~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger."
The Drowned God's Prayer, Iron Islands
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Iron Islands, Pyke
301 AC
Aerion
The coast of the Westerlands fell away beneath them, and then there was only the sea.
Aerion had flown over water before. The frozen lakes north of the Wall, the rivers of the North, and the marshes of the Neck, where Smarag's shadow had moved below them like a second creature swimming in the shallows. But this was different.
The Sunset Sea was not a thing to be crossed. It was a condition, extending in all directions past the curve of the world, gray-green and cold and indifferent to the small shapes that moved across its surface. There was no far shore to orient toward. There was only forward and behind, and below them the water went very deep, and it did not care.
Smarag didn't mind it. The dragon had a kind of fundamental equanimity that might have been stupidity in a lesser creature but in him read as something closer to perspective. He had seen stranger things than oceans. He had been dead.
They flew west and slightly south, following the line that Aerion's recollection of Wyman's maps told him would end at the Iron Islands. Pyke was the seat. Lordsport was the harbor. That was where a fleet would be.
The islands appeared as darker shapes on the horizon first, not land so much as an absence of sea, silhouettes against the sky. Then they resolved into something more specific: jagged, treeless, stripped of everything gentle.
He had heard men from the North describe the Iron Islands as grim and assumed they meant politically. Looking at them now, he understood it was physical. The black cliffs rose straight from the water with no beach between them and the sea, as if the islands had been cut with a blade rather than worn. The waves that hit the base of those cliffs did so without softening, because there was nothing here that had learned to be soft.
A thin smell reached him even at altitude. Salt and fish and something else: the particular quality of the air over places where things had been burning recently, a faint residue of old ash carried on a wind that came off the open ocean and smelled of nothing else at all. It was, in its way, a fitting approach. The Iron Islands smelled like the aftermath of something.
As they drew closer, he could make out the details that maps compressed into symbols: the harbor mouth at Lordsport, the chain mechanism across it, and the dark mass of Pyke rising behind the settlement on its column of rock, connected to the main island by a series of rope bridges that swayed visibly even from this distance. A fortress designed for men who had decided that accessibility was an enemy. He noted the approaches and filed them.
Lordsport harbor was full. More ships than he had expected, the Iron Fleet, or what remained of it after Oldtown, pulled back to its home port and replenished. Twenty vessels of war size and more smaller ships besides, packed tightly in a harbor that wasn't quite large enough for all of them comfortably. They sat in the water like a challenge someone had forgotten to follow through on.
He brought Smarag low over the water and began.
The crystal breath caught the first ship's hull amidships, and the wood fractured from inside out, the glintstone cold working through the grain and finding every stress point at once. The ship came apart in sections. He moved to the second and the third.
On the docks, men were running. Bells were ringing. He was aware of these things the way he was aware of weather, present and noted but not the focus. He was aware also of a single large ship already past the harbor mouth, moving west at speed, silent in a way that ships of that size were not supposed to be silent.
He noted it. He could not chase it without letting the fleet escape into open water where twenty warships would scatter and become twenty separate problems. He turned back to the harbor.
He was on his fourth ship when the harbor floor moved.
The water lifted, not from wind or wave but from pressure below the surface, displacing an enormous volume all at once. The harbor chains snapped. Every ship in the outer berths lurched sideways. Then the first tentacle broke the surface near the harbor mouth, and Aerion pulled Smarag hard upward and watched it rise.
It rose for a very long time.
He had read about krakens. He had heard fishing tales from the North and the sailor accounts that circulated in every port where men who worked the sea gathered to drink and frighten each other. He knew what krakens were supposed to be.
What the stories could not prepare you for was the fact of the thing itself: the sheer sustained height of it, extending upward past the harbor walls, past the level where seabirds flew, still rising. The skin was dark and wet and studded with the scars of deep pressure, the kind of marks left by stone pressing against flesh at the bottom of the ocean for a very long time.
When it reached its full extension, it was taller than any tower he had seen and still swaying with the slow patience of something that had never needed to hurry, that had time measured in geological terms, and that was not remotely concerned about the small winged thing at altitude watching it.
He was still watching it when the second one rose on the other side of the harbor.
Different angle. Different reach. The two of them together formed something like a gate, closing off the harbor mouth, and the shadow they cast across the water below was the shadow of a storm front, not the absence of light but the presence of something that ate it. The ships in the harbor were very small in comparison.
Everything in the harbor was very small in comparison. Aerion spent a moment recalibrating his understanding of the problem, because the problem had just become substantially different from what he had prepared for. He was not accustomed to being surprised by scale. He found that he was surprised by this one. He noted the surprise, set it aside, and looked for angles.
Smarag climbed without being asked, putting altitude between them and the tentacles. The right instinct. At height, there was room to move. At height, you could see what was coming before it arrived.
A tentacle from the eastern kraken swept in a wide arc at harbor-wall height and caught three ships simultaneously, lifting them and carrying them against the quay stones with a sound like a cliff face giving way. The ships became wreckage. The tentacle withdrew slowly, then swung back for another pass.
Two more tentacles broke the surface on the western side and began moving through the inner berths less deliberately, clearing the harbor of everything in their path the way you might clear a table of cups you didn't want anymore.
Ships that had been worth considerable fortunes ceased to be ships. The Ironborn soldiers on the docks fired crossbows at the tentacles, which was approximately as useful as it sounded and which Aerion recognized as the particular bravery of men who understood they had no other option.
He found his angle on the eastern one and began the approach.
The line was clean from the south, coming in high where the central mass was most exposed between two clusters of wreckage. He had the incantation already forming, the shaping pulled to the surface and held ready. Smarag read the vector and descended into it, wings angling back for speed.
The western kraken moved first.
Not toward them, but across. A single tentacle extended at full reach, not swinging but positioned, held at mid-height between Aerion's approach line and the eastern kraken's central mass. Not a swing. A wall. It had understood that something was coming from the south, and it had closed the southern approach.
Smarag peeled hard right, and the incantation dissolved unspent, the gathered energy dispersing in a way that left Aerion's hands feeling scalded. He had a half-second to register that the two krakens were coordinating. Not by intelligence exactly, but by something older and more basic: the way pack animals coordinated and the way the sea itself coordinated against anything trying to move against its nature. Then they were banking west at speed with two kraken bodies between them and any clean approach.
He let it settle. He worked out what that meant.
Two opponents, cooperating. Not in any way that involved thought, but cooperating nonetheless: one closing approached while the other held position. If he came from the east, the western one would block. If he came from the west, the roles would reverse. If he came from above, he looked at the full extension of those tentacles and revised that notion quickly. There was no good approach. There was only the least bad one.
He circled at altitude, keeping them both in sight, and took stock of what he had.
The eastern one was fractionally slower. The western one was fractionally smarter. The eastern one had positioned itself closer to the inner harbor, where wreckage gave it cover from below; the western one had kept itself near the harbor mouth, where it had more water to move through. These were not tactical decisions in any human sense. They were just the way the situation had settled. He would use them.
He came back from the north. An angle neither of them had seen him use yet.
Smarag dropped steeply, coming down almost vertically before leveling off low over the outer berths, using the remaining ship hulls as cover. Aerion felt the dragon's hesitation.
Not fear, Smarag did not have fear the way something mortal had fear, but a quality of assessment, the dragon reading the same geometry. Aerion was reading and noting that low altitude here left very little room to maneuver. A fair note. He pressed in the direction anyway because the angle was open, and open was what he had.
The eastern kraken turned toward them late.
A tentacle came down from the right side, fast for something that size, and Smarag rolled left. It passed close enough that Aerion felt the wind of it before it hit the water fifteen feet off Smarag's flank.
The impact detonated the harbor surface. A wall of water came sideways and hit them full-on, and for a moment there was no direction, only cold and pressure and the roar of water in every register simultaneously. Aerion's grip on the neck ridge failed.
His left hand caught a spine further back, and he hung sideways off Smarag's neck for three full wingbeats, the harbor water thirty feet below him, his shoulder wrenching with the whole of his weight and the turbulence.
Smarag felt it. The dragon leveled hard, not a maneuver but a deliberate act of stillness in the air, holding the wing angle steady at the cost of forward speed. Aerion used the moment to get his right hand back to the ridge and haul himself upright. He sat. He breathed. Both krakens were repositioning.
His left shoulder would be worse later. He filed it under later.
But he had the angle on the eastern kraken now, in the scramble of its repositioning, a half-second of exposed central mass between the swing of its tentacles. He threw the first lightning spear from thirty feet, close enough that the light of it hit him in the face.
The sea was lit from beneath, white and gold. The eastern kraken convulsed, its tentacles going rigid for a moment, a shudder running through every visible limb from the base outward. Then the shudder ended and the tentacles began moving again.
Slower. Differently. But moving.
He had wounded it. He had not killed it. He revised his estimates accordingly and went to work.
The western kraken learned from what it had seen.
It didn't sweep. It reached, extending a single tentacle toward the space where Aerion and Smarag were positioned, moving with more deliberation than he would have expected from something that size, and then paused. Testing. Measuring. The cluster of eyes at the central mass was tracking. There was something happening in there that was not blind instinct, a quality of attention that he recognized and did not particularly welcome.
Smarag went left. The tentacle adjusted.
Smarag dropped, hard and fast, the kind of descent that traded altitude for speed and left the stomach somewhere above. The tentacle came down where they'd been and hit the harbor water, and the impact threw a wave across the entire harbor that swept everything still floating against the far wall.
Aerion held on through the maneuver, came out of the drop low over the water with Smarag leveling off at mast height, and found the angle he needed on the western one's central mass. He threw a second spear.
The western kraken convulsed. A smaller shudder than the eastern one had shown, less damage or different resistance or both. It kept moving.
He had now wounded both. He had killed neither. The eastern one had been recovering while he dealt with the western one, and it had used the time to move itself further into the harbor, positioning its central mass among the shallow-draft vessels of the inner berths, putting wreckage between itself and any clear approach from above.
Aerion looked at the situation and made adjustments.
The western kraken extended three tentacles in a widespread south and west, and he understood suddenly that it was herding them. Not intelligently, not with any plan, but the way a predator in the water spread to close escape routes, a thing the body knew before the mind did. The pattern of the tentacles was pushing them gradually northeast, toward the black cliffs of the main island, toward rock that would end a pursuit with finality.
He saw it and he felt something cold pass through him that was not the sea wind.
He redirected Smarag west before the pattern fully closed, pushing through the gap between the outermost tentacle and the harbor wall. The western kraken's tentacle adjusted toward the movement late, fractionally late, and the tip of it caught Smarag across the tail as they broke through. Not a full strike. The tail was less vital than the wings. But Smarag made a sound, low and sharp, and his flight stuttered for one wingbeat before smoothing out.
They were through. But the geometry had shifted. The eastern kraken had repositioned in the inner harbor while the western one had been working the perimeter, and now both of them had mass between Aerion and anything resembling a clean approach to either target.
He climbed. Put altitude between them and everything below. Looked at it from above.
Two krakens, cooperating without communicating. One damaged, one less so. Both capable of reaching him at any altitude he could practically fire from. Smarag favoring his tail now, the flight marginally changed. His own left shoulder was a problem he had filed under later and which was moving insistently toward now.
He had been in fights with this structure before: two opponents, neither yielding, both adapting. The solution was not to alternate between them indefinitely. The solution was to commit to one until it was finished and accept that the other would use the time however it chose. He chose the eastern kraken, already wounded and sheltering in a defensive position, and he flew directly for it.
He came in from the north, low, and let Smarag's crystal breath fire at the wreckage-wrapped central mass from close range. The cold cracked through the debris into the flesh beneath. He circled and came in again from the west, a tighter arc than he'd have preferred, putting him closer to the western kraken's reach than was comfortable. A tentacle swept through the space thirty feet off his right side, and the displaced air hit him like a fist. He noted it and kept flying.
A third lightning spear, thrown at the moment he had the clearest angle on what he judged to be the eye cluster. The sea lit up again. The eastern kraken's tentacles writhed but did not go rigid this time, the coordination already failing, the movements increasingly disconnected from each other, like a man trying to think through deep pain.
He came back for it a final time.
Directly above the central mass, Smarag was folding his wings and dropping the last hundred feet like a stone. At the moment of closest approach, the dragon fired everything he had into the eye cluster at point-blank range. The cold went in and kept going.
The eastern kraken made a sound.
Not a sound that the air carried as sound. A vibration, low and sustained, the kind of frequency that went straight to the chest and bypassed the ears entirely. Aerion felt it in his ribs, in his teeth. Every tentacle went rigid simultaneously, fully extended, and then began curling inward one by one, slowly, like the closing of an enormous fist.
But dying, it was still vast. And the dying itself had its own violence.
Two of the rigid tentacles were directly beneath Smarag as the dragon climbed out of the dive. When they went loose and fell, they fell all at once, and one of them came down across the path Smarag had been taking.
The dragon hit it at speed, not caught or gripped, but impacting the side of it on the way up. The collision transferred all of that momentum sideways. Smarag spun. Not a controlled roll. A flat, uncontrolled rotation in the air, the horizon going vertical and then inverted and then vertical again, and Aerion lost his seat entirely.
He was in the air.
Not falling, not exactly. The rotation had given him some lateral velocity, and he was moving more sideways than down. But there was no dragon under him, and the harbor was sixty feet below and closing. He had one hand on nothing. His right hand was still closed around the neck ridge from reflex, and Smarag's spin was bringing the ridge back toward him, and he did the only calculation that mattered: whether the timing would work before the harbor arrived.
Smarag completed the spin.
The ridge came back to where Aerion's hand was, and he caught it, and the sudden deceleration nearly pulled his arm from the socket. He swung full-extension beneath the dragon, dangling, and Smarag leveled and climbed, and Aerion hauled himself back up with whatever he had left in his arms, which was not as much as he would have preferred.
He sat on Smarag's back with both hands locked in the ridge and did not move for a moment.
The eastern kraken's central mass had begun to sink. He watched it go, distantly, the way you watched things when your whole body was occupied with something else. His heart was loud. His shoulder was no longer something he could file. His arms were shaking with a fine tremor that he recognized as the kind that didn't stop when you told it to.
The western kraken's tentacle hit Smarag's left flank while he was still watching.
Not a glancing edge this time. A full side-on impact, the flat of the tentacle catching the dragon from the left rear quarter at speed. The glintstone shards along Smarag's left side shattered at their bases, several spinning free over the harbor as fragments of light.
The force of the blow was enormous, not the kind of force that pushed but the kind that stopped, a sudden negation of everything Smarag had been doing in that direction. The dragon lost his left-wing rhythm completely and dropped forty feet before finding it again. Even then the wing was wrong, the extension not quite full, something in the motion that spoke of damage working its way through.
Aerion felt all of it through the body beneath him. He felt the moment Smarag found the wing again and the quality of that finding, and he understood what it cost. The dragon turned his head back briefly, just checking, the way Smarag checked things he wanted to be certain of. Aerion met the look and gave a single nod. They were still in this.
His own left shoulder was a white line of pain every time the wing motion transmitted through Smarag's back. He breathed through it and found the western kraken and turned toward it.
It was the larger of the two. He had understood this in the abstract from the beginning; he understood it now in the specific, particular way you understood things you were about to fight alone.
Broader at the central mass. Tentacles thicker at the base. Movement is slower but more powerful, each sweep clearing a wider radius. And it was, beyond doubt, the smarter of the two. It had watched the eastern one die and read something from that, and it had reorganized itself accordingly.
Three tentacles above the waterline spread in a pattern that covered the angles it had identified as dangerous: the low firing position, the high position where the spears had come from, and the diagonal from the south where the sun was at their backs.
The kraken had not analyzed these approaches intellectually. It had stopped leaving them open because those were the directions it had been hurt from. The lesson was simple, and it had learned it.
It had also learned something from watching Smarag limp.
It was patient now in a way it hadn't been earlier. The tentacles are not reaching or probing but are simply present, covering the approaches, waiting. It had time. It had decided that whatever had been killing things in its harbor today was hurt, and hurt things made mistakes, and it would wait for the mistake.
Aerion did not plan to make the mistake. But he noted, without sentiment, that his hands were unreliable in a way they hadn't been two hours ago, and that Smarag's left-side maneuvering was slower than it needed to be, and that the distance between him and a mistake was considerably shorter than he would have liked.
He found an angle that wasn't covered.
The north side, where the tentacles hadn't extended, where a section of the central mass was visible between the surface chop and the harbor wall. Not a good angle. The mass was mostly submerged; what was visible was the upper edge, with no clear view of the eye cluster or any obviously critical structure. But it was open, and open was what he had.
He tried to gather the first incantation and found it came slower than usual, the shaping unsteady, the concentration harder to hold with his shoulder locking up every time Smarag's wing motion shifted. He held it anyway, forcing it together through the distraction, and when it broke apart a second before release, he closed his eyes briefly and started again.
He told Smarag what he needed. The dragon banked north, and the motion sent a spike through Aerion's left side that he absorbed through his teeth. The western kraken began adjusting its tentacles to cover the new approach. He watched the timing and waited for the moment before the adjustment completed.
He threw two spears in rapid succession, not pausing between them, the second already forming before the first had landed.
The effort of the second came from somewhere he hadn't been certain he had. Not the incantation cost alone but everything together: the shoulder, the cold soaking through his riding leathers from the harbor wave, and the hours of it. His hands were shaking visibly when it left them, the tremor running from his fingers up into his shoulders and jaw.
Both spears hit the upper edge of the central mass within a second of each other. The combined impact detonated something in the kraken's surface structure that the single hits hadn't reached: not an explosion but a rupture, a sudden discontinuity in the creature's coherence that expressed itself as a shudder throughout the entire body. The central mass lifted out of the water.
Fully exposed. For the first time.
Enormous beyond what he had thought when he'd seen only the upper portion. Dark and glistening and old in a way that rock was old, compressed, dense, and carrying the memory of pressures that would have destroyed anything less fundamental. The eye cluster at the center: many eyes, pale, arranged in a pattern that had no analog he could name. All of them open. All of them are looking at him.
He had perhaps three seconds before it settled back under the surface.
Smarag was already moving, reading the opening before Aerion had consciously registered it. The dragon dropped the final distance, and for a heartbeat the left wing caught, the full extension failing, the flight going ragged. They hit the approach at an angle, off-center, not the clean firing run Aerion had intended. He threw the crystal breath anyway, from the wrong position, from the hurt angle, at whatever part of the exposed mass was directly beneath them as they crossed it.
The glintstone cold went in.
Not cleanly. Not the way it had gone into the eastern one. More like water through a crack, finding its way through the outer surface and spreading inward, following the damage the spears had already opened. Slower. But going.
The western kraken went still.
Not convulsing, not shuddering. Still. The way a fire went still when it ran out of what fed it. The tentacles held their last position for a long moment, suspended, as if whatever had been directing them had simply stopped.
Then they came down all at once, every one of them simultaneously, the harbor receiving them with the sound of a landslide. The waves the impact generated crossed and recrossed the harbor, bouncing off the walls, diminishing slowly. A ship that had somehow survived until now finally gave up and went under quietly.
The central mass sank.
Aerion sat on Smarag's back and breathed.
His arms were still trembling. The ache in his shoulder had spread to his chest and neck, the kind of exhaustion that was not just physical but structural, that had worked its way into the load-bearing parts. He had fought in worse states and from worse positions. He noted that he was having to remind himself of this fact and that this was itself information about the state he was in.
Smarag circled at low altitude, his attention moving methodically between the two places where the krakens had gone under. He did this three times before his focus shifted elsewhere. Satisfied, in the way Smarag was satisfied with anything, completely, without residual doubt.
Both were down.
Most of the fleet was gone with them. Not destroyed by Aerion but by the krakens themselves, by the thrashing and the sweeping and the waves, ships crushed against the quays or pulled under or simply shattered by the impact of tentacles that weighed more than they did.
A few vessels at the farthest end of the harbor had survived intact, sheltered by the angle of the sea wall. He looked at them for a moment, too tired for deliberation, then brought Smarag around and dealt with them. The dragon's left wing held. Barely, but it held.
Then he looked west.
The horizon was empty. The Sunset Sea extended in every direction, gray and vast and giving nothing away. No sail. No shape. Nothing that moved.
He had not looked west once in the past two hours. He had not had the opportunity. He had no way to know how large a lead the Silence had, or which bearing it had taken, or anything useful about it at all. The open ocean was not a place where you found a ship that did not want to be found, and the Silence had two hours and the will to not be found and the particular quality of silence that made it practically invisible on open water.
He noted this under unfinished business.
He turned Smarag east toward the mainland and began the long flight back. The Iron Islands receded behind him, the smoke from Lordsport beginning to climb, Pyke's silhouette against the gray sky, the harbor below them a ruin of wreckage and still water. The job was half done. He had ended the Ironborn's ability to put to sea for years. He had not ended Euron Greyjoy.
It would keep.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Sunset Sea
Euron Greyjoy
He didn't watch the harbor die.
He sat in the stern of the Silence with his back to Lordsport and looked at the horizon instead, which was empty and clean and offered considerably more in terms of forward planning.
The Silence moved well. It always moved well, built for this kind of speed, the kind that required certain qualities beyond hull design and sail plan, qualities he had incorporated over the years through means he preferred not to enumerate in company.
The crew worked without speech. The ship moved without unnecessary sound. In the right conditions it became practically invisible, not magically but practically, the way anything making no noise and no light eventually became invisible to people looking for something else.
He felt both krakens die.
Not heard. Felt. Two cessations at the edge of awareness, separated by perhaps forty minutes, were the particular absence that followed the permanent absence of something he had spent years cultivating.
The first had cost him three months and a ritual he had performed alone on the open ocean at midnight. The second had cost him more. He did not think about the cost in terms of sentiment. He thought about it in terms of what it meant that something had killed them both, in a harbor, in under two hours.
He sat with that.
He had not been afraid in the harbor. He had not had time to be afraid. He had understood the arithmetic of the situation within sixty seconds of seeing what was happening, and he had acted on it. That was correct. That was survival. But he was afraid now, in the stern of the Silence, with nothing but open water in front of him and the certainty settling into him like cold.
He would have died.
Not probably. Not as one possible outcome among several. He would have died. If he had stayed in that harbor, if he had waited to watch, if he had done anything other than sail the moment he understood what had come for him, his bones would be at the bottom of Lordsport Harbor alongside the krakens.
He knew this with the same certainty he knew tides and weather, the things his body understood before his mind caught up. The creature that had come from above had not been looking for his fleet. It had been looking for him.
He was furious.
Not loudly. Euron Greyjoy had not been loud about anything in a very long time.
But the fury was there, deep and cold and structural, the fury of a man who had crossed every ocean on the known world and survived every sea and every port city and every betrayal and every knife in the dark; who had been to places where the stars were the wrong shape and come back; who had considered himself quite seriously unkillable; and who had this morning been forced to run.
The krakens were gone. Decades of accumulated advantage. The fleet was wreckage. The Iron Islands, which had been his seat and his supply line and his recruiting ground, were ash.
He had built all of it, and it was gone in a morning.
He thought about the dragon.
He had not known such a thing existed. That was the part that sat wrongly in him, the part his mind kept returning to. He had known things no living man knew. He had sailed to the grey wastes beyond the Jade Sea and seen the temples there; had been to Valyria itself and come back changed in ways he did not fully enumerate; and had maps and charts and lore that were not available to any other man alive. And he had not known that something like what appeared over Lordsport was possible.
Not the dragon alone; he had known about dragons, but the rider. The magic. The way it fought, not like a man who had acquired a weapon but like something that had grown into its power over a very long time. Something old in a new body. Something that should not be here.
There was nothing in any of his plans that accounted for it.
He revised his plans.
The Deep Ones could not fight from the sky. They could hold coastlines, could take cities from the waterfront, and could move through any land that touched salt water and overwhelm anything that met them at ground level.
He had built his thinking around the fact that nothing on land could stop them, and nothing at sea could match them. He had not built his thinking around something that flew. He would need to account for it now. He was a man who accounted for things.
He went below deck.
The Deep Key was in its case in the alcove he had built for it: lined with treated seaweed, cold-dampening, letting it exist in an enclosed space without making the whole ship feel like a tomb. He opened the case and looked at it without touching it.
The iridescence on its surface moved with its own rhythm, independent of the lantern swinging on its hook. Slower than before. More deliberate. The not-quite-colors are coming from inside the object rather than reflecting off it, faint and deep and regular.
In and out. In and out.
He counted. Eleven on the inhale, eleven on the exhale. He counted six full cycles before he was satisfied that the consistency was real and not a trick of his attention. Something was breathing in there, in the dark of the artifact, in whatever space existed inside a thing that had no business having an inside.
The anger came back to him then, quieter but with more weight behind it. The krakens were gone. The fleet was gone. The Iron Islands were gone. All of it was purchased at enormous cost over enormous time, and now it was wreckage and smoke at the bottom of Lordsport Harbor.
And there was a thing out there, on the mainland, that had done it and would be alive tomorrow and the day after and would be looking for him.
He needed to be gone before it found him.
Three weeks to the place in the west. If the winds held. He would be beyond any pursuit range long before then, the open ocean closing around the Silence like water closing over a stone, and whatever that thing was, it could not follow him where he was going. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
He closed the case with the particular care of a man handling something irreplaceable and went to his berth and lay down. Outside, the silence cut through the gray sea toward the west, toward water that had no bottom on any chart he had ever seen.
The Iron Islands were ash and wreckage behind him. The fleet was sinking. Both krakens were gone.
He had the key. He had the rhythm in the box. He had the place he was going and the knowledge of what to do when he arrived.
He had lost everything except what mattered.
Euron Greyjoy closed his eyes.
He did not sleep easily. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he lay in the dark and thought about a man he had not yet met and what it would take to kill him.