POV: Maester Colmar
Driftspire Tower, The Fingers, Vale of Arryn
The sea wind howled through the window slits of Driftspire as Maester Colmar descended the narrow stone steps, his candle flickering wildly with each gust. Salt crusted the walls of the ancient tower, and every wooden beam groaned with age. This place was no castle—it was a watchpost grown fat with weeds and stubborn men.
He found Lord Alester Longlight where he always did at dawn: hunched over a wooden board in the solar, drawing inked lines with obsessive focus.
"Lines and lines," Colmar murmured, adjusting the chain around his neck. "Your lord father preferred charts of tides and taxes, not… lattices of ink."
The young lord didn't look up. "They're not just lines, Colmar. They're plans."
"Of what kind?"
Alester finally looked at him. His eyes were clear, unnaturally calm for a boy raised amid storms and stone.
"Docks. A breakwater. Gridded streets. The beginnings of a port."
Colmar blinked. "A port? My lord, forgive me—your lands are rocks and shallows. You've six fishing boats and two of them leak."
"That will change."
It wasn't arrogance. It was fact.
By mid-morning, the small council gathered in Driftspire's modest hall: four men around a warped oak table.
Arn Mertyns, steward, coughed through a list of toll receipts.Ser Harwin Stone, all scars and sword-calloused hands, drank boiled ale and scowled.Colmar, ever watching, scratched his notes beside a crumbling scroll of fish tariffs.
Alester paced, unusually animated. He pointed to a charcoal map pinned to the wall.
"We'll dredge this inlet. Build three docks. Cut stone from the cliffside and begin a seawall to shelter larger vessels. The land just west is flat enough for settlement. I'll need road crews, quarrymen, and tools brought from Gulltown."
Arn groaned. "And coin from the sky, mayhaps?"
Alester smiled faintly. "We'll increase salt production. Sell it south to the Reach. And I have designs for a wind-powered crusher that will speed the process."
Even Harwin blinked at that.
"You mean to replace men with wind?"
"Not replace. Free them for better work."
Colmar sipped his tea, watching. The lad's ideas were madness—but structured madness. That was the worst kind. It smelled like vision.
"And what of the Sisters?" Arn asked. "They'll see a new harbor and sniff blood."
"We'll send them nothing but rumors," Alester said. "Let Lady Vyana wonder. Let Lord Renn sweat in his debts. Until we have more to show than sketches, we show nothing."
Colmar leaned in. "Then let us show you something, my lord."
He unfurled a battered scroll—a surveyor's report, decades old, from the late Jonos Longlight.
"Your grandfather once dreamed of something similar. He wrote of hidden iron veins beneath the east cliffs—never mined, too costly."
Alester stared, silent for a long moment.
"Then we'll dig. Starting tomorrow."
The council sat still. Even the wind seemed to still.
Colmar watched him, and for the first time since the rebellion, felt something move beneath the stone of this ancient, crumbling hall.
Not just salt and rocks now.
Purpose.