecked, they somehow made it function again.


That mattered quite a lot to Daemon.


Having wounds did not give one the right to wound others.


Being unhappy did not mean one could ruin a country.


"These brothers have my approval."


They were the first people in the dynasty’s history toward whom he felt human affection as well.


Then Viserys II’s son became king.


Aegon IV.


The Unworthy King.


Daemon read a few pages.


Then gave his first assessment.


"Does this bastard have his brain at the tip of his dick?"


Women.


More women.


Mistresses.


Bastards.


Favor.


Jealousy.


Revenge.


He put his private lust and emotions into national politics.


He used royal authority to retaliate against those he disliked and gave benefits to those he liked.


He even encouraged rumors questioning whether his legitimate son Daeron was truly his son.


Daemon sincerely could not understand.


"His father was Viserys II. Why is the son like this?"


The mystery of heredity.


Or failed upbringing.


Or simply a problem with the man himself.


Aegon IV had countless bastards.


Several born to mothers of noble blood were particularly famous.


The Great Bastards.


Daemon Waters.


Aegor Rivers.


Brynden Rivers.


Shiera Seastar.


And other children besides.


Among them, Daemon Waters was the son of the Targaryen princess Daena.


He showed astonishing martial ability from childhood.


At twelve, he won a squire’s tourney, and Aegon IV knighted him personally and gave him the royal family’s Valyrian steel sword.


The sword wielded by the Conqueror.


Blackfyre.


Daemon’s fingers stopped.


Blackfyre.


It did not feel unfamiliar.


He had heard it somewhere.


It had not yet surfaced.


He kept reading.


Daemon Waters later took the sword’s name for his house name.


Daemon Blackfyre.


And just before Aegon IV died...


He legitimized all his bastards.


Daemon slowly lowered the book.


"Wow."


He was impressed for a moment.


"He really was a son of a bitch to the end."


He died.


He handed the bomb to the next person.


"Why do kings lay land mines before they die?"


The next king could clear them.


Very convenient.


The man who received that bomb was Daeron II.


Unlike his father, he valued scholarship, administration, and diplomacy.


He purged corrupt officials and employed capable men.


Above all, he brought Dorne, which had not been subdued through long war, into the Seven Kingdoms through marriage and negotiation.


Daemon rated him quite highly.


"This is far cheaper."


He resolved with marriage and adjustments of rights what Daeron I had failed to maintain after grinding up tens of thousands of lives.


Of course, Dorne had to be granted considerable privileges.


Marriages between the royal family and Dornish nobles were needed as well.


It was slow.


Frustrating.


But cheaper than burying tens of thousands of people.


"There’s a reason they say war is political failure."


The problem was that many nobles disliked the policy.


They felt Dorne gained too much influence.


Furthermore, rumors persisted that Daeron was not Aegon IV’s true son, but born from the queen and the Dragonknight Aemon.


On the other side stood Daemon Blackfyre.


Handsome.


An exceptional warrior.


He had the Conqueror’s sword.


Above all, Aegon IV had already legitimized the bastards.


In symbolism alone, he was formidable.


And in 196 AC.


The First Blackfyre Rebellion.


It bore the name rebellion, but was effectively civil war.


Great lords divided between the two sides.


The Black Dragon.


The Red Dragon.


The end came at the Redgrass Field.


Daemon Blackfyre and two of his sons died.


But it did not end.


One of the Great Bastards, Aegor Rivers.


Bittersteel.


He fled to Essos with the surviving Blackfyres and their followers.


And he made a new army so the exiled knights and soldiers would not scatter.


The Golden Company.


Daemon’s eyes narrowed.


That word too was in his memory.


Raymund.


A low voice.


The night when he had been presumed asleep.


Prince.


Heir.


The Golden Company.


Blackfyre.


Daemon did not close the book.


He had not connected them yet.


He should not force a conclusion merely because words overlapped.


He kept reading.


Late in Daeron II’s reign, the Great Spring Sickness swept the realm.


The king died as well.


Several children of the crown prince also died.


A second son originally far from the throne became king unexpectedly.


Aerys I.


He liked books.


He studied ancient records, prophecies, and magic.


Daemon felt an affinity for a moment.


Then his expression immediately soured.


After becoming king, Aerys handed much of the practical work to his Hand, Brynden Rivers.


One of the Great Bastards.


The Bloodraven.


Bloodraven.


Aerys spent more time on books and mystical studies than ruling.


Daemon was silent briefly.


"I understand liking books."


He truly did.


"But being king is your job."


You could not go to the lab during working hours.


Of course, Bloodraven was capable.


The aftermath of the Great Spring Sickness.


Drought.


Raids from the Iron Islands.


The Blackfyre problem.


The realm kept functioning.


The Second Blackfyre Rebellion was suppressed at Whitewalls before it could properly begin.


Daemon II Blackfyre’s plans could not penetrate Bloodraven’s network of surveillance.


"That sounds less like a rebellion and more like preventive arrests."


Still, the Blackfyres did not give up.


The Third Rebellion.


This time, Haegon Blackfyre and Bittersteel truly crossed the sea.


War came.


And someone distinguished himself on the royal side.


Aerys’s brother.


Maekar.


Maekar differed from his brothers.


He was no scholarly ruler.


His character was strict and stubborn.


He was a fine warrior and knew how to command an army.


In the Third Blackfyre Rebellion, he showed his ability as leader of the royal army.


The rebellion was crushed.


Haegon Blackfyre died.


Bittersteel was captured, but eventually escaped back to Essos.


When Aerys died without heirs several years later, Maekar ascended the throne.


Maekar I.


Daemon read with considerable interest.


Maekar did not like Bloodraven.


They had conflicted for a long time.


Yet even after becoming king, he continued to use Bloodraven as Hand.


"Oh."


He disliked him.


But the man was capable.


So he used him.


Daemon liked such judgment.


Whether one liked or disliked a person was a secondary question in governing a country.


Compared to the eras before and after, Maekar’s reign was fairly peaceful.


The Blackfyre faction did not launch a major invasion during his reign.


Of course, that could not be explained by Maekar alone.


The Golden Company’s circumstances.


Conditions in Essos.


Its support base in Westeros.


Preparation for war.


There were many variables.


Still.


Maekar personally beat down the Third Rebellion.


He knew how to lead armies.


Even after becoming king in old age, his military strength remained sound.


At the end, when House Peake rebelled, the king personally led an army out.


He died in the siege of Starpike.


And three years after his death...


The Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion erupted.


The corner of Daemon’s mouth lifted a little.


"At least things were quiet while that man was alive."


It might have been coincidence.


There might have been other circumstances.


But imagining it from the rebels’ perspective...


They crossed the sea.


The king on the other side put on armor himself.


And that king had already destroyed their house once.


"If they started something, he probably would have come himself to crack their skulls."


It was uncertain how far the term good king applied.


He was not a great reformer.


Not a conqueror.


But he did not ruin the country terribly.


He used capable subordinates even if he disliked them.


When war came, he fulfilled his role.


He ran the realm peacefully.


Having read dynastic history this far, Daemon thought that alone deserved a high score.


"Is a king top-tier if he just doesn’t cause disasters?"


It was a sad standard.


After Maekar died, the succession became tangled.


His sons died first or caused problems that made them unsuitable for the throne.


In the end, a Great Council convened.


An unexpected king was chosen.


Aegon V.


Maekar’s fourth son.


He was a prince with almost no chance of becoming king in his youth.


He had traveled the Seven Kingdoms with the hedge knight Dunk while concealing his status.


He had truly seen how commoners lived.


That experience led to policies after he became king.


He tried to protect the smallfolk’s rights.


He tried to limit some of the authority great lords wielded over peasants.


Daemon initially liked it.


"Good."


The problem came after reading only a little further.


There were no dragons.


Royal authority depended heavily on feudal nobles’ men and money.


And in such circumstances, he intended to cut down the great lords’ rights?


Naturally, they resisted.


Whether a policy was good and whether it was feasible were different matters.


Daemon’s brow furrowed deeper.


"It lacks a little realism."


He understood what Aegon V wanted.


Protect commoners.


Good.


But what power would enforce the policy?


The king did not have an absolute standing army.


He did not have a weapon overwhelming the great lords’ military force.


"If good intentions alone enforced laws, graduate students wouldn’t have been ground down either."


Aegon also arranged political marriages to make up for that limitation.


He would bind princes and princesses to great houses such as Baratheon, Tully, Tyrell, and Redwyne.


Daemon nodded here.


"Right. That’s how you build a support base."


But every one of his children caused trouble.


His eldest son Duncan broke his betrothal to a Baratheon lady and married Jenny of Oldstones.


In the end, he had to renounce his claim to the throne, and the Baratheons nearly rebelled.


The second son Jaehaerys and daughter Shaera were each betrothed to other great houses.


But they secretly married, saying they loved each other.


Daemon read the sentence.


He stopped.


He read it again.


Jaehaerys.


Shaera.


Brother and sister.


"...What?"


He went back one line.


He checked again.


They were full siblings.


"No, fuck."


Daemon held the book a little farther away.


"Why does this family love incest so much?"


It began with the Conqueror.


Sibling marriage.


Another sibling marriage.


Uncle and niece.


Cousins.


Siblings again.


There were marriages outside the family in between, but marriages between strangely close blood relations repeated.


At that moment, it felt as though somewhere in Daemon’s mind, the East Asian civilization of his former life suddenly awoke.


A Confucian Dragon roared.


A Neo-Confucian Tiger howled.


Establish the distinction between parents and children.


Set right the order between spouses and siblings.


Daemon had not been an especially fervent Confucian in his former life.


He often forgot the dates of ancestral rites and had no interest in genealogy.


But when he repeatedly read the sentence that full siblings had married, something buried inside a twenty-first-century Korean rose of its own accord.


"No, you mad bastards."


It was the first joint sortie of the Confucian Dragon and Neo-Confucian Tiger.


Daemon glared at the book for a long time.


Then a new question arose.


"Could it be...?"


He ran through Targaryen dynastic history again in his mind.


A decent king appeared.


Then someone strange popped out in the next generation.


Another decent one appeared.


Then another tyrant or terrible king.


"Is that why this family is like this?"


Inbreeding truly increased genetic risk.


Close blood relatives were more likely to share the same genetic mutations inherited from ancestors. In particular, if harmful recessive mutations were more likely to be passed by both parents at once, the chance their offspring would show the trait or disease also increased.


Modern genetics well understood that repeated inbreeding over many generations could increase certain genetic diseases, deformities, and problems such as reduced fertility.


But that did not mean it alternated a king’s political ability or personality between good kings and bad ones by generation.


Traits such as governing ability, impulsiveness, and cruelty were not determined by a single gene.


Education.


Upbringing.


Political conditions.


Illness.


Personal experience.


People around them.


Power structures.


Too many things were mixed together.


Daemon was no genetics expert either.


The knowledge he remembered was far rougher.


If close relatives keep having children together, the risk of recessive genetic diseases goes up.


That was about it.


"So."


Blaming the entire dynasty’s proportion of mad bastards on inbreeding was bullshit.


He knew that.


But...


Daemon looked at the family tree again.


"Still, shouldn’t you be a little suspicious by this point?"


The Confucian Dragon seemed to agree.


The Neo-Confucian Tiger seemed to nod as well.


It was, of course, an illusion.


Daemon shook his head.


"Mad family, anyway."


Then he returned to the real issue.


By breaking their own betrothals and marrying as siblings, Jaehaerys and Shaera had destroyed two more political marriages.


The youngest, Daeron, also broke his betrothal to a Redwyne.


Daemon stared at the page for a long time.


"..."


Then he was impressed.


"He did a magnificent job educating his children."


Every one of them disobeyed their king-father.


Not merely one.


The children broke every betrothal he had arranged to build the realm’s political foundation.


Of course, children were people too.


If asked whether the state should decide a person’s marriage unilaterally, the Daemon of his former life would have said no as well.


But this was a feudal dynasty.


As long as one was born royalty and enjoyed a throne, lands, and privilege, the reality remained that marriage was politics.


Moreover, these had been cards Aegon V prepared to gain the great lords’ support necessary for his reforms.


"His policies hit the great lords."


"His children destroyed the alliances."


"There were no dragons."


Daemon tapped the page.


"What did he plan to use to push it through?"


His assessment of this king was complicated.


He liked him as a person.


He agreed with much of what he wished to do.


But as king, he lacked realistic means.


And he failed to manage his family, which should have made up for that lack of power.


Daemon suddenly thought of Viserys I.


He had dragons in abundance.


A full treasury.


Strong royal power.


Yet his indecision blew up a succession conflict.


Aegon V was the reverse.


What he wanted was clear.


He had the will to reform.


But he had no dragons and insufficient political coercion.


"This bastard and Viserys I should have switched eras."


If Viserys had possessed Aegon V’s drive, perhaps he could have settled the succession problem early with dozens of dragons and strong royal power.


If Aegon V had possessed the dragons and royal power of Viserys’s age, he might have suppressed the great lords’ opposition much more easily.


Of course, historical hypotheticals had no meaning.


Still, it was a pity.


And Aegon V seemed to have recognized his own limits in the end.


He began obsessing over restoring dragons.


Daemon understood the feeling.


A great lord refused a royal command.


What did his ancestors do?


They sent up a dragon.


Done.


"I understand it."


The problem was the result.


Summerhall.


An attempt to hatch dragons.


Fire.


The deaths of the king himself, Prince Duncan, Dunk, and many others.


Daemon lowered the book slightly.


"A good person and a good king are different things."


He had good intentions.


That much was acknowledged.


He lacked a sense of reality.


It was difficult to say he managed his house well either.


In the end, trying to gain the coercive power he lacked, he burned himself to death.


"It’s hard to call him a terrible king outright."


He thought a long time.


"But it feels wrong to call him mediocre too."


Score his intentions and he rated high.


Look at the results and the score fell.


"A king should be judged by results."


Daemon ultimately placed Aegon V a little below the middle.


Aegon V was succeeded by his second son, Jaehaerys II.


The current king.


The man Daemon had already cursed after seeing his name in a book on weights and measures.


It felt strange meeting him again in a history book.


Jaehaerys II was frail.


He had often been ill since childhood and was far from martial.


On the surface, he differed greatly from the image of a strong king.


But a weak body and weak judgment did not mean the same thing.


A great crisis came as soon as he ascended.


The Council of Nine.


Pirates, mercenary captains, exiles, and self-proclaimed kings in Essos joined hands, promising to help each other take a kingdom apiece.


At first, they seemed an alliance unlikely to last.


They were nine men with different desires.


It was not unreasonable to expect them to fight among themselves and collapse.


But the Council of Nine truly grew in power.


It seized the disputed lands.


It took Tyrosh.


It advanced into the Stepstones.


And one of the next prizes it sought was the Seven Kingdoms.


Jaehaerys II did not wait until the enemy landed in Westeros.


He sent an expeditionary army.


He pushed the battlefield outside his own lands.


Daemon gave him a rather high score here.


"This was well done."


If they fought after the enemy landed, his own fields would burn.


His own people would die.


Better to catch them while they were still in the Stepstones.


"A king doesn’t need to be good with a sword."


Even if his body was weak, it was enough to make sound judgments.


At least the current king he had read of so far seemed better than expected.


The problem was one man within the Council of Nine.


*


The Council of Nine’s members were anything but ordinary.


Pirates.


Mercenary captains.


An exiled prince.


A wealthy merchant.


Self-proclaimed kings.


Each wanted a kingdom of his own.


And among them was one man who commanded the Golden Company.


Maelys Blackfyre.


Daemon’s hand stopped.


"..."


Maelys.


It was his father’s name.


There could be any number of people with the same name.


The name Daemon itself had appeared several times in the history book.


So he could not conclude anything from one name.


The next line.


An immense physique.


A second head born grotesquely attached to him.


"..."


The words in the book suddenly seemed far away.


A very old memory.


Huge arms.


A low voice.


An overwhelming body lifting him up.


Attached around the neck and shoulder...


Another face that should not have been there.


The name he had thought of in childhood passed through Daemon’s mind again.


...Cho’gall.


It had been funny before.


This time, he could not laugh.


Maelys fought his cousin Daemon Blackfyre for command of the Golden Company.


He killed the cousin’s warhorse with one punch.


And it was written that he tore Daemon’s head from his body.


Daemon took his eyes from the book for a moment.


"...He lived as he looked."


Not in a good sense.


Maelys became captain of the Golden Company.


He joined the Council of Nine.


And the Council truly took Tyrosh.


It took the Stepstones as well.


Daemon paused here briefly.


Among all the Blackfyre attempts he had read of, their conditions were strangely favorable.


Tyrosh.


There was a city.


A port.


Taxes.


The disputed lands were nearby.


They had the professional troops of the Golden Company.


They had the basis to build a fleet.


If I were Maelys...


He would not go into Westeros immediately.


First, he would stabilize Tyrosh.


He would not start by plundering merchants.


Continue trading.


Just pay taxes to me.


He would establish order.


Control the port and warehouses.


Give Golden Company soldiers land to settle.


Let them summon their families.


Turn the mercenary company into a national army.


It could take several years.


It could take ten.


The Iron Throne was not going anywhere.


Meanwhile, he would seek dissatisfied factions in Westeros.


Spread money.


Arrange marriages.


Create factions.


Rather than charging in declaring he had come to claim the throne...


Make them ask him to come.


Daemon thought that far, then stopped himself.


It was calculation from a later person who knew the outcome.


The Council of Nine was not a single nation.


Nine men had different goals.


The people of Tyrosh could not have accepted their rule obediently.


There was no reason the other Free Cities would sit idle.


Nor would Westeros watch a Blackfyre comfortably build a country for ten years.


There must have been many variables absent from the book in reality.


Still.


"It is a pity."


It looked like the moment the Blackfyres had their greatest chance to gain a firm territorial foundation in Essos.


In the end, they moved once more toward the old goal of their house.


The Iron Throne.


"They went again."


It seemed that after several generations, a house’s goal consumed its very way of thinking.


The expeditionary army of Westeros and the Council of Nine clashed in the Stepstones.


The war was not brief.


Many battles continued on land and sea.


The king’s Hand, Ormund Baratheon, died.


Jason Lannister died as well.


Maelys took the field personally.


And in the end, he faced a young knight.


Barristan Selmy.


A duel.


Maelys’s death.


Daemon looked at the final sentence for a long time.


"I see."


So that was how he died.


His grief was not as great as he expected.


Even with the word father attached, no feeling followed.


He did not remember eating meals together.


Or being played with.


Or being taught anything.


If he had anything, it was only a few shadows of very early childhood.


Huge arms.


A low voice.


A grotesque second face.


A man who had been his biological father.


To put it crudely in terms from his former life...


A sperm donor.


That was about it.


The fact that a man in a history book had been his father would not suddenly produce filial devotion.


The sentence beneath it struck harder.


With Maelys Blackfyre’s death, the male line of House Blackfyre ended.


"..."


Daemon read it again.


The final male line.


Maelys.


Dead.


The house ended.


"No."


He pointed a finger at his chest.


"I’m right here."


Three years old.


White Harbor.


Alive and well.


"Fuck."


At that moment, all the scattered words joined at once.


Prince.


Your Grace.


Heir.


The Golden Company.


Blackfyre.


Tyrosh.


His dead father.


Daemon was a Blackfyre.


Maelys Blackfyre’s son.


The final male-line descendant absent from official history.


The last remnant of a rebel dynasty that had hurled itself at the Iron Throne for generations.


"...Wow."


He was not moved.


It was simply too absurd.


The First.


The Second.


The Third.


The Fourth.


And the Council of Nine.


They failed once.


They went again.


They failed again.


Their sons went.


Their grandsons went.


Even generations that had never seen the Iron Throne made the throne their life’s goal because their fathers and grandfathers had failed to take it.


In the end, even his own father went.


And died.


Daemon muttered.


"My family is fucking exhausting."


At this point, it was less a political aim than a family motto.


Then he remembered.


The Iron Throne.


That chair he had read about earlier.


A massive lump of iron forged from melted swords of conquered men.


You could not lean back on it.


Sit wrong and it cut you.


Even kings had bled upon it.


Daemon’s expression turned strange.


"Wait."


For generations...


To obtain that thing...


They killed one another.


They killed tens of thousands.


They crossed the sea.


They created a mercenary company.


Even his father died.


And the actual object was...


A scrap-metal chair with a thousand blades stuck in it.


"..."


Daemon thought sincerely.


"I wouldn’t be king if they gave it to me."


What reason was there to risk one’s life over a chair whose back could not even take a cushion?


The power to rule a country had value.


There was money.


There was an army.


But for that, one worried about assassination, rebellion, and relatives all one’s life.


And in the end, got cut while sitting down.


"What about fucking tetanus?"


He understood his Blackfyre ancestors even less suddenly.


"They did this five times?"


It seemed the family motto needed changing first.


*


Daemon unfolded the map.


What Maelys had wanted.


Westeros.


The Iron Throne.


The Targaryens who held that throne.


His father had led an army to gain it and died.


And when her husband died, Valena fled with her son.


Daemon’s finger started at Tyrosh.


It crossed the sea.


Westeros.


Farther north.


White Harbor.


His finger stopped.


"...Mother wasn’t in her right mind either."


Her husband went to take the throne of Westeros and died.


Then taking that man’s only son...


She entered the very kingdom ruled by her husband’s enemies.


All the way to its northern end.


At first, it was funny.


After thinking a little, the humor vanished.


Everything he had taken for granted until now looked different.


The manor.


Gold coins and jewels.


Twenty-two servants.


The relationships Valena had built with White Harbor’s noblewomen.


The credit she had built with merchants.


The trust Raymund had built with the Manderlys’ people.


Daemon had recently calculated these as assets.


That was not wrong.


But before that...


They were a hiding place.


A disguised life.


A wall Valena and Raymund had built over several years.


The very life that ensured no one would suspect the last Blackfyre was here was a defensive structure.


Daemon’s hand rose to his hair.


Black.


More precisely, dyed black.


As time passed, silver showed at the roots.


Then Raymund noticed as if he had a ghost’s eyes.


Dye it again.


Check whenever strangers came to the manor.


Check before outings too.


When he was young, he had not understood why that old man obsessed over his hair so much.


"Fuck."


He grabbed a fistful of hair.


"This was an identity card."


Silver hair.


Valyrian blood.


The last male of the Blackfyres, officially believed exterminated.


What would happen if the royal family learned?


He did not need to think long.


The Blackfyres had already tried several times to overturn the dynasty.


They believed it had ended when Maelys died, and then a boy was found alive.


It did not matter that he was three now.


Three-year-olds grew.


Even if a claimant did not wish to be king, others could use him as a banner.


"They’d kill me."


It was a very realistic conclusion.


For the first time, he understood how great a risk Valena had taken.


She fled Tyrosh.


She crossed the sea.


She entered an enemy country.


She made her son’s hair black.


She created a new identity.


She bought a house.


She hired people.


She built connections.


And she lived as if nothing had happened.


All the while, to Daemon...


Dress warmly.


Eat your snacks.


Don’t stay up all night.


Don’t swear.


She said such things.


Daemon rubbed the tip of his nose once.


"...Mother wasn’t ordinary either."


More than the fact that Maelys was his father...


That thought stayed with him longer.


And naturally, his gaze went to the chest.


The dark red object.


An object resembling a dragon egg.


Blackfyre.


A house branched from the Targaryens.


Blood of Valyrian dragonlords.


One more piece of evidence had joined the rest.


Until shortly before, only its appearance and manner of care supported the dragon egg hypothesis.


Now there was its origin as well.


The house holding this object descended from an actual dragonlord family.


The likelihood that it was genuine had risen.


It was not certain.


Not every egg held by a Blackfyre was necessarily real.


It could be an old imitation.


It could be a Valyrian relic acquired by another route.


Still, the story had become far more plausible than before.


Daemon laid his palm against the dark red surface.


Cold.


Still.


The rational decision was clear.


Leave it alone.


Do not experiment carelessly until its identity was confirmed.


Hide the fact that he knew of this room.


If it truly was a dragon egg, it was politically dangerous.


Being the last Blackfyre was sufficient reason for the royal family to put a blade through him.


And if there was a dragon too?


Daemon closed his lips.


"..."


He looked at the egg for a long time.


Rationality clearly told him that.


The problem was...


It was a dragon.


If it was real.


A dragon.


It flew through the sky.


It breathed fire.


A person could ride it.


"...Fuck."


The corners of his mouth slowly rose.


Even if he had been an engineering student nearly thirty in his former life, there was no helping it.


This was a dragon.


Man, woman, age—none of it mattered.


Anyone who had a chance to ride a dragon and did not feel excited was stranger.


"Daemon the Dragonlord."


He tried saying it aloud.


A moment of silence.


"...That’s fucking awesome?"


He laughed.


But a few moments later, reality returned.


Three years old.


The last descendant of a rebel dynasty believed exterminated.


Hiding within the Targaryen kingdom.


Beside him lay an egg that might be real.


His mother hid all these facts.


Daemon leaned the back of his head against the wall.


"Quite a productive rest."


He had opened a history book to clear his mind.


As a result, he questioned Westeros’s ancient history.


He considered the Stark dynasty’s succession problems.


He built several hypotheses about the Doom of Valyria.


He speculated over why Aenar had left Valyria.


He rated kings one by one.


Somewhere in the middle, he even summoned the Confucian Dragon and Neo-Confucian Tiger.


He learned that his own house had been throwing itself at the throne for generations.


He learned his father had taken part in the final throw.


And he learned that he himself was the last male-line Blackfyre, absent from the history books.


The margins of the history book were now covered with marks beside passages he wanted to check again.


Records that did not match.


Passages that interested him.


Questions to investigate further.


"..."


Daemon stared at those traces for some time.


The laboratory was gone.


There was no professor.


No papers.


No degree.


Yet what he did had not changed.


He saw something he did not know.


He became curious.


He sought materials.


He made a hypothesis.


If it did not fit, he corrected it.


If the evidence was lacking, he wanted to find more.


"That’s why I went as far as a doctorate."


He laughed softly.


"Mad bastard."


This insult was directed at himself.


He did not dislike it.


It only felt a little unfair.


Daemon checked the candle.


It was not completely late yet.


He knew what would happen if he began reading more.


He did not intend to be found by Raymund and carried to bed again today.


He gathered the three books into his arms.


As he moved to close the chest, he paused.


He reached in and stroked the dark red surface once.


"You can wait."


First, he needed to learn whether it was real.


Dragons could wait too.


Blackfyres could wait.


He needed the Iron Throne even less.


Daemon opened the door.


"Enough idle thoughts."


After a moment, he looked back.


Candlelight spread faintly over the dark red surface.


"Time to do what I need to do."


There was something more urgent now.


First, he intended to make his own room warm.

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Ch. 7: Legacy
[A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones] The Black Dragon in the North*
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