The moment Rhaella landed on the landmass she had brought out of the sea through her magic, no one spoke.
Not a word was uttered.
They were too busy praying to her.
The Volantene free men thought she was one of the old gods of Valyria returned to the world, while the slaves considered the fire of R'hllor manifested in front of them in the form of a dragon.
Rhaella did not speak because she was assessing the situation and considering what she should do.
"Transfer all the slaves on one ship and the free men on the others," she ordered in High Valyrian.
They took a solid minute looked at her in awe when they realized she could talk.
And the next moment, the order was being carried out. The ships were brought alongside each other and stabilized through grappling hooks and lines to hold the vessels.
Planks were then placed to facilitate the movement of people through the ships. The slaves and the free men were both eager to carry out this order for their own reasons.
The free men thought their god just wished to bless them and did not wish lowly slaves to be nearby when doing so.
While the slaves had simpler thoughts; they just thought the masters were about to be burned alive on their ships while the slaves would be watching every moment of it, not even blinking.
Midway through the transfer process she realized she should have said the opposite, as there were many more slaves compared to the free men.
"Stop," she ordered.
Everyone stood still where they were and looked to her. Even the people on the planks just held on and did not dare move.
"Free men on one ship and slaves on the others," she corrected herself and watched as her orders were being carried out.
This order did give the masters some cause for thought, but they brushed it off. There was clearly a dragon god in front of them, they told themselves.
They considered themselves generous enough in that moment that they did not even kill a slave right away when one had accidentally touched one of the masters, an act that was punishable by death in Volantis.
It took them some time but they separated, and every man, woman and child on those three ships looked up at her with hope.
And among those three ships, two of them had kind of the right idea.
Rhaella had no intentions of wasting her time talking to anyone, so she just channeled some magic in her eyes and used the 'detect thought' spell to read the surface thoughts of the free men.
She did that because she wished to find any one of them that might be worth sparing. And lo and behold, they turned out to be slavers through and through.
Rhaella let out a breath of air before taking a deep one as she channeled her magic to the fire in her heart.
The fire blazed with the might of a volcano about to burst and was ready to incinerate the whole ship into ashes in mere moments when Rhaella noticed something. Even with two ships, the slaves looked a little cramped.
She paused and cooled down the fire before thinking for a moment. She experimented with her breath weapon a little to have it only affect the men and leave the non-living things alone.
While, the people on the ships just watched the dragon in front of them as she looked at them as if judging every action they had ever done in their life.
It took a few minutes before the dragon stopped moving her head and just looked at the free men on their ship.
Her massive maw opened as the temperature around them increased, churning the water beneath them.
However, the masters felt a coldness, a chill in their bodies as they saw darkness itself churning in the massive maw.
Darkness escaped the dragon's mouth and moved towards them like liquid vapors. The vapors seemed to have a mind of their own as they wrapped themselves around every free man on the ship.
There was no fire, no screams, and no damage to the ship. In the blink of an eye, the free men all went stiff as if they were petrified.
They still seemed alive, however, as their eyes seemed to be moving around. And with the look in their eyes and the black blood leaking from them, it seemed they were in pain unfathomable to humans.
"The dark fire of R'hllor," one of the slaves said out loud.
"The dark fire of R'hllor," another echoed.
And soon every slave on the two ships chanted the same thing as they looked at their former masters unblinkingly, as they did not wish to miss even a moment of their agony.
A minute passed like that before the first man fell, and a shattering sound was heard that repeated itself again and again as men fell one after another.
Rhaella nodded as her experiment seemed to have worked. She had basically added shadow magic to the fire in her breath, turning her breath into vaporized obsidian that moved towards the men before seeping into their bodies through every pore.
The obsidian then seeped into the skeletons and blood of the men before hardening, and the men were caged in their own bodies.
Their glass skeletons shattered in their bodies as they fell, turning them into perfectly preserved corpses on the outside, while on the inside, every bone in their body had been replaced by obsidian shards, sharp as a dagger.
After the last man fell Rhaella looked at the people on the other two ships as she wondered what to do with them.
"You can throw those bodies in the sea and divide yourselves in these three ships," she ordered them and watched them do as she had told them while she thought of what to do.
She used her magic sense to get an idea of where she was and found out they were just south of Volantis, as the ships seemed to have departed from Volantis not long ago.
She then looked further south to see if she could find an inhabitable island for the people to live on.
She even considered the islands under the smoking sea, as with Doom dead and his powers taken by her, old Valyria was no danger to her and anyone she wished to protect.
And she found one. A day of magically accelerated sailing away, and the island even had a volcano on it. She had some ideas of what she could do with the volcano to help the people on the ship.
The slaves were the ones steering the ships usually, so they did not have any problem leading the ships to the area she was directing them towards.
They did not even object to going towards the smoking sea as they knew the dragon in front of them would protect them.
Although she did have to explain to them she was not sent by R'hllor and introduced herself as Rhaella, just Rhaella.
This did not have the effect she intended, as the people had a new god, Rhaella.
During the almost twenty-four hours it took for the ships to reach the island, Rhaella spent her time with her children and would return back to the ships whenever they would be occupied or when they were asleep.
Viserys was not afraid or disappointed by the words she had said to him in their last conversation; he was more confused and thoughtful as he tried to deduce the reason she said that.
The ships entered the smoking sea and reached the island she had intended the next day. They docked a little ways away from it as she made preparations to make the island safe for the people in the ships.
A/n: It seems not that I have stopped begging for power stones, you guys think I am some virtuous saint giving you all chapters for free.
Let's see if I let the next chapter out of the basement.