This chapter is special; I tried to capture Caspian's personality and what drives him, but I'm still not entirely convinced.
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Caspian Darkwood
1st Moon Of 58 AC
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The heat did not come only from the air; it rose from the ground as well, soaking through the soles of my boots until the skin on my feet blistered inside the leather. The marble of Qarth's main avenues did not shatter as if torn by an earthquake; instead, it melted, turning into a pasty, viscous mass that boiled with bubbles of ash. Around me, the night sky had vanished, replaced by a canopy of thick smoke and a fire of a sickly green—dense as boiling oil—that came roaring down the facades of the great limestone palaces.
To my right, a stone portico collapsed with a dry crunch. Among the glowing debris, a surge of people fought their way out, shoving one another. They were not soldiers. They were entire families from the slums, wrapped in old tunics that the ambient heat had already begun to scorch before the flames could even touch them.
A man grabbed my forearm. His face was nothing more than a mass of open blisters and raw flesh peeling away in strips.
"The bronze gates are closed! We are burning alive, my lord! Open the gates, for the love of the gods, open the gates!" he shrieked in a raspy, agonizing voice, his bloody fingers digging into the sleeve of my doublet, leaving a smear of burned skin and human fat upon my leather.
I shoved him back instinctively, but the flow of the crowd was a tide of pure panic. A woman fell a few yards away, crushed by the stampede; she tried to crawl across the glowing cobblestones, leaving the imprints of her seared palms on the stone before a wave of purple fire swept over her entirely. Her screams did not sound human; they were high-pitched shrieks—like a machine failing to turn over—from something being consumed from the inside out. Small children ran blindly with their hair engulfed in flames, slamming into burning walls, tripping over corpses that had already begun to bloat and burst from the extreme heat.
The smell was the worst of it. Pungent sulfur mingled with the sour, nauseating, heavy stench of thousands of bodies burning all at once in the maze of alleyways. I was choking. I tried to draw breath to shout an order, to find an evacuation route through the chaos, but the air that entered my lungs was so hot it seared my throat, leaving a metallic taste of bitter copper and congealed blood at the back of my tongue.
In the distance, the towering House of the Undying gave way. The massive structure leaned its weight over the harbor's great plaza. I saw its gigantic shadow project over me as the cascade of incandescent stone, molten iron, and thousands of people screaming in agony came crashing down in a relentless avalanche. The crowd shoved me headlong toward the wave of fire. I felt the radiant heat scorch my eyelashes, the skin of my face on the verge of splitting—
My eyes snapped open. I sat bolt upright in bed with a sudden jolt that nearly threw me off the mattress, my chest heaving and a violent gasp escaping my throat.
My heart pounded against my ribs with savage force, a frantic rhythm that threatened to burst through my chest. I was drenched in a cold, clammy sweat that plastered my linen tunic to my back. For several agonizing seconds, disorienting haze clouded my vision: the bluish twilight of the room blurred with the shadow of the tower falling over my head. My right hand shot out blindly toward the nightstand, clawing at the wood in a desperate, visceral attempt to find the drawer with my pistol, the tactical rifle, or the hilt of the combat knife I used to keep pinned beside my pillow in my past life—back when I was a lieutenant in the mud, waiting for enemy artillery.
My fingers clumsily bumped against the cold hilt of my sword leaning against the wall.
The freezing metal brought me back to reality like a blast of ice water.
I turned my head, breathing through an open mouth, and recognized the high arches, the limestone walls, and the slivers of afternoon light filtering through the shutters. The Great Pyramid of Meereen. I was safe. I was in my quarters.
I forced myself to execute the tactical breathing protocol: four seconds to inhale cool air, four seconds to hold it in my chest, four seconds to exhale. Slowly, the racing pulse began to subside, leaving behind a fine tremor in my fingers and that familiar exhaustion of a day off to a bad start.
I dragged the palms of my hands firmly across my face, feeling my rough beard and cold skin.
Qarth. That damn city burning in my head again.
I sat motionless on the edge of the bed, resting my elbows on my knees as my heart rate finally stabilized. The taste of bitter copper and the suffocating tightness in my throat took minutes to fade.
I felt no guilt. If anyone were to ask me whether I regretted burning Qarth to the ground, my internal answer remained a flat no. In my previous life, I learned that guilt is a sentimental luxury reserved for civilians who judge war from the comfort of their homes. On a real battlefield, hesitating over the morality of an order is a fast track to ending up in a body bag. Qarth tried to assassinate me; they sought to destroy my people by taking my life. I applied the only doctrine that decadent oligarchies understand: the complete annihilation of their operational capacity. And if I found myself in that exact scenario again, I would order Endaxia to unleash fire with the very same resolve.
Regret, however... that was different. Regret has nothing to do with pity or morality; it is what remains when everything is lost, or when you are the one who causes it to be lost.
I regretted the innocent lives, not out of some self-righteous compassion that serves no purpose once swords are drawn, but because their deaths represented a catastrophic flaw in the design of my conquest. Those thousands of civilians who burned in the slums did not plot the attempt on my life; the merchants trapped at the docks were only looking to make ten coins to buy bread. They were ruined lives that could have been integrated into a productive system—paying taxes, building fortifications, or growing grain to sustain my khalasar. Mass slaughter is an efficient tool for instilling paralyzing terror, but it is a clumsy method if relied upon as the sole strategy. A leader who only knows how to burn cities to ashes will soon have nothing left to rule.
I stood up, feeling the cold stone beneath the soles of my feet. I walked toward the gallery window, watching the sea of Meereen's rooftops take shape under the purple sky of dusk.
Sometimes I paused to measure just how much I had changed since arriving in Essos. In my first life, violence was a tightly regulated tool, bounded by treaties, rules of engagement, and superior officers. There were standards; we were taught to maintain a facade of decency amidst the filth. But this world had no rules—only the law of the sharpest steel and hunger. Here, kindness without a hard blade to back it up isn't a virtue; it's a suicide note written by an idiot.
At first, I tried to apply the logic I was raised with, but the reality of this continent spat right back in my face. If you show weakness to a Great Master or a Dothraki warlord, they don't interpret it as diplomacy; they see it as an invitation to slit your throat and keep your boots. To survive, I had to shed that modern skin gradually. I turned myself into a system designer. If this world was a brutal framework running on fear, greed, and faith, I would learn to manipulate those three engines better than anyone.
I treated power as if I were building a technical settlement from scratch: you need food to sustain men, you need men to enforce order, you need gold to maintain power, and you need calculated terror so no one questions the structure. I couldn't care less about the nobility of Aerea's Targaryen name or the archaic prophecies the red priests shrieked in the bazaars. If it served the Dothraki to believe the Horse God gave me the power to fly through fire, I gave them their flying god. If it comforted the fanatics of the Faith to think I was Azor Ahai reborn to crush the shadows, I fed the legend (even if, in this case, it happened to be true). Religion was nothing more than a force multiplier—a psychological tool as valuable as a battalion of heavy cavalry.
I heard firm footsteps on the stone behind me. I didn't need to turn around to know who it was. The sharp clinking of steel against studded leather and the soft chime of bells woven into hair braids were unmistakable.
"Khal," Zirqo's voice was deep, low, and constantly alert.
I turned slowly. Zirqo stood erect a few paces away, wearing the steel breastplate I had personally adapted for my Bloodriders. At first, the Dothraki warriors despised the weight of the metal, but as soon as they saw arrows bounce harmlessly off the polished plates, they adopted the armor with the same discipline they applied to riding their mounts. Besides, leveraging someone's faith yielded these kinds of results.
"Was there any trouble in the lower districts?" I asked, walking over to the table where my leather doublet lay.
"None," Zirqo replied, adjusting the belt where his arakh hung. "Mottaekho and Kakho rode through the Labyrinth of Mazdhan with a whole Horde. They found three groups of the Sons of the Harpy."
"What did they do with them?" I inquired in a neutral tone, slipping my arms into the leather sleeves.
"They cut off their hands and nailed them to the gates of their family estates," Zirqo said without a single muscle in his face twitching. "Just as you commanded. City men learn quickly when pain speaks louder than words."
"Good," I nodded, fastening the buckles across my chest. "Initial panic clears the path. Have the Hordes keep up the good work."
Zirqo inclined his head slightly. "Blood of my blood," the warrior said, using the sacred oath. "The men will follow you to where the green land ends. For us, there is no other Khal."
I looked Zirqo straight in the eyes. In his sun-baked, battle-scarred face, there was no trace of flattery. The Dothraki didn't understand much about numbers or laws, but they respected direct loyalty, tangible strength, and strong leadership. I treated them as professional soldiers, not expendable savages, and in return, they gave me an elite guard that no Ghiscari coin could ever bribe.
"Go below and line up the guard," I ordered him calmly. "I'll be down in a few minutes."
Zirqo gave a brief bow and retired with heavy steps, leaving the room in silence once again.
I stepped up to the bronze pitcher on the table, poured myself a cup of water, and drank it down in one gulp. The chill of the liquid cleared my throat, though it couldn't fully dissolve the suffocating sensation brought on by the nightmare.
At times, in very specific moments, I missed the simplicity of my past life. I missed the days when my only concerns were guard shifts, grabbing a cold beer at the end of the week, or getting six straight hours of sleep without hearing the constant hum of a drone overhead. I wanted comfort, I wanted stability, I wanted the peace of a world where survival wasn't a daily auction to the highest bidder. But the cards were dealt in this land. If I didn't take absolute control of this chaos, a red-robed fanatic or a decadent noble would take it instead, re-chaining thousands of people for the sheer pleasure of feeling important.
No, I wasn't the hero of this story. I didn't have a single shred left of the naive idealism found in knights' songs, nor the faith of reformers who believe societies change through well-crafted speeches. I knew exactly what I had become: a conqueror, a cold calculator willing to stain his hands with blood up to his elbows to build a system that could withstand the test of time.
I walked toward the side corridor leading to the queen's quarters. The heavy violet silk curtains were drawn back slightly, letting in the golden light of the sun as it hung over the city walls. Aerea sat before a polished bronze mirror, running a bone comb through her long silver hair with measured strokes. Through the reflection, her violet eyes met mine the moment I crossed the threshold.
"Did you rest? You were asleep when I arrived," Aerea said, without turning around. Her voice was calm, yet carried that underlying firmness she had cultivated since we established ourselves in Meereen. "I heard you groaning and tossing around."
"It was just the suffocating heat in the room," I lied naturally, stepping up behind her to place my hands on her shoulders. "The walls trap the heat from the whole day before."
Aerea set the comb on the table and covered one of my hands with hers. The warmth of her skin stood in sharp contrast to the coldness with which my mind had just processed the afternoon's executions.
"I know full well when you dream of the burning of Qarth, Caspian," she murmured, fixing her gaze on my reflection. "You wake up with a heavy countenance—I can tell. I know what happened there... and I know exactly what it costs you to keep your mind under control when you dream."
I didn't answer right away. I rarely shared the dark corners of my mind with anyone, not even her. Aerea was my wife and my ally in this structure, but she was also the Khaleesi. She needed to see steadfast leadership, not the cracks where the toll of these decisions leaked through.
"Qarth was a solution to ensure no counterattacks could follow, Aerea," I said softly, leaning down to her ear. "And what I executed in Meereen is the guarantee that we won't have to repeat a similar slaughter within our own walls. Reopening the arenas, taxing every guild, executing saboteurs before they can organize a revolt—it's all to keep this city from turning into a pile of ash."
Aerea let out a slow sigh, tilting her head back to look at me directly.
"Sometimes I look at you and wonder what remains of the man I first met," she remarked with a blend of sadness and resignation. "You've become as relentless as the steel of your sword. I don't want the pain around us to consume you."
"What remains is the man needed to keep you and me breathing at the end of the day," I answered without hesitation. "If I turn soft, if I let pity interfere with economic or military plans, Meereen's noble families will slit our throats at the first banquet and toss our bodies into the pits. Kindness without real power is suicide in Essos. I would rather history books remember me as a tyrant who made Xandar the greatest empire in the world than see my people dead."
Aerea held my gaze for a few seconds. Finally, with a slight nod, she accepted the unyielding logic of my words. She knew I was right, even if the price was hardening a little more with every decree signed.
"Just remember that you have me," she said softly.
I nodded and placed a chaste kiss on her forehead.
I left the quarters and took the corridor leading down to the grand staircase. As I descended through the marble levels of the Great Pyramid, the roar of the city below rose sharply: the shouts of merchants in the bazaar, the clinking tools of blacksmiths repairing the gates to the Pit of the Three Graces, and the constant chatter of thousands of freedmen beginning their day.
The lingering smell of smoke from the nightmare vanished entirely, replaced by the scent of dry dust, spices, and leather that defined the pulse of the city. I tightened the straps on my elbow guards and picked up my pace. There was no time for ghosts or belated regrets over the dead of Qarth. The machinery of Meereen needed momentum to keep running, and I was the only man willing to turn the gears—no matter how much blood it took to keep the wheel turning.