(Bonus chapter, enjoy.
300 Power Stones for the next bonus chapter.)
๐ฎ๐๐๐๐๐๐ 107: ๐ฟ๐๐ ๐ฌ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐.
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Vlad descended through the broad corridors carved into the depths of Casterly Rock while the torchlight played across the stone walls. As he left the upper levels of the fortress behind, the distant murmur of the court disappeared and the passageways fell into a profound silence.
During the last few years, he had devoted as much time to reorganizing his domain as he had to conquering it. Defeating armies and taking castles was only the beginning; afterward, something had to be built that was capable of sustaining itself once the war ended.
That was why he had divided his progeny into clans, each with a different function.
At the top was his own bloodline, the Drakul.
It would never be a numerous clan. For the moment, it consisted only of himself and Daenerys, along with a few progeny who made up his inner circle. The rest of the structure rested upon them, and Vlad had no intention of turning Westeros into a kingdom of vampires or establishing an endless dynasty.
Below them were the Ventrue.
They were second-generation progeny, created by Vlad himself or by those who had received authorization to do so. They would not occupy a throne, but they would govern fortresses and territories wherever necessary, sharing power with the human nobility rather than replacing it.
Then came the Tremere.
While the Citadel hoarded knowledge behind its walls, they sought it wherever they could find it. Magic, alchemy, architecture, engineering... any discipline capable of strengthening his domain had a place among them.
Information fell to the Nosferatu.
Lena Drakul led that clan. Before the Embrace, she had worked as a prostitute and, years later, she still moved through the same world of brothels, taverns, and pleasure houses, though now she used it to maintain an information network that stretched across both continents.
The Brujah were responsible for the armies.
They remained under the command of Greylon, once known as Grey Worm. Since regaining his freedom, he had even chosen a name of his own. Now he organized the military forces and prepared the campaigns that, sooner or later, would inevitably come.
The economy belonged to the Lasombra.
Dorian, a former merchant whom Vlad had given the Embrace years earlier, worked to unite Essos and Westeros through a single trade network. He was competent, though the relationship between them remained tense. Like all progeny, he obeyed the direct orders of his progenitor, but he had never willingly accepted losing the freedom he had possessed while still alive.
The final clan was the Assamite.
It still existed more as a project than as a reality. Vlad continued gathering men to form an order capable of hunting traitors, destroying unstable vampires, and watching over the clans themselves when necessary.
They did not yet have a patriarch, but he hoped Edward would take that position when he returned from beyond the Wall.
First, however, he would have to answer for his disobedience.
Edward had ignored his order by turning Anna, a vampire incapable of controlling her thirst and responsible for several deaths. Although she was already dead, the mistake remained serious. Vlad had expressly forbidden turning mentally unstable people.
The punishment would be severe, though he had no intention of dispensing with him. Edward was still far too useful to waste over a single mistake.
As he descended toward the deepest chambers of the Rock, Vlad thought that the system was only taking its first steps. In time, however, it would become the true foundation of everything he was building.
When he entered the laboratories, several researchers looked up upon recognizing him before immediately returning to their work. The tables were covered with scrolls filled with runic diagrams, measuring instruments, bottles of reagents, and metal pieces adapted for different experiments.
The chamber was spacious. The shelves were already beginning to fill with books, though many remained empty, awaiting new additions.
In many ways, this was the true heart of his project.
Magic occupied an important place, but Vlad had never separated it from the rest of knowledge. Alchemy, architecture, engineering, and magic were different paths toward understanding the same world.
Even so, the runic system remained at the center of all those investigations.
It had all begun years earlier, when he used an ancient Valyrian book to prepare the ritual that would bring the dragons back to life. Like so many other mages before him, at the time he had simply followed the instructions in the text: the blood sacrifice, the arrangement of the symbols, the chants in High Valyrian, and the runes that marked the boundaries of the ritual circle.
The ritual worked, but once the dragons were born, Vlad could not help wondering why.
For years, he returned to that same question again and again. Why did a specific symbol, a particular word, or a certain form of writing alter the behavior of magic? If magic was a fundamental force of the world, it made no sense that simple marks drawn upon stone or parchment could modify it.
After years of drinking the blood of all kinds of magic users and inheriting part of their memories and experiences, he eventually formulated a theory that he found quite plausible.
Until then, he had explained magic as though magical creatures themselves were its source. Dragons were bonfires; other supernatural creatures were mere candles that kept magic present in the world. However, that explanation only described the phenomenon, not its cause.
Magic was not a force separate from living beings, and belief was its true origin.
When men, animals, or magical creatures held a belief with sufficient intensity for long enough, that belief fueled magical phenomena, and those phenomena shaped the reality around them. Magical creatures themselves were not exempt from that principle; they also existed because entire generations had recognized them as part of a supernatural world and, in turn, their existence reinforced that same belief, further fueling the magic they radiated in what was a paradoxical cycle.
That explained why the disappearance of the dragons had weakened magic. They were not its source, but they were one of its most powerful manifestations and, without them, people "believed" that magic had disappeared from the world.
The theory also explained anomalies that had simply been accepted for centuries, such as the long summers and winters of Westeros. The world worked that way because entire generations had grown up convinced that this was the natural order of things and, over time, magic had ended up adapting reality to that collective belief.
The great deities of the world were not primordial beings that predated humanity. The Red God, the Great Other, the Old Gods, and other similar entities were enormous concentrations of magic born from centuries of collective belief.
But they were not gods in the human sense of the word.
The Red God, as a manifestation of fire, had no desires, plans, or human thoughts; its nature consisted simply of spreading and being fed, just like fire itself.
Likewise, the Great Other did not seek to destroy life or exterminate the living. As a manifestation of death, it had no need to accelerate a process that would eventually reach everyone equally. They did not guide their followers or grant favors; they simply existed as enormous concentrations of magical power with which those who possessed the necessary psychic ability could connect.
The same theory explained why more recent or less uniform religions, such as the Faith of the Seven, had not given rise to similar manifestations; antiquity helped, but it was not the decisive factor. What truly mattered was the clarity and uniformity of collective belief; without a sufficiently defined idea, magic could not condense into a stable entity.
Understanding this led Vlad to completely reinterpret the ancient rituals.
Symbols did not work because they were magical in themselves; they worked because, for centuries, countless sorcerers had associated the same signs with fire, ice, strength, healing, or protection, and magic itself had eventually begun responding to those associations.
Runes acted as a link between the sorcerer's mind and magic.
A symbol associated with fire made it easier to create flames not because the drawing produced fire by itself, but because it represented a concept that magic had already learned to recognize. Without symbols, magic was still possible, but much more difficult, because to create a simple flame the sorcerer had to precisely imagine the entire phenomenon: the heat, the combustion, the shape of the fire, and the way it interacted with the air.
Runes condensed all that complexity into a single symbol, and that led Vlad to an obvious conclusion. If the relationship between a symbol and its effect could be studied, it could also be reorganized and perfected.
Thus, his runic language was born.
It was not a new form of magic, but a much more orderly and coherent way of applying principles that already existed.
Even so, creating a rune remained a complex process. The first time a symbol was designed, the sorcerer had to imbue it with magical energy and, above all, construct a perfectly defined idea of the effect it was intended to represent.
If he wished to create a rune capable of launching a fireball, he had to correctly conceive its size, temperature, speed, stability, and the behavior of the flames once released.
That process fixed the meaning of the symbol and, from then on, the rune retained that conceptual structure, allowing the same effect to be reproduced without the need to mentally reconstruct the entire process each time.
The simplest effects could depend on a single rune; more complex ones required several working at the same time. A barrier of fire, for example, required symbols intended not only to generate the flames, but also to maintain their shape, control the spread of the heat, and delimit the affected area.
At first, Vlad thought of using that system only for weapons and armor.
He was already capable of forging blades wreathed in flames and armor reinforced through magic, but that approach had obvious limitations. Weapons could be lost, broken, or fall into the wrong hands and, moreover, they still depended on the skill of whoever wielded them.
That would not be enough for the war he knew was coming.
Not even he could face alone an enemy that had spent more than eight thousand years gathering an army. If the Night King returned at full strength, Westeros would need more than heroes and enchanted weapons.
It would need soldiers capable of using magic.
From that reasoning came the idea of integrating runes directly into the body.
If symbols could guide magic during a ritual, they could also do so permanently if they were inscribed upon the bearer in the form of tattoos.
To accomplish this, he had designed a specific tool known as a stele; it was a short rod forged from Valyrian steel, covered in runes and tipped with polished dragonglass. The stele was used alongside an ink created by the Tremere from alchemical reagents, herbs, and the blood of supernatural creatures.
Vlad preferred to use vampiric blood, since it worked particularly well as a magical conductor and, moreover, allowed him to maintain control over production.
During the tattooing process, the mage infused the rune with the desired effect along with a specific amount of magical energy, which remained stored within the tattoo itself. Once completed, the bearer did not need to possess magical talent to use it; they only had to activate the structure inscribed upon their skin for it to reproduce the effect previously fixed within it.
In essence, each tattoo functioned as a spell prepared in advance, although that reserve of energy was not infinite. The runes did not generate it on their own and, once it was exhausted, magic had to be infused into them again to recharge them.
That ensured Vlad would maintain control of the system; as long as he did not share the knowledge necessary to create or recharge those structures, any lord who wanted to maintain troops equipped with magic would remain dependent on him, and that dependence was part of the objective.
He did not intend to create armies of unstoppable sorcerers, but to establish a system that would allow magic to be used in a stable and relatively accessible manner, without resorting to absurd sacrifices or rituals. At the same time, it offered the lords of Westeros a reason to accept the new order; few would reject the possibility of having guards stronger than any enemy or soldiers capable of using fire in the middle of a battle.
However, the work of the Tremere went far beyond magic.
Although runes occupied a large part of their research, Vlad had also put many of them to work on much more mundane problems. Engineering, architecture, and mechanics seemed just as important to him as magic if he truly intended to transform Westeros into something more than a kingdom conquered by dragons.
He had read enough stories about transmigrators to realize that many seemed obsessed with introducing discoveries into medieval worlds that those societies had already known about for centuries.
Crop rotation, the use of fertilizers, or greenhouses constantly appeared in stories about young jade-skinned masters who "civilized" backward kingdoms.
That had always seemed absurd to him.
Westeros was not a primitive village, but an entire continent where millions of people had been cultivating the land for centuries. Thinking that entire generations of peasants had never learned to improve their harvests was simple arrogance; each region had developed techniques adapted to its own climate, and the peasants of Westeros were not idiots.
What they lacked was not ingenuity, but access to certain tools, and the Citadel had spent centuries monopolizing much of the useful knowledge. That was why he preferred to focus on innovations he knew for certain did not yet exist on the continent.
Such as the printing press.
At one of the nearby tables, several craftsmen were adjusting the final details of the first prototype: a wooden press with metal movable type and a system capable of transferring ink to paper quickly and evenly.
That was the result of bringing specialists from different trades together under the same roof. Vlad only had to remember a vague idea from his past life for far more skilled hands to eventually turn it into something functional.
Once perfected, the printing press would allow him to easily reproduce the years of information he had accumulated on magic, history, and strategy and, at the same time, begin to erode the monopoly on knowledge that the Citadel had maintained for centuries.
But the printing press was not his only project.
Dragons had given the Targaryens dominion over the skies for generations, although in truth that had never been a human dominion; men could only fly as long as the dragons allowed them to.
Vlad intended to change that.
On another table rested plans covered in diagrams and calculations describing structures of fabric and lightweight wooden frames. Other designs were even more ambitious: large gasbags attached to gondolas capable of transporting people or cargo over long distances.
If those projects succeeded, men would be able to dominate the skies without depending on magical creatures, and Vlad suspected that this would transform warfare as much as dragons had centuries earlier.
There were also less spectacular projects, but equally important ones.
Some engineers were studying hydraulic systems inspired by ancient Valyrian aqueducts and certain designs Vlad vaguely remembered from his past life. If they managed to adapt them to the cities of Westeros, the water supply would improve, the cities would grow, and many diseases would decrease.
Magic was a powerful tool, but engineering could change the world just as effectively.
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Welcome back for another week. As promised, here's the extra chapter. I hope you enjoy it.
Today's chapter is quite exposition-heavy, mainly because it serves as an introduction to the entire system I've created for the story. And just to be clear: when I say I created it for this story, it's obviously inspired by and borrows elements from many other systems that have appeared in fanfics, books, and other stories, so I'm not going to take any special credit for it.
As I said, this chapter needed to be fairly explanatory. I promise I tried to make it as entertaining as possible, but there are only so many ways to present all this information without ending up with incredibly long conversations that would probably become even more tedious.
Honestly, I think this was the best way to handle it. The chapter doesn't read too badly or feel particularly boring, so I'm pretty satisfied with the result. And every now and then, there's nothing wrong with having a chapter dedicated to explaining the more complex aspects of the world and its systems.
As you can see, I've also mixed the magical system I previously established for Westeros with some elements of Castlevania's magic, mainly the entire concept of collective belief. I've also established a few new things about the nature of the gods, and honestly, I much prefer this approach.
We'll see all the ramifications of this system as the story progresses.
On another note, I'm quite satisfied with how I've solved the problem of gaining support for Vlad. Obviously, most people might obey him out of fear, but that would never earn him genuine loyalty.
Instead, through this system and the way he plans to distribute it, Vlad effectively gains a monopoly over magical military power in Westeros. Personally, I think it's a fairly elegant and interesting solution to several problems that might arise later on.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter and this introduction to the new system.
See you next week.