91 AC
King's Landing, The Red Keep, Autumn
The quiet scratching of quill on parchment filled the dimly lit chamber. Aegon Targaryen, seated at his desk, paused mid-sentence as a crisp autumn leaf fluttered in through the open balcony doors, carried by the evening breeze.
He lifted his head, turning his gaze toward the left where the balcony overlooked the city, the sky painted in hues of amber and violet as dusk settled over King's Landing.
Three months had passed since his trade with Rhaenys. Of the five weapons reforged into Valyrian steel through flamecraft, four had been sold, netting him a sum of twenty four thousand gold dragons.
The last, a dagger, the finest of the set, he had kept not for profit, but as a gift for Rhaenys. The memory of her reaction warmed him still: the way her eyes had lit up, the fleeting press of her arms around him, the soft curve of her smile. It had been worth more than gold.
And in that moment, Aegon had realized the truth, he had a crush on her.
On his cousin. His married cousin.
A wry thought flickered through his mind following that: I guess I'm a Targaryen after all.
A murmur of voices drifted in from the corridor, pulling Aegon from his thoughts. Servants and maids whispered in hushed tones just beyond the heavy oak door.
Their words were fragmented, cautious, but one word carried clearly through the stone walls, War.
"Did you hear? Another merchant ship went missing near Bloodstone."
"The pirates again? Gods help us, they'll be on our shores next."
"They say Lord Velaryon's fleet is already at sea."
Aegon leaned back in his chair, quill resting against his lower lip. So even the servants were speaking of it now.
That meant it had become real, not just a matter for the Small Council, not just a whisper in noble halls, but something alive in the Red Keep itself, threading its way through the kitchens and courtyards, lodging itself into the bones of the realm.
It's begun, he thought. The fear, the questions. And soon, the calls for action.
He stood, walking slowly to the balcony, the voices behind him fading into a blur. Below, King's Landing sprawled in a patchwork of rooftops and smoke, its people oblivious to how close they stood to the edge.
The civil war in Myr had ended midway through summer. It had been bloody, decisive. One faction had claimed victory, the other shattered.
But the defeated didn't die, they scattered.
Desperate and hunted, they fled the city with their ships, their rage, and their gold. With no banners, no laws, no homes, they became pirates. Raiders. Wolves with sails.
At first, no one in Westeros cared. The squabbles of Essos were a world away. But that indifference turned to unease when the pirates seized islands in the Stepstones.
One by one, they carved out strongholds, turning the scattered isles into a nest of vipers: untamed, brutal, and growing bolder by the day.
The consequences were swift and severe.
Trade between Essos and Westeros ground to a near halt, ships vanishing into the clutches of these new reavers like gulls swallowed by a storm.
No house felt the blow more keenly than House Velaryon. Their immense wealth, earned not through gold mines or taxes, but through mastery of the sea, began to bleed away with every lost ship, every merchant slain, every port avoided.
The numbers were grim. Caravels from Lys, galleys from Pentos, even coastal traders from Dorne, gone, plundered, or sunk without a trace.
Some came limping back to Driftmark half-burnt and ransacked, their captains trembling with tales of black-sailed warships manned by men with no flags, no king, and no mercy.
It had been enough. Rhaenys Targaryen and her husband, Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake himself, had descended upon King's Landing like a gathering storm.
They came not as petitioners, but as protectors of Westerosi prosperity, demanding the Crown do its duty.
Corlys, ever the mariner, laid out maps on the Small Council table, jabbing at them with a calloused finger. "If we lose the Stepstones," he warned, "we lose the Narrow Sea. What comes next? Plundered fleets from Oldtown to Gulltown? Essosi gold funding sellsails off our own shores?"
But King Jaehaerys remained unmoved.
"The pirates have not attacked Westerosi lands. Our ports are intact, our people unharmed. We cannot justify war on foreign soil for the sake of foreign trade." His voice, calm and deliberate, left no room for debate.
Corlys had left that very day, his jaw tight with fury. He had no need for permission to defend what was his. His fleet sailed within the week, swift, silent, and armed to the teeth.
Rhaenys, however, stayed behind in the Red Keep.
Where Corlys wielded sails and steel, she would wield words and will.
Her goal: to turn the king's mind, and the Small Council's, before the Stepstones became something far worse than an inconvenience: an empire of raiders, too entrenched to uproot.
But Aegon had no time to bother with such matters of realm and trade. He was in the midst of his own quiet crisis, one no one else knew about.
He took a deep breath, turned away from the balcony, and focused his gaze inward. With a silent mental command, he opened his attribute panel.
[
CON 7.0
STR 6.8
AGI 7.3
DEX 7.5
INT 9.8
Magic 2.1
]
The numbers hung before his mind's eye like floating glyphs, unseen by the world.
Though only seven years old, he possessed the attributes of a thirteen or fourteen-year-old youth. These attributes manifested physically as well, giving him the appearance of a young squire. But then a problem arose.
His class [Heir of Old Valyria] granted prophetic dreams, visions, flashes of future possibilities, fragmentary glimpses of fates yet to unfold. At first, they were rare, even helpful.
But everything changed after he advanced his [Dragon Rider] class to its maximum level.
That was when the visions stopped being dreams. They became something else.
Nightmares.
Unbidden and violent, the visions came to him in sleep, pulling him under like a riptide. Scenes of war and blood filled his mind, dragons screaming through firelit skies, men dying in droves, ships sinking into black waves.
Some of the visions didn't even belong to this age. He recognized a silver-haired girl in a ruined throne room, surrounded by ash.
Another showed a grim-faced man in black furs, sword drawn, facing down a tidal wave of white death in the North.
Daenerys. Jon Snow. He had never seen them with his own eyes, but he could recognize them. His memories from his past life filled in the rest. He was seeing far beyond his own time.
And when he woke, it never ended cleanly. His head would throb with a splitting ache, his limbs would tremble, and a sense of foreboding would linger like smoke clinging to his skin.
The intensity only worsened with time.
It began to show. The dark circles beneath his eyes, the way his shoulders slumped with exhaustion, his growing reluctance to leave his room, people noticed.
The servants whispered. Even Rhaenys had given him a few concerned looks he chose not to acknowledge.
The only relief he found was in Dreamfyre's presence. When he rested near her, the pressure eased. The headaches faded. He could breathe.
It didn't take long for him to make the connection.
One of the traits of his [Dragon Rider] class, [Draconic Conduit], granted a measure of magical resistance. That, combined with the close bond he shared with Dreamfyre, dulled the aftereffects of the visions.
That was when he began to suspect something deeper. Not just about the visions, but about the attribute that had changed the most in recent months: Magic.
It had crept upward slowly. From a flat 1.7 to 2.1.
That was the threshold.
Before, his dreams were manageable. But when Magic reached above 2.0, when it crossed whatever invisible barrier governed the soul of this world, it was as if a door had opened in his mind, and the sea beyond was too vast to contain.
No other trait had reacted so violently to growth. When his CON had begun increasing due to the class [Gluttonous Child], his body had visibly grown plumper.
That's when he realized this attribute system wasn't symbolic. It wasn't some game overlay. These numbers were him, physically and metaphysically. They were affecting the fabric of his existence.
Which meant leaving an unknown attribute like Magic to grow unchecked was dangerous.
He needed to understand what it was. What governed it. Why it affected only some aspects of his being and not others. Why dreams could become prophecies. Why they now threatened to unmake his sanity.
So, during the past three months, he refrained from forming new classes, except one, created just last week.
A class not for war or politics, not for power or prestige.
A class created purely to uncover the unseen.
A Tier 2 class.
[ Class: Occult Scholar (Tier 2) ]
[ Prerequisites:
- Possess at least one supernatural or magical trait (satisfied)
- INT ≥ 9.0 (satisfied)
- Demonstrated methodical study or experimentation related to the supernatural (satisfied) ]
[ Level 1 (000 / 1000) ]
[ Trait : Arcane Methodology
(+10% focus and insight on a supernatural trait, relic, magical anomaly, or supernatural-based phenomenon, gaining a moment of structured clarity.)
(+1% INT bonus for every unique magical phenomenon successfully analyzed.) ]
[ Trait : Rationality
(+ 5% Mental resistance: Negates harmful side effects from [Arcane Methodology] or exposure to dangerous magical stimuli.)
( 10% Reduction in INT damage or sanity deterioration effects from magical or supernatural sources.) ]
The effects of the new traits were immediate. His nightmares faded back into dreams, and the persistent headaches eased significantly. He finally got his beauty sleep which he had been missing the past few months.
Looking at the scattered papers on his table, Aegon leaned forward and exhaled slowly. The dim candlelight danced over lines of ink, some smudged by hurried revisions or half-formed thoughts.
His fingers brushed against a loosely bound stack, and a ghost of a smirk touched his lips as he remembered how it had all begun.
The creation of his new class hadn't been immediate. When the idea had first formed in his mind, to develop something dedicated solely to understanding the supernatural, he'd imagined it would be easy. But the Class Tree had proved stubborn.
The class had first appeared as a grayed-out branch, a failed class creation. Its name, [Occult Scholar], had hovered temptingly before him, but remained inaccessible.
Only one prerequisite remained unmet: "Demonstrated methodical study or experimentation related to the supernatural."
And thus began his research.
The subject of that research had been the most logical, and most dangerous, thing available to him: his own flamecraft ability.
His power to create and manipulate fire, born from the class [Heir of Old Valyria] and fueled by blood and will, was potent and unpredictable. It was also uniquely his. The perfect candidate for supernatural analysis.
Over the following weeks, he buried himself in study. He requested tomes and scrolls from the Grand Maester under the pretense of curiosity in Valyrian lore.
He asked for volumes on alchemy, natural philosophy, and mythical properties of dragonflame. Some came with raised eyebrows, others with quiet indulgence.
The court was too distracted to probe further. With the growing chaos in the Stepstones and Corlys Velaryon's departure, the Crown had other worries.
That worked in his favor.
He isolated variables. Volume of blood. Intentions. Though he did not require to sacrifice his blood to manifest the effects of the trait [Blood and Flame Awakening] anymore, he still did it while noting every slight change in the flames.
He recorded the color and shape of the flames, how fast they responded to thought, how much blood triggered a reaction, how the fire reacted to metal, wood, stone, and water. It was slow and taxing, but methodical.
And then, at last, last week, it clicked.
The Class Tree system acknowledged his effort. The branch grayed no longer, and the [Occult Scholar] class was his.
"Time to continue what I was doing," he muttered to himself, settling into the chair once more and dipping the quill into ink.
The papers before him were his research logs, painstakingly written notes of observations, hypotheses, and wild theories. But they were not in the Common Tongue. Nor in High Valyrian.
They were written in English.
The language of his past life.
It had taken him time to reacquaint himself with the alphabet and structure, after all, it had been years since he'd used it, but the benefit was obvious.
Nobody in this world could read it. Not even a maester or a spymaster.
Even if someone stumbled upon his notes, they would see nothing more than strange glyphs and foreign script.
He had considered other forms of secrecy. A hidden location, perhaps. He even explored one of the old secret passages built by Maegor the Cruel beneath the Red Keep.
The one he discovered was narrow, winding, and long-forgotten. It would've made an ideal base of operations.
But it was infested with rats.
Dozens of them. Bold, aggressive, half-starved vermin that had likely made the tunnels their home for generations.
They would have chewed through his parchment, dragged away pages for nesting, and destroyed everything within days. That ended that idea.
And so, with no truly secure hiding place, he turned to the next best solution: encryption by language. If he couldn't physically shield his work, he could mentally shield it. And what better cipher than a tongue no one in this world had ever heard?
His quill scratched against the parchment, adding another entry to the pile:
Test 41: Blood volume = 5 drops; flame summoned via fingertip incision. Immediate ignition. Color: deep orange with blue edges. Mental Shape: serpentine curl. Flame sustained for 12 seconds.
He paused, tapping the quill against his chin. "Need to isolate for intent-driven shape variance," he murmured. "Possibly linked to the subconscious...."
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