By Jeanyx's fourth year on the island, peace had become his default state. Wintertown—the name he only recently learned, to his embarrassment—had grown into a small, thriving city under his watch. The people adored him, even if he preferred quiet anonymity. His days were filled with invention, his nights with research, and when the mood struck him, long games of chess with Brandon or walks by the frost-lit lake where Nyx's reflection shimmered like a ghost beneath the ice.
But peace, Jeanyx had learned long ago, never lasted forever.
It was early in the new year when a panting messenger burst into William's hall, face pale and breath frosting in the cold. The news was short and grim—ships had washed ashore on the northern coast. At first, no one thought much of it. Shipwrecks weren't rare in the treacherous waters surrounding the island. But when the messenger stammered that the ships were foreign, made from wood none of their carpenters recognized, Jeanyx's expression hardened.
Without another word, he rose, grabbed his Valyrian steel blade, and vanished into the forest.
The northern woods were a blur of white and shadow as he moved—his form darting through the trees with fluid grace, each leap carrying him effortlessly from branch to branch. He called it tree hopping, a technique he'd copied straight from an old anime back in his first life. "If it works, it works," he'd muttered when he first tried it. Now, it was second nature. The cold wind cut across his face, sharp and clean, but his focus never wavered.
It took less than an hour for him to reach the coast.
The beach stretched out before him in a sprawl of snow and ruin. Unlike the warm sands where he'd first awakened years ago, this northern shore was a graveyard of frost and death. Broken masts jutted from the waves like spears. Four ships—massive, three-masted galleons with curved hulls—lay splintered across the ice. The wood was riddled with holes, torn by rocks or cannon fire, and bodies floated lifelessly in the shallows, their pale limbs swaying with the tide.
From his perch in the trees, Jeanyx crouched low, observing in silence. His violet eyes scanned the wreckage, his mind cataloging every detail—the scattered crates, the shouts, the smell of salt and iron. Then he saw them: a group of survivors huddled near the fire they'd built from broken planks.
At first, they looked like any desperate sailors clinging to life—but then he spotted the flag.
Tattered, salt-stained, but unmistakable. A crimson harpy on a black field.
Astapor.
Jeanyx's brow furrowed. Slavers.
His suspicion was confirmed moments later when he saw three men in luxury robes—the kind only noble masters wore in the slave cities—standing over five kneeling figures, their backs raw and bleeding from the lash. The whip cracked again, echoing through the cold air.
For a long moment, Jeanyx simply watched. His expression didn't change. He didn't shout or rush to intervene. He simply tilted his head slightly, analyzing the scene like a mathematician examining a problem.
It wasn't that he was opposed to slavery—this island wasn't, either. Their gods didn't condemn it. But there was an unspoken rule carved into their way of life: slaves could only be taken through conquest, never bought, never stolen. These men, with their whips and silk robes, had no place here.
And beyond that, Jeanyx had other reasons to act.
For months now, he'd been studying blood alchemy, a forbidden branch of the craft that required human essence to forge the strongest enchantments. He'd experimented on animals—wolves, boars, even a bear—but the results had been limited. Animal blood could only take him so far. He needed something stronger. Something conscious.
And now, fate had conveniently delivered it to his doorstep.
Jeanyx's fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword. The weapon shimmered faintly in the pale light, its black steel veined with faint crimson lines that pulsed like living veins. He'd never used it in earnest—not since reforging it through alchemy. The urge to test it burned in his chest like a heartbeat.
He exhaled once, slow and even.
"Well," he muttered to himself, voice calm and almost bored, "looks like I finally found volunteers."
Then he dropped.
Snow exploded beneath his boots as he landed silently on the shore, cloak trailing behind him. The slave masters turned instantly, startled by the sudden figure emerging from the treeline—a tall, silver-haired man with eyes that glowed faintly violet in the dim light, his sword half-drawn and steaming faintly in the cold.
They shouted something in Valyrian, but Jeanyx didn't bother translating. Words wouldn't matter.
He drew his sword with a whispering hiss. The blade caught the light of the dying fire and shimmered darkly, a reflection of something deeper—older. The air around him seemed to still, the snow pausing mid-fall.
Hundreds of men stood before him. Armed, frightened, desperate.
Jeanyx tilted his head slightly, his expression unreadable.
"In my opinion," he said quietly, his voice cutting through the wind, "this isn't a fair fight."
And then he moved.
Snow hissed as it met the surf, turning to steam in thin, ghostly veils. The four broken galleons creaked like dying whales, their ribs jutting from the shallows. Men clustered along the tideline—some in Astapori silks turned to rags by salt, others in leather and mismatched mail. A dozen whips hung from a dozen hands. Two hundred more clutched spears, cutlasses, axes ripped from smashed crates.
Jeanyx stepped out of the trees like the night had pushed him forward. No cloak. No helmet. Just frost in his hair and a golden blade in his hand, bright as a sunrise hammered into metal.
"Pick a spokesman," he said mildly, voice carrying over wind and water. "Or don't. I'm not fussy."
A robed Freedman—no, master, the kind that wore perfume to hide the rot in his soul—strutted forward with a bent scimitar. "You'll kneel," he called in rasping Valyrian. "You'll return our property and beg. If you shine my boots, perhaps I'll—"
Jeanyx tilted his head. "Boots don't shine when they're full of seawater." He raised the sword as if testing the balance. "And I don't kneel."
Laughter rippled down the beach. Fear came with it, thin and metallic.
"Take him," someone barked.
They rushed.
The first line came like a wave in a storm, all noise and edges. Jeanyx moved one step left and the world slowed to fit him. A spear jabbed for his ribs—he slid forward, elbow grazing the shaft, and cut once, short and mean. The spearhead fell; the man followed it, hand half there and half gone. Jeanyx spun on the ball of his foot, the golden blade drawing a crescent across the air. A throat opened. Steam rose.
"Too close on the right," he murmured, more to the tide than to them. "Thank you."
A mace whistled for his skull. He ducked without looking, the wind of it combing his hair, then stepped into the man's guard and stamped his instep flat. One upward cut turned the mace-hand dumb; a backhand stroke ended the argument. He eased the body aside with his hip—courteous, almost—and let three more pour past, falling over their own momentum.
"Your line is crooked," he told them, strolling as he killed. "Did no one drill you? Gods, Astapor used to have standards."
They swarmed. Jeanyx waded.
The blade became a metronome, a clean, insultingly simple rhythm that chopped the mob into measures. A cut to the wrist, pivot. A low sweep that took two hamstrings at once—snow threw up a plume as they crumpled—followed by a high draw cut that parted a helm like wet bark. He fought as if the sand itself gave him cues, as if the slope of every dune was marked on the inside of his eyes.
"You," he said to a man with a painted shield, "move your feet." The man obliged by charging. Jeanyx's sword flicked, shaving a grip-knot; the shield spun free and the man stared at his suddenly naked forearm as if it had betrayed him. "Not like that," Jeanyx sighed, and laid him down.
The second rank hesitated. Jeanyx smiled, eyes bright and amused. "We can slow it down, if you'd like. I'm very patient."
They screamed and came on.
He met them with a dancer's cruelty. A thrust slipped under a raised armpit; a riposte stitched a collarbone to the air and unstitched it again. He used their weapons as stepping stones—one foot on a spear haft to vault, blade ringing as it tapped three helmets in passing; a landing that bowed the snow and threw light off the sword like flung coins. He cut without flourish but moved with it, a clean geometry of hips and shoulders. Where his blade went, men folded. Where his heel set, someone fell.
"Back left is clever," he said conversationally, shearing a pikehead and the piker's courage with it. "Flankers always look clever until they trip over the bodies."
They did, in fact, trip. He let them, then harvested them as they flailed, quick and merciful by his standard—though mercy here looked a lot like a golden line that began and ended in red.
A captain with braided beard and a notched cutlass forced his way through the press, roaring something about sons and gold. Jeanyx met him with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
"Finally," he said. "Someone who looks like he's swung that thing before."
They touched steel once. The cutlass juddered; the captain's arm went numb elbow to wrist. He tried again, teeth bared. Jeanyx slid the cutlass off his spine like rain off a roof and let the captain feel the kiss of a blade he'd never be quick enough to answer. The man blinked, looked down at the red blooming from his shirt, then up at Jeanyx as if the sky had lied to him.
"Good balance on that guard," Jeanyx told him softly as the captain sank to his knees. "Wrong century for it."
He stepped through the falling man.
Numbers tried to matter. They couldn't. The mob broke around him into strands he plucked and snapped. When they pressed him, he narrowed; when they backed, he lengthened, the reach of his blade turning cautious men reckless and reckless men into ingredients for the tide. He used the beach like a second weapon—retreating two steps to put a loose board under a charging man's heel, advancing one to push a cluster into a wave so cold it cut their breath in half.
"Left foot," he reminded one, and took it at the ankle. "Told you."
It became obvious, quickly and horribly, that he was not surviving them; he was choreographing them. He baited a spear, slid along its shaft as if it were a rail, and opened the wielder's neck with a cut so slight it looked like a lover's secret. He let a hammer glance off his shoulder just long enough to convince the next three that weight might help, then turned their momentum into a knot of limbs that made a neat bundle for the sea to fetch.
A whip cracked near his ear. He turned and cut the lash in midair, then the handle, then the wrist beyond it, three notes in a single word.
"Shh."
The robed masters were backing away now, satin dragging through slush. He left them for later. He preferred them full of hope when he spoke to them.
A pocket of men formed around a shield-boss painted with a harpy. They moved better—trained sailors, perhaps, or mercenaries lucky enough to have an officer with a spine. Jeanyx's smile deepened. He walked into them as if into a warm room.
"Now," he said gently, "don't embarrass yourselves."
They tried not to. Shields rose. Spears angled. A short man with scarred lips barked cadence and they advanced in a stepped line that would have pinched another man flat.
Jeanyx set the golden blade across his forearm and walked obliquely, not retreating so much as rewriting the angle. The first spear snapped when he drove it down with his free hand and used the shaft as a lever, twisting the point into the sand and the wielder into his own comrade. He slid under a second point and lifted with the flat of his sword; the spear rose like a mast being stepped, and Jeanyx stepped with it, kicking the base in, collapsing the formation from its own knee.
"Better," he conceded, and cut three throats without breaking his sentence.
The scar-lipped sergeant lunged, short blade aimed for Jeanyx's heart. Jeanyx caught it on the underside of his guard, rolled his wrist, and let the man feel what a bind is when one of you knows what it means. Their hilts kissed. Jeanyx's elbow touched the man's cheek. "Shhh," he said again, almost kind, and sent the point home under the breastbone, quick as guilt.
By the time he withdrew, the sergeant was already falling. Jeanyx wiped the sword across the man's cloak—habit, courtesy—then turned to the next problem.
The next problem was numbers again. Three came with axes high; he stepped inside the first and gave the axe a new owner—its previous one now armless—then used the recovered handle as a javelin, knocking a fourth flat. The third got close enough to smell Jeanyx's breath: wintergreen and iron. He died with the certainty that he'd been close to something sacred.
"Two hundred," Jeanyx mused aloud, as if counting gulls. "Give or take. I don't like round numbers."
They faltered. Men looked at one another and saw corpses wearing their faces. The shore made a low, private sound as waves took the luckless and the legless. Steam drifted across the sand in slow veils.
Astapori silk clung to a master's belly as he staggered backwards. "Monster," he whispered.
Jeanyx tilted his head, genuinely considering. "A monster would make you interesting."
He went to work on the pockets that remained with a cleaner mood, like sweeping a room he knew he'd already made his. He cut in straight lines and gentle arcs, repeating nothing he didn't have to. A man tried to flee toward the wreckage; Jeanyx's blade traced his calf as precisely as a seamstress. Another feinted high and reached for a hidden dagger; Jeanyx let him find it, then pinned his wrist to a mast-stump and took the rest of him apart with three economical motions.
"Stop hiding knives under courage," he advised. "It confuses them both."
The last cluster tried to make a circle around him. Circles are prayer wheels for men who've run out of prayers. Jeanyx stepped into it, not shrinking but widening, forcing their points to disarrange. He used one man's shoulder as a hinge and pivoted behind them, a golden line cutting segments off of fear until fear itself had no circumference. When it ended, he stood alone, snow breathing around his ankles, the sword steaming as if it had its own winter.
Silence pressed its palm across the beach.
Only the robed men remained upright now, backs to the bones of a shattered hull. A dozen living. Maybe fewer. Their faces were the wrong color for the season.
Jeanyx flicked the blade. Blood shook off in a fine arc, beading in the air like garnets before pattering the snow.
"You have three choices," he said, strolling as if down a new street in Wintertown. "Throw yourselves on that wreckage and save me a walk, beg and be useful, or keep talking and be educational."
One swallowed. The tallest tried for dignity and landed somewhere near petulance. "We are merchants of Astapor. Our city—"
"Is full of men who call cruelty an economy," Jeanyx finished, smiling without warmth. "You don't interest me because you're evil. You interest me because you're sloppy."
He stopped an arm's length away. Up close, the golden blade wasn't really gold—it was Valyrian steel kissed by some alloy that caught light like a coin under deep water, rippling faint patterns along the fuller. The hilt fit Jeanyx's hand as if his bones had been poured around it.
"We wrecked in a storm," another said too quickly. "We meant no harm. Those men we whipped—we were… restoring order."
Jeanyx looked past him to the five kneeling figures still huddled where he'd first seen them. He lifted the sword and indicated them with its tip, as if using a pen to underline a point.
"Stand," he told the kneelers, without raising his voice.
They didn't understand his words, but they understood the intent. They stood. One was missing two fingers. One had the thousand-yard glassiness of a man whose mind had learned to leave his body for hours at a time. One was a woman in a man's tunic, hair hacked short, eyes like nails.
"Walk to the trees," Jeanyx said. When they hesitated, he added, "Now."
They went. Jeanyx waited until their footprints were clean in the snow. Then he turned back to the robed men, whose courage was doing arithmetic and coming up poor.
"You should have died at sea," he told them, almost kindly. "It's warmer there."
They raised their weapons because men do. Jeanyx didn't sigh, but the thought crossed his face.
What followed was not a fight. It was punctuation.
The first man tried to speak and the golden blade placed a period at the base of his throat. The second lifted his hands and found a comma where his wrist had been, a brief pause before the end of his sentence. The third turned to run and was granted an em dash from hip to shoulder that turned his thought into something implied and unfinished.
"See?" Jeanyx murmured, stepping between the last two and taking them both in a stroke that would have been called ostentation if it weren't so terminal. "Brevity."
When it ended, the beach exhaled. Gulls circled, wary. The wrecked ships groaned, remembering storms.
Jeanyx stood very still, the sword point kissing the snow. Around him lay two hundred and some number more, depending on how you counted halves. He rolled his shoulder once, a small correction in a body that had kept perfect time.
Behind him, the five who had fled to the trees were watching from the treeline, eyes bright with animal silence. Jeanyx didn't turn, but his voice reached them as if spoken inside their chests.
"You'll work," he said, as if noting it to himself. "You'll eat. You'll sleep under roofs that don't leak. You'll stop being prey. Start walking."
He lifted the golden blade and set it across his shoulder, a casual rest that made the weapon look like a tool, which it was. As he passed the nearest corpse, he nudged it into a better alignment for the tide to claim.
"Your owners are dead," he added, not unkindly. "Try being people again."
He started back toward the trees, steps quiet in the snowfall. A single survivor—half-hidden under a splintered spar, one eye swollen shut—gathered what little courage lived in him.
"Who are you?" the man croaked.
Jeanyx paused without turning.
"A terrible chess partner," he said. "And a worse audience."
He walked into the forest, the snowfall closing around him like a curtain, the last thing visible the faint glimmer of a blade that had cut two hundred men into silence and somehow done it without raising its voice.
(timeskip)
It didn't take Jeanyx long to regret letting the freed slaves go. The realization came to him late one night while he hunched over a massive table covered in blueprints and sketches. For nearly a year, he'd been planning a castle — not a manor, not a hall, but a fortress carved into the mountain itself, strong enough to outlast empires.
He leaned back in his chair, eyes scanning the parchment filled with measurements and half-finished runic markings, and muttered under his breath, "I need workers… a lot of workers."
Then it hit him.
He'd let over three thousand slaves go free only days earlier.
Jeanyx pinched the bridge of his nose, half annoyed with himself, half amused. "I swear, sometimes I'm my own worst enemy."
By morning, he tracked them down. They hadn't gone far — a camp not even a day's walk from Wintertown. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and desperation. The people were gaunt, exhausted, and still too afraid to approach him. When Jeanyx asked how many of them there were, the leader, a hollow-eyed man who looked half-dead from starvation, spoke up.
"Three thousand… five hundred and six," he rasped.
Jeanyx blinked. "Three thousand?" He looked past the man at the broken survivors sitting in clusters across the snow. "How in the hell did all of you fit on four ships?"
"They made us stand," the man said. "Packed us together. If someone fell, they… didn't get up again."
Jeanyx stared for a long time. The memory of the beach — the blood, the shattered hulls, the stench of iron and salt — played behind his eyes. The cruelty didn't shock him. Cruelty was predictable. What caught his attention was the sheer waste of human potential.
And suddenly, he had an idea.
He stood at the center of the camp, cloak billowing slightly in the cold wind. Thousands of eyes turned to him. "You've got two options," he said, voice calm, almost too casual. "You can sit here and freeze to death… or you can do something that actually matters."
The crowd murmured, uncertain. Jeanyx raised one hand, focusing his mind. The Force pulsed through him — smooth, steady, alive. It was risky trying this on such a large group, but these people were already broken, their wills cracked beyond repair.
"Listen to me," he said softly, his tone layered with power. "You will follow me. You will obey me. You will build something great."
The ripple of his will swept through them like a cold wind. The slaves stilled all at once, their eyes unfocused, their breathing even. Jeanyx lowered his hand, half-expecting it to fail. But when thousands of heads bowed in perfect silence, he grinned.
"Well," he murmured, "that worked better than expected."
He led them back to Wintertown in a single line stretching through the forest, the sound of footsteps crunching on frozen snow echoing for miles. They carried with them the two surviving slave masters and twenty-one guards, bound and gagged. When they arrived, Jeanyx introduced them as spoils of combat.
No one questioned it.
What did draw attention, however, was Jeanyx's next announcement. Standing before the entire village — farmers, craftsmen, hunters, and laborers — he declared his intent to build a castle on the largest mountain overlooking Wintertown. He described it with precision: multiple halls, a grand forge, a vault beneath the peak, and walls that would last for centuries.
William, the chief, looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "Jeanyx, that's—"
Before he could finish, Jeanyx dropped a heavy iron chest on the table between them. The lid creaked open, revealing thousands of gleaming golden dragons and silver stags.
William stared. Then, wisely, he shut his mouth.
"I'm hiring everyone," Jeanyx said. "Men, women, anyone who can lift a hammer or carry stone. Farmers can stay with their crops. The rest — builders, miners, smiths, whatever they are — I want them."
William nodded slowly, still staring at the gold. "Understood."
Within the week, word had spread across the island. Notices were sent to every settlement: Jeanyx of Wintertown was paying in gold for builders, and paying well.
The first to arrive came from the west — a hardy folk from a place called Stonefall Hollow, a mountain village known for its forges and quarries. When Jeanyx saw them marching up the path, he nearly laughed.
They were shorter than the men of Wintertown, but built like stone walls — broad shoulders, thick arms, beards blackened with soot, and calloused hands that looked like they could crush iron by touch alone. They weren't magical, but they didn't need to be. They were born to build.
Behind them came their craftsmen — masons, carpenters, miners, and smiths. Some pushed wagons filled with tools Jeanyx had never seen before: gear-driven pulleys, iron sleds for moving stone, modular scaffolding made of interlocking beams that could be set up in minutes. These weren't wildmen; they were engineers generations ahead of their time.
And they hadn't come alone.
Trailing behind the dwarves were twenty giants, each easily twenty feet tall, wrapped in furs and carrying tree trunks as casually as walking sticks. Behind them came two thousand villagers from all corners of the island, drawn by the promise of gold and food.
Jeanyx stood on the mountain path watching the river of people stretch toward the horizon. He turned to William, eyebrows raised. "So, uh… how exactly are we paying all of them?"
William rubbed the back of his neck nervously. "I… might've made a deal with Chief Durvok of Stonefall Hollow."
Jeanyx narrowed his eyes. "What kind of deal?"
"Four crates of your medicine — the penicillin."
"That's reasonable."
William hesitated. "And, uh… one other thing."
Jeanyx sighed. "Of course there's another thing. What does he want?"
William coughed. "He asked if you could make something to help him… perform better in bed."
Jeanyx blinked. "…That's it?"
William nodded awkwardly.
Jeanyx snorted and crossed his arms. "I already made that potion last year."
William looked both confused and impressed. "You—wait, why would you even—"
Jeanyx didn't answer. He just turned his head slightly toward Brandon, who was sitting by the fire pretending not to eavesdrop. The old man froze, eyes shifting away.
William followed his gaze, realization dawning. "…Ah. Right. Say no more."
"Let's just call it a favor for your father's enthusiasm," Jeanyx said dryly.
Within two weeks, the mountain base transformed into a living city of scaffolds, tents, and pulleys. Jeanyx organized the entire workforce with military precision.
The giants handled lifting and heavy hauling, dragging massive stones from the quarries and placing them like children setting down blocks.
The dwarves took charge of structure — cutting and fitting each slab so precisely that not even a blade of grass could slide between them. Their craftsmanship was unmatched; every strike of their hammers rang like music.
The villagers and slaves became the laborers and runners, carrying mortar, wood, and supplies across the growing site.
Every dawn began the same way: the sound of thousands of hammers striking rhythm, echoing across the valley like a heartbeat. Smoke and frost mixed in the air as the fortress began to rise — a foundation of black stone at the base, merging seamlessly into the mountain.
Jeanyx designed it all. He could often be found in the middle of the chaos, shirt sleeves rolled up, sketching on planks or etching calculations into the dirt. He argued with dwarves about angles, debated with miners about reinforcement patterns, and personally adjusted the cranes the giants used to hoist the largest slabs.
By the first month, the outer wall stood twenty feet high. By the second, the first gatehouse took shape — carved from basalt and reinforced with steel from Stonefall Hollow's forges. The villagers began calling it Frosthold, though Jeanyx never officially named it.
At night, torches burned along the ridges, outlining the silhouette of a fortress that would one day dominate the northern horizon.
William often stood beside him on the ridge, watching in awe. "You could've built a home," he said once, half smiling. "Instead, you're building a legend."
Jeanyx smirked faintly, eyes reflecting the orange glow of the torches. "Legends last longer."
Below them, the mountain thundered with life — giants moving stones, dwarves shouting instructions, and villagers singing rhythmic work chants to keep pace. The sky burned pink with dawn, and for the first time, Jeanyx allowed himself a small, genuine smile.
Wintertown had grown. The island had changed.
But the fortress he was building — that was something else entirely.
That was destiny taking shape in stone.
(timeskip)
The Mourning Keep rose like a ribcage against the sky—half a skeleton of black stone pinned to the mountain, scaffolding clinging to its bones, cranes and pulley-gantries swaying in the wind. When the gusts funneled through the cluster of peaks, they sang—long, low, aching notes that rolled through the valley like grief. The sound had named the place before a single wall stood: the Mourning Keep.
From the half-built bastion's eastern parapet, Jeanyx stared down at the world he was trying to hold together and felt his stomach turn.
Ten thousand mouths. Ten thousand bodies, swinging hammers, hauling stone, cutting dovetails in timber, tightening iron pins, singing work-songs until smoke and breath braided together in the cold air. The giants moved like living derricks. The dwarven engineers argued over angles and leverage with Torrhen. The villagers trotted in lines with baskets of mortar; the slaves moved in pairs, silent, steady. It worked—barely. And only because he'd willed it into working.
It wouldn't keep working without food.
"Season Seven Drogon," he muttered, measuring Nyx with his eyes like a man trying not to look down a cliff. She sat at the far end of the platform, half in shadow, half in pale winter sun. The size comparison wasn't hyperbole anymore; she'd outgrown the pens along the icy lake months ago. Forty feet of sinuous muscle and midnight armor, wings like cathedral sails veined in violet, spines gleaming a dull amethyst where they ridged from skull to tail. When she breathed, frost fogged from her nostrils. When she shifted her weight, the stone underfoot complained.
I've put this off too long.
He'd told himself a dozen practical reasons. Weather. Currents. Her growth plates. The new saddle needing another stitch. Truth was simpler: flying mattered to Valyrians the way breath mattered to lungs. It was culture and blood and pride wrapped into one terrible, beautiful thing. If he was bad at this—if he was clumsy, or fearful, or worse, if he couldn't connect to her in the air—what did that say about him? About the line in his veins? About the version of himself who'd promised this island a future?
The wind poured through the peaks. The Keep moaned.
"Ñuha zaldrīzes," he called quietly. My dragon.
Nyx turned her head with the unhurried assurance of a queen acknowledging a courtier. Her eyes were winter-violet, bright as amethysts caught in moonlight. She blinked once, slow and feline, then lowered her neck until her skull was level with his chest. He could see the scars on her snout—scrapes from cliff faces, the pale track of a giant's errant chain weeks ago. Cold rolled off her like a tide.
"Not today," he told his stomach. "If I'm going to throw up, I'll do it after we're airborne."
He crossed to her while the entire half-mountain watched without looking like it watched—dwarves pretending to tie knots a second time, giants pausing with timbers in hand, William and Brandon pretending to argue over ledger tallies they quietly turned upside down. Lyra stood with a hand over her mouth, eyes bright. Mira made a small sign to the Old Gods and the Elder. Torrhen just nodded once, a smith's blessing: may the metal hold.
Jeanyx's fingers found the saddle before his courage did.
He had made it a year ago and never used it. Dark leather layered over boiled hide, reinforced with bronze rings and stitched with sinew until it felt like it had grown that way. Two high cantles to cradle his hips during dives. A yoke that hugged the base of Nyx's neck where the spines parted. Four straps to anchor to the chest harness; four more to the girth and wing-root, so the drag wouldn't tear anything vital if he botched a landing. He'd copied the old Valyrian patterns he half-remembered and corrected them with dwarven common sense.
His hands shook anyway.
"Just a saddle," he told himself, threading the first strap through the ring. "Just a chair that refuses to sit still."
The leather creaked. Nyx's skin—if one could call glossy obsidian plates and the softer, pebbled hide between them "skin"—was unnervingly cool. When his wrist brushed her jawline, his pulse doubled. He felt every rivet, every stitch he'd hammered into this thing while pretending he wasn't avoiding the day he would use it.
He fumbled the second strap.
"Of course," he said aloud, to no one and to the entire island. "The most important thing a Valyrian does, and I decide to grow ten thumbs."
Nyx made a sound like a kettle just before it sings. Then she did something that would have been ridiculous if it hadn't been perfect: she nudged him with her nose. Not a shove. A press. A quiet, insistent hey.
He swallowed. His breath came back in pieces.
She purred against his forearm, a low, seismic vibration that traveled into bone. It was the same sound she'd made on a beach years ago when she fit in his hands and pretended to be brave. It was the same sound she made when she slipped through black water beneath the lake and surfaced under his boots, offering her head like a dock. You are mine. I am yours. We are fine.
"Alright," he said, and this time his fingers threaded the buckles cleanly. "Alright."
He checked the girth—two fingers snug. He checked the wing straps—slack enough to allow full extension, tight enough to keep the saddle from sliding if she barrel-rolled. He checked the anchor-line he'd added as an insult to his pride—a safety tether from his waist to the front ring. If he fell, it would break his pelvis instead of his skull. He called that a win.
Nyx watched him with the patience of a glacier.
When everything sat true, he stepped to her foreleg, set his boot in the stirrup he'd had the dwarves rivet into a scale-gap, and paused.
This is the part. This is where you either become the thing you keep promising or you admit you've been faking it.
He looked out over the valley to the half-city sprouting around the mountain's foot. The Mourning Keep's shadow washed over Wintertown and the lake beyond, where a scrawl of frozen rivulets ran like veins under glass. He could almost see the hunger moving through it all, invisible but heavy—the lightness in the giants' steps that was really weakness, the way a mason paused between hammer-strikes just a fraction too long. Ten thousand mouths. Ten thousand days he had the arrogance to say he could shape.
He set his jaw and swung up.
The saddle caught him; the cantles hugged him; the yoke kissed the inside of his thighs in a way that would bruise later. He slid his boots into the stirrups and found his seat. The world changed when he sat. The Keep didn't loom anymore—he perched above its shoulder, at eye level with scaffold cranes and the hooded peaks beyond.
Nyx's head turned, a single great hinge of vertebrae. She looked back at him along the line of her body. The pupils narrowed to hunting slits. The wings flexed once, shivering with a sound like sails finding wind.
His mouth was dry. He wet it, tasted metal.
He laid his palm to the base of her skull, fingers on the little notches where her armor plates gave way to skin. The old language rose without effort. "Sōvēs, ñuha zaldrīzes," he said softly. Fly, my dragon.
Nyx answered with movement.
A step, and the stone thudded. Another, and the gantry lines sang. Then she ran—short, brutal strides that shook dust from the scaffolds. Jeanyx leaned forward and the saddle became a part of his spine, the stirrups a promise under his feet. The platform's edge rushed at them.
She leaped.
For an instant the world dropped and Jeanyx dropped with it, stomach falling out through the soles of his boots. Instinct tried to wrench his hands anywhere but where they should be. He kept them where they were, one on the yoke, one on her neck, and pushed his weight into his heels. The straps bit his hips. Wind punched him in the teeth.
Nyx threw her wings wide.
The air caught. It didn't feel like down becoming up; it felt like up deciding to hold them. The first beat was a hammerblow that flattened the hair on his head. The second beat found a rhythm, a long, slow pull like drawing a thousand-pound bow. She didn't flap; she rowed the sky. The third beat set them climbing.
The Mourning Keep fell away beneath them, its half-built courtyards and half-roofed halls turned into neat little layouts he could cover with his palm. The cranes became toys. The giants became figurines. The sound of the weeping wind braided into the deeper music of flight—the creak of harness leather, the hush of slipstream along wing-membrane, the sudden roar when she angled a feathered edge into a gust and turned it into lift.
He realized two things at once. One: he had been wrong about fear. It wasn't something you carried in your gut on a dragon—it lived in the air and licked your face every time the wing rose and fell. Two: he was smiling so hard his cheeks hurt.
"Essi," he said without thinking. Higher.
Nyx obliged, pouring strength into her shoulders. The mountain slipped below their bellies like a whale turning in the dark. The peaks on either side of the Keep slid past and those long, low, grieving notes swelled around them—the Mourning Keep's namesake—so loud he felt them in his breastbone. The valley opened like a secret being generous. White forests. Black rivers stitched with ice. The slate smear of the northern sea.
"Good," he breathed, and for the first time since he'd climbed into the saddle, his mind stopped arguing with itself.
They climbed until the air bit his teeth. Then Nyx banked.
It began as a lean and became a geometry lesson. A lift vector. A bank angle. He didn't need the words; he felt the diagram through the soles of his feet. He moved with her—not steering (no one really steered dragons), but asking, and she made his asking look like mastery. The horizon tilted and the sea unrolled to fill it, endless, iron-blue, ridged by winter wind. Nyx's left wing dipped, right wing bit, tail cut a new line into the sky, and they turned toward the coast.
"Toward the ice shelf," he said into the gale. "We need a whale, girl."
She didn't need the words. The bond inside him—the thread that ran from the old beach to the cold caverns, from red spider lilies in an inner domain to frost smoking off her teeth—tightened and sang. Hunger, she sent, not in words but in the way she adjusted her chest, in the eagerness of the next downstroke.
They beat seaward.
Over the lake first, where cracks wrote maps under glass. Jeanyx could see fishing holes like coins punched from the surface, tiny figures lifting nets with care. Over the low forests beyond, where the snow still clung to every spruce like a vow. Over the coastal cliffs, where the spray leapt up like hands trying to drag them down. Then the sea took them—a flat sheet that was not flat at all, patterned like hammered steel, seamed with foam.
"Scan," he murmured, though it was for him. He let his eyes unfocus and look for patterns in wrong places. Movement against movement. A spout like breath stolen by the sky. A dark back rolling where the light shouldn't roll.
Nyx found it first. Her head twitched. The pupils widened. She rose two beats, held, then slid a feathered bank to the right with a grace that belonged to predators and kings.
There—a line of vapor ghosts, four… no, five, spaced out like notes on a staff. A pod. Big enough to matter. Big enough to feed them for weeks if he got this right. The plan unfolded the way it had thirty times in his mind and not once in his hands: spot, shadow, drive, split, choose, take.
"Soft," he warned, palm on her neck. "No crash dives. Don't stun the lot of them."
Nyx's reply was a ripple along her shoulders that said I know this like you know breathing.
She bled altitude until the pod was an arm's throw away in dragon terms—maybe fifty feet up, not enough to spook them hard, enough to make them feel shadow and hurry. The whales blew and rolled, black and white and grey, scars crossing scars in calligraphy older than empires. One calf close to its dam. Two juveniles toward the back. A bull on the outside left, huge and scar-torn.
Him.
Jeanyx exhaled and let the Force do the listening for him—the water's push, the whale's vector, Nyx's measured power. "Naejot," he said, and pressed his knee.
Go.
Nyx dropped like a thrown spear and then checked like a master horse brought a pace from a fence. The sudden shadow panicked the pod exactly as intended. The family split along their reflex lines—calf tight to dam, juveniles flanking, bull swinging wide to present that impossible head and jaw as a threat.
Jeanyx would have smiled if he weren't busy being part of the world's most violent fishing trip.
"Now," he said, and Nyx did the thing that made her different from the tales.
She didn't breathe fire. She exhaled a cone of black-violet cold—not a wind, not a fog, but a visible narrowing of the world. The air steamed where it met her breath and then stopped steaming as the heat left it. The surface of the water under that cone filmed in an instant, then skinned, then crusted ice thick enough to argue with whales. Not a prison; a drag. Enough to slow. Enough to make the chosen bull's first turn become a clumsy lurch.
Nyx slashed once with her foreclaws and the ice plate shattered back into slush. The bull's momentum broke; its back rolled wrong. The tail came too high and slapped down with desperation instead of precision.
"Take him," Jeanyx said.
Nyx folded like a knife and hit the sea with a plume that would have flattened longboats. The impact sent a sheet of water over Jeanyx; his world became cold and brine and the smell of iron. The saddle yanked him forward and then back again as Nyx's forelimbs closed around everything they could find of the bull—blubber, muscle, breath. She held. Jeanyx braced, knees flexed, hands locked, and he felt the force of the whale's life like a smith feels the first blow on a new anvil.
"Up," he rasped, coughing salt. "Sōvēs!"
Nyx's hind legs found purchase on nothing at all and made it enough. She didn't try to fly with the whole whale; that would be madness. She dragged, half-swimming, half-climbing on the air each wingbeat created against the water's resistance. The bull thrashed. She answered by plunging her jaws into the dense muscle where neck becomes back and freezing—not the water now, but the flesh under her teeth. Jeanyx heard rather than saw the crackle, like sap bursting in a fire. The thrash weakened.
"Shore," he gasped, spitting. "Get him to the shelf."
They hauled like executioners. The pod, confused and loyal, fled and circled in equal measure until a survivor's instinct rippled through them and sent them seaward. Nyx did not chase. She worked. Jeanyx worked with her—calling micro-adjustments into the wind, leaning when her tail needed weight to flip their angle, hauling the anchor-line with his free hand to change the saddle's center when gravity turned traitor.
The cliffs grew again. The grey-white shelf of shore ice rose ahead like a promise.
At twenty feet from the lip, the bull found one last reservoir of strength and twisted so hard the harness screamed. Jeanyx felt leather give somewhere he couldn't afford to have it give.
"Hold," he breathed, to the strap or to himself he wasn't sure. He let the Force reach out—not to push or pull, but to ask. A little more lift under the left wing. A little less drag under the right. The kind of nudge you give a friend's shoulder to tell them a joke is coming. The world obliged. Nyx snarled and turned that into a final, savage heave.
They hit the shelf with a sound like a door slamming in a cathedral.
Everything became stillness violently achieved. The bull lay half in the surf, half on the ice, breath carving white ghosts into the air. Nyx stood over it, panting, muzzle rimed in frost and blood. Jeanyx sat in the saddle with his heart trying to evacuate through his throat, then laughed—a strange, cracked sound—because there was nothing else left to do with the noise inside him.
"Good girl," he said when he could speak. He leaned forward until his forehead touched the base of her skull. "You magnificent, impossible girl."
She rumbled under him—pleased, proud, a little tired. She shook once and showered him with ice chips.
"Alright," he said, voice raw. "Let's bring dinner home."
They didn't fly with the carcass; they couldn't. But Nyx could drag it along the shelf, and the giants could meet them with chains and sledges once the signal went up. Jeanyx pulled a flare from the saddlebag—a glass tube filled with alchemic brew that burned blue—and wrenched the cap. It hissed and climbed, a bright azure tongue in daytime's teeth.
Back at the Mourning Keep, horns answered. On the lake, distant figures turned and pointed. He saw movement along the roads—the long, even stride of giants taking shape, the purposeful scurry of dwarves, William's coat bright against the white, Brandon's cane ticking the rhythm of urgency, Lyra already running as if she meant to pull the whale herself.
Jeanyx swung down from the saddle on legs that pretended they had always known how to be legs. He landed, staggered, laughed again, and then set to work with a knife because the work was what made the world stay real. He cut the first anchoring lines into the whale's fin and tail, looping them where he wanted the giants to hook. Nyx watched, head cocked, then delicately bit down and pulled when he pointed, dragging the massive bulk more square onto the shelf.
"Easy," he told her. "Don't bruise the meat."
She gave him a look that said I am a dragon, not a butcher, and then—because she was also Nyx—she obeyed.
The first giant arrived at a jog that was a small earthquake. "Hook," Jeanyx called, pointing. "There, there. We'll quarter it on the shore, not here. Don't crack the ribs—we'll use them." He was shouting orders before he realized he'd started, voice hoarse and precise. Dwarves barked back acknowledgments, already measuring sled angles with their hands. Villagers roped in lines. Torrhen yelled something about knives as long as a man's arm. William panted up with a grin that split his beard. Brandon arrived last, as always, and said nothing at all, because nothing needed saying.
They moved as if they'd rehearsed it. In a way, they had—every other desperate thing they'd done together in the past years had been rehearsal for this: giants to haul, dwarves to rig, villagers to cut and carry, Jeanyx to bind them to a single will.
When the first ropes went taut and the whale slid, something eased in the center of him that worry had been occupying rent-free for weeks. This would feed them. This would buy him time. This would let the Mourning Keep grow another ring of ribs before hunger made men mean and mistakes easy.
He looked back at Nyx.
She stood with wings half-spread, taking the wind's measure, eyes on him and not on the carcass as if to say, I got you there; what next?
He walked to her and set his palm against her snout. "We do it again," he said. "And again after that. Until the walls stand and the halls are warm and the Mourning Keep's song is the only thing that sounds like hunger."
She exhaled over him, a breath so cold it made his lashes crisp.
He laughed and wiped his face with a sleeve. "Insufferable," he told her, feeling like he could breathe for the first time in days. "You know that?"
She nudged him—hey—and purred.
He looked back toward the mountain. The skeleton Keep caught the late light and turned it into a silhouette of what it would be. The wind threaded the peaks and sang that low, grieving note again, but it didn't sound like loss now. Not exactly. It sounded like a promise kept at a cost, like the ache your muscles keep after hard work, like a reminder that some things are worth the weight you put on your bones to make them real.
"Come on then," he said, patting her neck. "Back to our bones."
He climbed into the saddle with the ease of a man who had learned that fear could live beside joy without spoiling it. Nyx crouched, launched, and the sea dropped away. The Mourning Keep reached for them with half-built hands and fell short, as it should. The valley opened. The world stopped arguing for a while.
They flew home—hunter and rider, queen and friend—over a people who looked up and pointed and shouted with mouths that would soon be full. The Keep moaned its strange, beautiful song through the wind, and for the first time since the first stone had been set, Jeanyx heard in it not mourning, but the sound a throat makes just before it learns to sing.