ARC III: THE AWAKENING OF THE DRAGONS AND THE WAR OF THE EMPIRE
Chapter 44: The Shadow of the Emperor
POV: Arawyn Stark (302 AC)
While the columns of the North marched endlessly toward the South, tearing through the muddy roads of the Riverlands under the command of my cousin Robb and the legendary Ser Arthur Dayne, I remained in Winterfell, fighting my own relentless battle. And contrary to what many of those southern lords full of false morality might presume, it was far from a bad battle. Quite the opposite.
In the suffocating heat of my private chambers, I drove my hips rhythmically, penetrating the soft, moist throat of Margaery Tyrell, while my testicles were sucked with a wild, burning voracity by the hungry lips of Val. Both were arranged across the immense bed of furs, erotically bound together by thick, mystical vines that I myself had summoned from the wood of the bedframe. The bonds of green tendrils pulsed faintly, keeping the bodies of my empresses perfectly positioned for my absolute delight.
A few paces from the bed, oblivious to the explicit debauchery consuming the room, Ros paced back and forth holding a stack of official parchments. Her melodious, fiery voice dictated logistical reports on the progress of the Empire's great works, but I barely paid attention to the sound of her words. After all, even before she could open her mouth to utter the first syllable, my Supreme Greensight had already revealed every detail of those reports to me in visions of the future.
I already knew perfectly well that the construction of the Second Wall—the gigantic runic barrier we were erecting directly on the border of the Lands of Always Winter to contain the definitive advance of the Others—was operating at full speed, with the foundations of ice and magical rock nearly finished. Likewise, I had already visualized the flawless progress of the works on Aegon's Castle in the Blessings, a strategic fortress designed to consolidate our infrastructure on the new frontier.
I felt the mystical and physical pressure build at the core of my being. With a guttural grunt of pure satisfaction, I held Margaery firmly by her brown hair and released a massive, dense quantity of cum directly onto the faces of my two wives. The warm semen coated the delicate features of the Rose of the Reach and the fair skin of the princess of the Free Folk. Right after the peak of pleasure, both collapsed heavily against the bear-skin pillows, falling into a deep and exhausted sleep. And I did not blame them for it; after all, we had been locked in these chambers for many days, testing the limits of our carnal and magical endurance.
Margaery's performance during those days had proven to be a genuinely fascinating surprise. Her mystical lineage, descending directly from the legendary Garth Greenhand, had manifested splendidly through a magic based on the control and manipulation of plants and the vital flows of flora. Meanwhile, my dear Val possessed the normal physical skills and indomitable stamina that characterized the pure blood of the First Men who lived beyond the Wall. Leaving them to rest in the sanctuary of the bed, I raised my naked body and utilized a subtle fraction of elemental water and air magic to cleanse the remnants of the act from my own body in the blink of an eye.
I donned a simple dark linen tunic and walked toward my private solar, closely accompanied by the silent steps of Ros and the monumental silhouette of Inverno, my direwolf of perfectly black fur and brilliant green eyes. As we advanced, I could not help but admire the rustic grandeur of the architecture around us. Fortunately, the deep corridors of Winterfell had been constructed in the past with gargantuan dimensions, specifically designed to allow the simultaneous passage of hundreds of armed men. The ancient Starks had planned every millimeter of that castle strategically thinking of the arrival of the next Long Night; Winterfell was no mere noble residence, but a colossal complex of interconnected castles, designed to serve as humanity's final bastion. Everyone had to fit inside when the apocalypse knocked at the door.
Upon entering the solar, I found Mikken, the official smith of Winterfell, and Tobho Mott awaiting my presence. The great armor smith of Qohor had traveled to our lands for the sole purpose of learning the metallurgical secrets of working with the frost steel of the North under Mikken's tutelage. To gain access to this forbidden knowledge, Tobho had been forced to sign a magical contract of absolute fealty sealed with blood, officially becoming the Empire's second blacksmith.
The two men bowed deeply as soon as I crossed the threshold. Mikken took a step forward, gesturing toward a wooden stand covered by a dark velvet cloak.
"The new armor is perfectly finished and ready for combat, my Emperor," the old smith declared, his voice full of artisan pride.
"Then bring it to me," I ordered, seating myself in my oak chair.
When they removed the cloak, the structure of black metal revealed itself under the torchlight. The design of that armor was something I had personally commissioned, deliberately moving away from the aesthetics of my old protection, which was based strictly on the wolf figure of my house. This new plating was inspired by the look of the greatest and most iconic villain of a great work of fiction from my past life: the classic armor of the Dark Lord, Sauron.
I made a point of adopting that monolithic and terrifying aesthetic to ensure that my mere presence on the battlefield would be enough to paralyze the hearts of my enemies with pure dread, even before a single blow was struck. I harbored not the slightest concern about appearing like a monster or a villain to the hypocritical lords of the South; the real world was a cruel mechanism that, at times, required ruthless villains to forge order out of chaos. I prepared myself to seek the new weapon I intended to retrieve that very day from the depths of the castle.
Moved by a mystical premonition, I ordered Mikken and Tobho Mott to withdraw and signaled for Ros to follow me. I decided to descend into the dark depths of the crypts of Winterfell. As we lit the torches and went down the first flights of damp stone stairs, the air around us became progressively colder and denser.
After a few minutes of descent, I paused my walk for a moment before the stone statues of my father, Brandon Stark, and my grandfather, Lord Rickard. To be perfectly honest, aside from Lord Rickard's statue, I had no desire to erect any others down here, but my uncle Ned had insisted so much on honoring Brandon's memory that I decided to allow him to execute the work to ease his feelings of guilt.
As I stared at the sculpted features of my father and my grandfather, I found myself internally pondering what those ancient lords would think of everything I had built from the ruins of their house. Would they feel a genuine pride upon seeing Stark blood rule a mystical Empire? Or would the aristocratic pride and limited mindset of their era prevent them from understanding the grandeur of my work? In the end, that answer mattered not at all. The future belonged to me.
I continued the journey, descending the staircases toward the lower levels. We passed by the dusty tombs of the Lords of Winterfell, advanced through the ancient tombs of the Kings of Winter, and continued to descend toward the permanently buried areas forgotten by time. I had never bothered to clear out or explore those deepest sectors before today, but the hour had come. I intended to reclaim what the ancient kings had left behind, though, thanks to my Greensight, I already knew exactly what awaited me in the darkness.
Down there, hidden beneath tons of rock and ancient spells, lay the legendary weapon of the first Kings of Winter, the **Fist of Winter**. This colossal mace was forged from the metallic heart of a fallen star—an origin identical to that of the legendary sword Dawn of House Dayne.
That material coincidence revealed a profound secret that absolutely no one in Westeros or Essos was capable of deciphering: there was a very clear reason why, unlike the Andals or the Rhoynar, no historian knew for certain where the First Men had come from. No corner of the eastern continent seemed to have been the original home of that race, and there was no cataclysm or expanding Valyria to justify their massive migration toward Westeros thousands of years ago.
The truth hidden in the mists of time was that the First Men, just like the ancestral lineage of House Dayne, were the direct descendants of the survivors of the collapse of the **Great Empire of the Dawn**. And the Valyrians themselves also shared this exact same ancestral family tree. It was for this biological and mystical reason that the magics of all these cultures possessed such undeniable structural similarities at the core of their powers.
The First Men had inherited the ability to project their consciousness into the minds of animals and familiars through warging; the Valirians used a variation of this same mental connection to bond with their dragons; and the sorcerers of Valíria used their glass candles of dragonglass to see places located thousands of leagues away—one of the technical ramifications operating on the very same mystical frequency as the Greensight of the Starks. Although they exhibited obvious superficial differences caused by millennia of geographical isolation, all magics of the mortal world shared the same primordial origin born under the light of the Dawn.
Utilizing my elemental earth magic, I made the collapsed rocks and solid stone walls move fluidly before us, opening a safe passage toward a sealed tomb that had remained untouched for more than ten thousand years. The primitive runes carved into the heavy stone door indicated that the sepulcher belonged to the beginning of the Age of Heroes—the exact period when the Starks consolidated their military conquest over the entirety of the North.
I entered the dusty chamber and came upon a monumental stone statue, flanked by the sculpture of a direwolf whose dimensions rivaled those of Inverno. The name of that Stark king had been completely lost in the pages of history due to the relentless wear of time, but my mind knew perfectly well who it was. To the surprise of absolutely no one, his name was Brandon. The Starks and the Targaryens shared this same chronic problem of nominal repetition; we were obsessed with Brandons, while they could not see an heir born without naming him Aegon.
I approached the statue and, after uttering a brief mental prayer in respect to the Old Gods of the North, lowered my body to collect the weapon resting at the feet of the stone monarch. As I closed my fingers around the hilt, I felt the mystical pulse that inhabited the interior of the mace. The energy was considerably weak and dormant after millennia of isolation, but that posed not the slightest problem; I would update it and rewrite its runic matrixes later in my solar.
The timing of that discovery had been perfectly surgical, for the great war council meeting was about to begin in the Riverlands through my mental projection. Keeping my eyes fixed on the darkness, I invoked my new black armor. I had inserted into the dark iron plates the very same runic enchantment I used to manifest my Crown of Ice, allowing the armor to materialize directly over my body out of nothingness.
I made sure to configure the spell so that the armor equipped piece by piece, plate by plate, emanating a heavy, metallic sound with each click in the darkness of the crypts. I did that for the sole and deliberate purpose of farming aura, consolidating a majestic presence before sending my consciousness on an astral journey to the Riverlands camp. Concentrating my mystical power, I projected my mind through the freezing mist, taking control of that strategic meeting with the lords of the West, the North, and the river that detailed the final siege against King's Landing.
Following the conclusion of the astral meeting and the definitive return of my consciousness to my physical body in the depths of Winterfell, I turned my back on the tomb of the ancient king and began the way back through the dark crypts. However, as soon as I crossed one of the peripheral corridors of the level of the Kings of Winter, I stopped my steps abruptly.
*Uhmmm... something is strange here...* I reflected, narrowing my eyes toward an apparently ordinary wall of solid rock.
I looked around with attention, but my physical senses detected not the slightest anomaly in the environment. I decided to expand my own signature of elemental magic through the corridor, but the result remained the same: there was no fluctuation of energy, heat, or mystical presence in the structure.
Yet, it was precisely that absolute "nothingness" that triggered the warning sign in my mind. The absence of any magical response in that specific section of the wall was too profound, as if that place simply did not exist within the fabric of the castle's reality.
I approached the rock and ran my fingertips along the dusty surface. Upon applying a light pressure imbued with my blood, a series of primitive and unknown runes instantly lit up on the stone. Even exhibiting rudimentary traits of the First Age, the geometric complexity of that runic matrix was something I had only witnessed in my own personal creations of magical engineering. I was genuinely impressed. Who in my house's past had possessed such an absurdly advanced technical proficiency?
As soon as the entirety of my blood was absorbed by the stone, the runes glowed with a silvery intensity and the rock wall moved silently to the side, revealing the entrance of a secret chamber. Upon entering the hidden room, the identity of the creator of that place became obvious to me: **Brandon the Builder**. The greatest and most legendary ancestor of House Stark.
Observing the vastness of runic designs and architectural schemes carved with surgical precision on the walls of that millenary workshop, I understood immediately that, had Brandon lived in my current era, I would have finally found someone of my own intellectual and mystical level to hold a decent conversation about magical engineering. Merely observing the arrangement of the primitive runes on the walls of that secret room for a few brief seconds was already enough to grant me a massive wave of inspiration, revealing new paths to improve my own personal matrixes.
In the center of the chamber rose a stone statue of the Builder that differed drastically from all the other representations in the castle. He was not sculpted holding the traditional iron swords crossed over his lap; it was a sculpture of normal proportions, depicting the ancestor holding a mason's chisel in one hand and a war hammer in the other.
I walked with firm steps toward the statue with the objective of touching the ancestral rock, but my movement was interrupted when my right foot violently collided against a heavy metallic object resting hidden under the dust of the floor.
"Son of a bitch! Fuck!" I cursed loudly in the darkness, letting out a roar of pure pain as I grabbed my struck big toe and hopped on one leg through the chamber.
I swept away the ancient dust with a breath of air magic and fixed my eye on the object that had caused the impact. Surprise replaced the pain instantly. What I had kicked on the floor was the Builder's own weapon: a war hammer.
The appearance of that weapon was a fascinating contradiction between the rustic and the refined. The hammerhead seemed carved from a dark, massive volcanic rock, faceted like raw basalt or dragonglass mixed with meteorite. It presented a purely functional design for impact: one side was flat and wide, designed to crush surfaces, while the opposite end sported a pointed, sharp beak made to pierce armor.
However, the rusticity of the dark rock ended at its external silhouette. The center of the hammerhead was adorned by a luxurious and exquisite golden plate encrusted in a polished steel frame, where a series of ancient runes gleamed with a burning orange and crimson hue. The long handle of the weapon was entirely wrapped in strips of braided brown leather, segmented every few centimeters by polished golden metallic rings filled with runic inscriptions. The base of the handle ended in a sharp point faceted from the same volcanic material as the head.
Upon raising the war hammer from the ground, my runic matrixes absorbed the mystical signature of the object, and I instantly understood the purpose behind its creation. Brandon the Builder had forged that tool specifically to combat the Children of the Forest and creatures of pure elemental magic. The hammer operated as a **weapon of absolute negation and anti-magic**.
It was for this exact reason that the weapon was capable of repelling my mystical senses and causing real physical pain to my toe; it simply ignored and broke any barrier or passive magical protection of the wielder. It was fascinating to note how even my Supreme Greensight had been unable to detect the existence of the object in the chamber before my senses noticed the physical void in the wall. I had found the only weapon in all the mortal world that held the real potential to bypass my defenses—an instrument of annihilation created by my first ancestor.
Looking at the two new weapons that now rested in my hands—the Runic Hammer of Brandon in one, and the segmented black steel mace, whose appearance exhibited a matte sphere adorned with six sharp claw-like blades and slits pulsing with emerald energy, in the other—I faced a brief doubt about which to adopt. However, the dilemma lasted only a few seconds. I smiled slyly, realizing that I could simply use both weapons simultaneously in combat; after all, both had been designed to be wielded with just one hand. And, well... if you possess the supernatural physical strength of an emperor, absolutely any weapon in the world becomes a one-handed weapon.
I abandoned the deep crypts carrying the two ancestral relics and found Ros awaiting my exit exactly at the threshold of the main entrance to the underground cemetery. The young redhead displayed a clear expression of pure discomfort, hugging her own arms against the cold.
"By the gods, Arawyn... you took an eternity down there," Ros commented, letting out a relieved sigh upon seeing me. "I hate this place. The shadows of these statues seem to carry the ghosts of all the Starks who have ever died."
I found that scene to be a wonderful irony. The second greatest living green seer of modern times in the mortal world—since young Bran Stark had not yet accumulated enough power to surpass her knowledge—maintained a purely childish fear of hauntings and stone ghosts.
Ros shifted her gaze to my waist and frowned, her expression shifting to genuine perplexity upon noticing the two weapons fastened to my leather belt.
"How strange... through my projections of the Greensight, I was only able to visualize you retrieving a single weapon from the depths, the black mace of the kings..." she commented, reaching out a curious hand to touch the basalt surface of the Builder's hammer. "What exactly is this other weapon you carry?"
In the millisecond the tip of Ros's index finger made the slightest contact with the dark rock of the hammer, the young woman withdrew her hand with impressive speed, letting out a sharp yelp of pain as if she had touched an incandescent iron plate. She stared at her own reddened finger with wide eyes of pure shock.
"What in the name of the gods is that, Arawyn?! That rock... it simply sucked and repelled my vital energy! Is it an anti-magic weapon or what?!"
I let out a loud and clean laugh at her reaction, finding it fascinating how that redhead could behave in such a silly and frightened manner in ordinary moments, yet still demonstrate a technical acumen so absurdly surgical for matters related to the dynamics of magic.
"Yes, my dear Ros... Brandon the Builder was the holder of a truly terrible and relentless anti-magic weapon in the past," I replied, adjusting the handle of the hammer in my belt. "And to the absolute dread and total despair of my enemies in the South, that legacy now belongs exclusively to me."
We returned to the chambers of my private solar. I settled comfortably into my immense oak chair, disposing Brandon's Runic Hammer and the mace whose true name was the Fist of Winter upon the surface of the mahogany table to analyze their structures in detail, planning which runes and mystical improvements I would insert into their metallic cores during the night.
To help me clear my thoughts and optimize my intellectual focus—though I highly doubted that specific dynamic would help my brain concentrate on runic engineering—Ros positioned herself on her knees between my legs. The young redhead undid the drawstring of my tunic with agility and swallowed my erect member with an absurd willingness and a burning voluptuousness, working her mouth and tongue with a fervent dedication that made my eyes roll in pure pleasure.
While sustaining the smooth rhythm of her wet lips and staring at the reflections of the weapons upon the table, I caught myself pondering what grand name I should bestow upon Brandon's war hammer to do justice to its power of negation. I let my thoughts flow freely until the pinnacle of pleasure hit me; I held Ros firmly by the cheeks and released my warm seeds directly into the back of my beautiful assistant's throat, who swallowed every drop of the liquid with a muffled groan of satisfaction.
Ros raised her body with a sly smile, climbing onto the mahogany table and pushing aside the logistical parchments with her thighs. She slowly opened her nether lips in my direction, displaying her damp intimacy and calling me to the beginning of a new round of lust upon the wood.
Adjusting my posture before pulling her by the legs, I let out a genuine laugh filled with imperial derision as I reflected on my current situation. While I found myself in the absolute comfort of Winterfell, receiving an enthusiastic blowjob from a beautiful redhead and preparing to fuck one of the most desired women on the continent over the map table, my empresses managed the tedious bureaucracy of the court on the thrones with an iron hand, and my cousin Robb and Ser Arthur marched through the mud of the Riverlands fighting bloody battles.
Creating a whole mystical Empire and having the brilliant wisdom to delegate the entirety of the stressful work, military marches, and administrative responsibilities to others had been, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, the best idea of my mortal existence. It was exactly what the supreme saying of my new dynasty stated: fuck while they work. And the South would soon discover the price of defying the master of the game.