"Master?"
"Do not call me 'Master'!" Roman groaned, rubbing his temples. "Call me 'My Lord,' or I will throw you out of the keep!"
"Eep!"
Spurred by Fili's startled squeak, Roman reluctantly dragged himself out of his massive featherbed.
He had been running around the Riverlands relentlessly for the past month, and even his draconic stamina was finally starting to flag. Recognizing the exhaustion in his own men, Roman had officially ordered the Harrenhal Vanguard to stand down and take rotational shore leave.
When Roman finally stumbled over to his washbasin, he found that Fili had already meticulously prepared everything: warm water, a fresh towel, and his shaving razor laid out perfectly.
This hyper-attentive treatment made Roman feel slightly uncomfortable. He had always managed his own personal grooming. But now, Fili had forcefully appointed herself as his personal squire and servant.
Weeks prior, Lady Shella had attempted to assign Roman a few traditional maids, but when Roman learned that Pina—a notoriously gossipy servant—was among them, he had politely declined the offer.
Ultimately, Roman hadn't possessed a dedicated personal attendant until Fili had literally dropped out of the sky.
"Were you trained as a highborn attendant?" Roman asked, splashing his face with warm water.
"Yes, my lord Roman," she replied brightly. "I am an orphan. The household that adopted me put me to work as a scullery maid from a very young age, so naturally, I know how to manage these tasks."
Roman frowned, reaching for his towel. "Then why did you flee to King's Landing? Was it solely because of your 'dreams'?"
Fili nodded, her bright demeanor dimming slightly as she looked down at the stone floor.
"One night, I had a terrifying nightmare. I saw the estate I lived on being attacked by brutal bandits. I saw everyone I knew slaughtered. I was so terrified by the vision that I ran away into the woods the very next morning. A few days later... the bandits actually came, just as the dream foretold."
"After that, the dreams guided me toward the capital, telling me to find you. I even found hidden stashes of food along the Kingsroad simply by following the visions. But the strange thing is, the closer I got to you, the less frequent the dreams became. And now that I am here... the nightmares have stopped entirely. I truly believe the Seven Gods guided me to your protection!"
Roman looked at the strange girl in silence, mentally reviewing the canonical roster of POV characters and major players in A Song of Ice and Fire.
There is absolutely no mention of a prophetic girl named Fili in the lore. What is going on here? Is she a magical anomaly like me?
When Roman observed the world through his Pale Flame vision, the vast majority of nobles and smallfolk were entirely identical; they possessed weak, flickering sparks of mundane life force.
Currently, only the Baratheon bloodline possessed a noticeable physical uniqueness, likely due to the lingering traces of ancient Targaryen/divine blood in their veins. But Fili's spiritual fire was blindingly massive.
Shaking his head, Roman decided to ignore the complex, metaphysical mysteries for now and simply focus on utilizing his new recruits efficiently.
"Come along, Fili. We have work to do."
As Roman strode out of the room, he watched out of the corner of his eye as Fili—who stood a modest five-foot-seven and couldn't weigh more than a hundred pounds—casually reached over and hoisted his impossibly heavy steel warhammer onto her shoulder, trotting happily after him.
This girl is definitely not a normal human, Roman thought, amused.
Their first stop was the inner foundries. The Whent armory had recently absorbed roughly two hundred highly skilled, experienced blacksmiths from the King's Landing recruitment drive.
Roman found old Ben Blackthumb wiping soot from his brow and immediately asked for a production quota update.
"Ben, with this expanded workforce, how many full sets of standardized lamellar armor can we realistically produce a month?"
"My lord," the old smith rasped, leaning on his anvil. "The first batch of twenty sets was completed so quickly because we cannibalized a massive stockpile of old, pre-cut armor plates. But that stockpile is gone now. We have to forge, cut, and punch every single steel plate from scratch, which takes time. However, with these new hands... I believe we can fully equip a five-hundred-man vanguard by the next autumn harvest."
Roman hadn't held out much hope for rapid mass-production, so hearing that Ben could outfit a terrifyingly massive force of 500 heavy infantry in a few months instantly delighted him.
"Brilliant work, Ben! Maintain that pace, but do not sacrifice quality for speed. If you require more coal, iron, or silver to pay the men, you only need to ask."
Hearing this, Ben gave Roman a knowing look that clearly translated to: "I was hoping you would say that." The old smith immediately snatched a roll of blueprints from a nearby table.
"Lord Roman, working with these small lamellar plates has given me a few ideas. I believe we can utilize the natural flexibility of the overlapping steel to create fully integrated, one-piece arm guards, eliminating the need for the soldiers to strap on separate, cumbersome bracers."
Ben pointed a blackened finger at Roman's original sketch. "Furthermore, the armor you drafted is essentially a straight steel cylinder. All the crushing weight hangs directly on the soldier's shoulders. I suggest we aggressively taper the steel plates inward at the waist and hips. By pairing the armor with a heavy leather war-belt, the soldier's hips will naturally carry the bulk of the weight, drastically reducing fatigue on the march."
"Finally," Ben concluded, tapping the chest of the diagram, "we can incorporate solid, reinforced steel roundels over the heart and lungs, and integrate specialized mail gussets to protect the vulnerable armpits during high-angle combat."
Roman listened to the rapid-fire, highly technical improvements and was profoundly impressed.
"Ben, you master smiths are truly miraculous! You found half a dozen vital, life-saving improvements just by glancing at my rudimentary sketch!"
"Implement every single one of your changes," Roman ordered with a grin. "If you run into any logistical bottlenecks, come directly to Lady Shella or me."
Ben smiled with deep satisfaction, his wrinkled, soot-stained face beaming with pride as he rubbed his calloused hands together excitedly.
After finalizing the military contracts, Roman took Fili out to the sprawling demolition sites.
The new recruits who lacked specialized artisanal skills had been organized into massive labor crews. The vast majority of them were currently working to dismantle the cursed rubble of the outer Harrenhal towers.
The massive, purified stone blocks were hoisted onto reinforced wagons and transported down the newly paved roads to various strategic choke points across the Whent territory.
Working closely with seasoned architects, Roman had carefully mapped out the locations for a new network of localized fortresses.
Geographically, the Riverlands were agonizingly flat and utterly lacked natural defensive barriers like the mountains of the Vale or the harsh swamps of the Neck. The only way to truly protect the local farmers from roaming sellswords and enemy raiders was to build robust, localized fortifications.
Roman had decided to construct specialized, rapidly deployable "star forts" at major traffic hubs and river crossings.
The engineering process was incredibly efficient. First, the crews built a massive, multi-tiered wooden frame. They then filled the interior of the frame with heavily compacted earth and rubble, and finally reinforced the outer sloping walls with the indestructible black stone salvaged from Harrenhal.
Compared to the traditional, agonizingly expensive, vertically towering stone castles of Westeros, Roman's earth-and-stone star forts offered comparable defensive capabilities against sieges, but cost a mere fraction of the silver and took only months to build instead of decades.
"It is a profound pity I do not possess the legendary earth-magic of Bran the Builder," Roman muttered to himself as he reviewed a blueprint. "Otherwise, I could erect these fortresses overnight and completely lock down the Riverlands."
While Roman chatted excitedly with the engineering foremen, Fili stood quietly behind him, her bright blue eyes entirely fixated on the thick, black draconic tail swaying lazily beneath Roman's cloak.
The girl had heard the widespread rumors that the Lord of Harrenhal possessed a demon's tail, but the pragmatic smallfolk largely assumed it was just an eccentric, physical ornament the lord wore to look intimidating.
But with her supernatural senses, Fili could clearly feel the raw, pulsing draconic magic radiating from the appendage. The sheer novelty of it made her heart flutter with intense, cat-like curiosity. She desperately wanted to reach out and touch the terrifying scales.
"What are you standing around daydreaming for, Fili?" Roman called out, already walking toward the horses. "We need to go inspect the northern farmlands."
"Oh! Right! Coming, my lord!"
Snapping out of her reverie, Fili scrambled onto her pony and followed Roman out into the countryside.
When they crested the northern ridge, Fili gasped. The landscape below was a sprawling, endless ocean of vibrant green.
The newly planted autumn wheat had just broken through the soil, covering the earth in a perfectly neat, impossibly dense carpet of brilliant green shoots.
Inspired by the heavy, durable farming equipment utilized in the freezing North, the Whent blacksmiths had successfully designed a massive, wheeled heavy-plow fitted with three separate iron plowshares.
By hitching the heavy plow to a team of two draft horses or oxen, a single farmer could violently tear through thick, root-choked soil at a terrifyingly rapid pace, vastly increasing the total acreage a family could cultivate before winter.
Furthermore, thanks to the apocalyptic heat generated by the Pale Flame and the magical coke, the blacksmiths were able to cast highly precise metal molds, allowing them to rapidly mass-produce the iron plowshares by the thousands rather than hammering each one by hand.
The massive blast furnaces and industrial workshops at Harrenhal were operating day and night, churning out an endless river of standardized iron tools.
Yet, despite this staggering, industrialized output, the demand for Whent ironware across the Riverlands was still insatiable. The foundries were already severely backlogged with merchant orders stretching well into the following year.
Realizing the sheer, untapped economic value of his steel, Roman had immediately ordered the construction of a third, vastly larger blast furnace.
Additionally, Roman used a massive chunk of his treasury to establish a formal "Academy of Crafts" located directly within the walls of Harrenhal, offering high wages to any master artisan willing to teach apprentices.
The reasoning behind the academy was simple: Harrenhal was still desperately short on educated manpower.
Agriculture, textiles, deep-vein mining, advanced metallurgy—all these expanding industries required highly trained specialists. Roman possessed the modern theoretical knowledge, but without a localized army of skilled Westerosi tradesmen to execute the blueprints, his theories were utterly useless.
Roman could only provide the spark; he was not omnipotent.
Looking down at the thousands of busy farmers working the fields, and smelling the rich, clean scent of freshly turned earth riding on the autumn breeze, Roman felt the deep, lingering tension in his chest finally begin to dissipate.
None of this grand design can be accomplished overnight, Roman reminded himself, taking a deep breath. Instead of agonizing over the distant future, I must focus on solving the immediate logistical problems directly in front of me.
"Come, Fili," Roman smiled, turning his horse back toward the castle. "It is time to bring the lords of the Riverlands out of the dark ages."
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