I was supposed to publish it on Sunday, but I couldn't wait.
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Essos, Vaes Dothrak
1st Moon of 58 AC
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Winter in northern Essos did not manifest as the white snow that always seemed to devour the distant North of Westeros, but rather as a freezing, dry wind from the Shivering Sea that swept down from the peaks of the Mother of Mountains, scouring the immense plains of the Dothraki Sea. In the streets of the rebuilt Vaes Dothrak, the sound of hammers and stonemasons' picks slowly faded as afternoon yielded to a purple-tinted night. Dust no longer floated in the air; the dirt plazas and streets were gone, replaced by thoroughly paved stone roads.
Inside the private chambers of the palatial estate Caspian had built for himself and his family, the atmosphere was notably warmer, though no less tense. The palace was a feat of hybrid architecture: the solid stone foundation and vaulted ceilings of dark wood evoked Xandarian sobriety, while the horse hides, red silk tapestries from the Free Cities, and bronze braziers served as reminders that this remained the heart of Dothraki territory. Caspian preferred it this way; he knew he could not easily change the deeply ingrained culture of the horse lords. Even so, he had transformed the city's architecture from a collection of straw, grass, and mud huts of various ethnicities into a bustling metropolis of tall buildings crafted from wood and stone.
Caspian stood beside a large map table, where several blueprints of the city and the grand Temple of the Dosh Khaleen—currently under construction—were laid out under the weight of clay paperweights. He wore a black wool tunic bordered with gold threads woven into linear patterns, and over his shoulders rested a cloak made from the pelt of a White Hrakkar. His face bore the deep exhaustion of the endless days of supervision and construction he had endured.
Beside him, Amanda delicately arranged a set of silver cups and a pitcher of spiced wine brought from the vineyards of Xandar. In the shadows of the room, standing like silent gargoyles, were three of his Bloodriders: Essino, Onno, and Qrano. The three Dothraki wore their formidable diamond armor, their long, dark braids falling heavily over their shoulders, adorned with small bronze bells that chimed softly with every movement. Their hands rested casually but alertly on the hilts of their arakhs—the curved swords that defined their identity and served as the source of death for countless men and women.
Valka, the leader of the witches and Caspian's wife, sat in a large oak armchair near the main brazier. Her dark eyes, heavy with a mysticism that often made others uncomfortable, remained fixed on the fire, though her mind registered every subtle shift in the room.
"The foundations of the southern sector are finished, my love," Valka remarked, her voice carrying that magnetic, deep cadence that defined her. "The food shipment from Xandar has also arrived. Looking at how things are going, we will need another one in four days; there are many mouths to feed."
"I will personally oversee getting meat, Valka," Caspian replied, rubbing his temples. "Speed is vital if we want to consolidate the city before the turn of the moon."
Amanda approached slowly, holding the silver cup filled with warm wine. Her eyes were fixed on the nape of Caspian's neck, and an almost imperceptible tremor shook her fingers as the distance between them closed to less than a single step.
"My Khal..." Amanda whispered. Her voice sounded strangely hollow, completely lacking her usual warmth, as if the words were being uttered by someone poorly mimicking an instrument out of tune.
Caspian began to turn to take the cup, but before he could complete the movement, Amanda's face blurred and distorted for a fraction of a second. To an ordinary observer, it would have looked like a simple flicker of the firelight, but to Valka, the anomaly was as loud as a scream in a silent desert. Behind the smooth skin of the maid, a cold, grayish shadow—a decaying, sunken face—emerged with the swiftness of a striking viper.
The gleam of cold steel flashed in the woman's right hand. A long dagger with a blackened blade to prevent reflection plunged directly toward Caspian's exposed throat.
"I... I am sorry," the false Amanda began to whisper, uttering the dry-lipped ritual apology of the Sorrowful Men. But her apology was never completed.
With a movement that defied human perception, Valka's arm whipped forward. An enchanted whip uncoiled through the air with a hissing crack, leaving a trail of purple sparks in the dim light of the room. The leather, imbued with powerful enchantments, wrapped with millimetric precision around the assassin's armed wrist. The sharpness enchantment woven into the whip took effect instantly; as the leather snapped taut, the magic sliced through flesh, tendon, and bone with absolute ease, like a hot iron cutting through plastic.
The severed arm, still gripping the black dagger, fell onto the map table, splattering bright scarlet blood across the blueprints of Vaes Dothrak.
The false Amanda let out a gut-wrenching shriek, collapsing to her knees as blood gushed from her ruined stump.
"Whore!" Essino roared, unsheathing his arakh in a fluid motion that made the bells in his braid chime aggressively. Qrano mimicked the gesture instantly, stepping between the bleeding woman and his Khal, his eyes bloodshot and his face twisted into the savage fury of the Dothraki.
Caspian leaped back a step, startled by the suddenness of the assault, his hand instinctively reaching for the sword hanging at his hip. But the danger did not only come from the mutilated woman.
To his left, Onno, his trusted Bloodrider, did not move to protect him. His eyes, once dark and familiar, now shone with a dead, icy glaze. The glamour spell woven over him by the warlocks of Qarth began to crack under the physical strain of the moment, revealing flashes of pale, withered skin beneath the Dothraki war paint.
Before Essino or Qrano could react to their blood-brother's anomalous movement, Onno raised his arakh. The curved blade sliced through the air in a perfect, brutal arc, propelled by the full force of his shoulders.
The strike was clean, savage, and absolute.
The steel of the arakh severed Caspian's neck. The Khal's head detached from his shoulders, hitting the floor with a dull thud, followed milliseconds later by his lifeless body collapsing onto the fur rug, staining it a deep, heavy crimson.
"Caspian!!" Valka's scream was not that of a frightened woman, but the wounded roar of a creature that had once been the source of nightmares in the world she had been brought from. The magic in the room collapsed violently; the flames in the braziers flared up to touch the wooden ceiling beams, and the air grew so dense it was difficult to breathe.
Qrano and Essino froze for a fraction of a second, their muscles locked in absolute horror at the sight of their fallen Khal. Onno, holding the blood-slicked weapon, showed no emotion whatsoever. Under the influence of the Qartheen glamour, he was no longer a man, but an extension of the will of his eastern masters and their faction.
But before Onno could take a single step to secure his escape, the very fabric of space seemed to rip open in the darkest corners of the room.
Three inhuman silhouettes, over two meters tall, with extraordinarily long, slender limbs and eyes glowing with a hungry, violet fire, materialized out of thin air with a sharp, static crackle like stones grinding together. The Endermen, who always watched over Caspian—invisible to mortal eyes but eternally present—responded to the end of their master's life.
The fury of the creatures was instantaneous and cataclysmic. One of them let out a distorted, metallic screech that rattled the eardrums of everyone in the room before lunging at Onno. Elongated fingers tipped with dagger-sized claws sank deep into the traitor's shoulders. With a terrifying strength that defied all physical logic, the second Enderman grabbed Onno's head while the third pinned his legs.
Onno's body was literally torn to pieces in a matter of seconds. There was no time for defense, no time to swing the arakh, and no time for the parlor tricks of Qarth's warlocks. The creatures shredded flesh and bone, their claws tearing right through the protective metal of his diamond armor, scattering the remains of the false Bloodrider across the walls and floor in a horrific rain of viscera. Onno—or whatever was left of him under the spell—fought blindly and desperately until his last breath was violently snuffed out by the implacable force of the beings from the End.
In the center of the carnage, Caspian's severed head, resting on the stained rug, began to glow with a pure, golden light.
The small Totem of Undying that Caspian always kept hidden in his tunic activated. The gold-and-emerald figurine consumed itself, bursting into a thick cloud of shimmering green and gold particles that enveloped both his head and torso. Before the stunned eyes of Essino and Qrano, who fell to their knees in terror at what they believed to be a divine miracle, the severed tissues began to mend. The flesh of his throat stitched itself back together with threads of golden light, the blood vessels reconnected, and Caspian Blackwood's heart began to beat powerfully once more.
Caspian took a deep, agonizing gasp of air, as if breaking the surface of a frozen ocean, and slowly pushed himself up, placing his hands on the blood-soaked floor. The exhaustion was gone from his eyes, replaced by an icy, inhuman coldness.
The false Amanda, bleeding out on the floor and trying to drag herself toward the exit with her remaining arm, was cut off by Valka.
The leader of the witches stood over her like a goddess of death. Without a word, Valka delivered a heavy punch, loaded with her full strength and accumulated magic, straight to the assassin's temple. The impact was brutal; the woman's head bounced off the stone floor, and her body went completely limp, knocked into deep unconsciousness.
The three Endermen, their violet eyes locked onto the resurrected Caspian, let out a low, unsettling warble and vanished into thin air with the same dry crackle, leaving behind only the smell of sulfur and the utter devastation of the room.
Caspian stood up, wiping the blood from his throat with the back of his hand. He looked at the mangled remains of Onno, then at the unconscious woman, and finally locked his gaze onto his wife.
"Bring the witches, Valka," Caspian said, his voice lower and more dangerous than it had ever been. "I want this city searched from top to bottom. Now!"
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Valka's command tore through Vaes Dothrak like a wildfire. In less than an hour, the silence of the night was shattered by the thundering hooves of riders and the terrified murmurs of the Dothraki population. The light of lanterns illuminated the stone roads, casting long, menacing shadows across the wood and adobe facades of the city.
The witches of Xandar, clad in dark robes and wielding whips that pulsed with eerie, spectral lights, rode out with a grim determination.
Though the power of the witches was immense, rooted in the use of potions and enchantments, they were not omniscient. The glamour magic woven by the warlocks of Qarth was one of the oldest and most refined arts in Essos—an illusion that did not alter physical matter but instead manipulated the perception of those looking at it, hiding a person's true identity behind a flawless mask. For the witches, who relied on sight and were not deeply versed in the traditional magic of this world, the Qartheen glamour had remained completely invisible until the violence of the attack shattered the illusion in their king's chambers.
Under Valka's direction, the witches deployed in groups of three through every residential sector, focusing heavily on the quarters of the palace servants and the compounds of the Bloodriders. The search was thorough, violent, and entirely merciless. Chests were smashed, tapestries ripped from walls, and every servant was subjected to the trial of weakness potions to see if the resulting pain would break their concentration and force them to reveal their true form or shatter their magical mask.
It was in the northeastern sector of the city, inside a small stone cabin designated for low-ranking palace servants, where the witches finally uncovered the truth behind the deception.
The wooden door was kicked off its hinges. Stepping inside, the witches did not find a scheming spy, but a scene of pure, domestic horror. In a dark corner of the room, half-buried under dirty wool blankets and bound tightly to a wooden support beam with thick hemp ropes, was the real Amanda.
The young servant girl was alive, but her body was a canvas of human cruelty. Her face—the very same face the assassin had mimicked with such terrifying precision in the palace—was bloated, swollen, and unrecognizable from severe beatings. Her arms and legs bore horrific burns inflicted with red-hot iron, and her fingers were broken, her fingernails torn out one by one.
The Sorrowful Men had kept her captive in her own home for weeks, subjecting her to systematic and brutal interrogation. They did not care about kingdom secrets that Amanda did not possess; they wanted her daily routine, her gestures, the exact way she served wine to Caspian, her common phrases, and the precise times she entered and left the royal chambers. Every single torture session had been meticulously designed to extract the details necessary for the impostor to slip into the king's inner circle under the veil of glamour without raising a single suspicion from the Bloodriders or the witches guarding the palace.
Upon being freed by the witches, the real Amanda could only let out a ragged, terrified sob, curling tightly against the cold stone wall, weeping in fear that her tormentors had returned to finish her off.
As for Onno, the search of his personal quarters yielded no survivors. They found his body half-buried beneath piles of hay. The true Bloodrider had died weeks ago defending his post when the Sorrowful Men first planned the infiltration. The mangled body that the Endermen had ripped apart in the chambers belonged to an impostor—an assassin who had accepted the glamour of the Dothraki warrior and fought to his very last breath under the magical influence of his employers.