Chapter 1: The Last Embers of Divinity
The first sensation was not of fire, but of a chilling, all-encompassing silence. It was a stark contrast to the cacophony of his last moments, the screech of twisting metal, the shattering of glass, and the abrupt, final thud of his own failing heart against the polished marble floor of his corner office. He had been… closing a deal. A hostile takeover, his specialty. Cunning, they called him. Shrewd. A predator in a bespoke suit. He remembered the faint taste of celebratory scotch on his lips, the triumphant smirk he'd shot at his defeated rival, and then… a searing pain in his chest, a white-hot agony that had stolen his breath and sent his meticulously ordered world into a spiral of darkness.
Now, there was only this profound quiet, a stillness that seemed to press in on him from all sides. He had no body, no eyes to see, no ears to hear, yet he perceived. He was a disembodied consciousness adrift in an endless void. Was this it? The great beyond? A rather underwhelming finale for a man of his… stature. He had always imagined something more, perhaps a celestial boardroom where he could negotiate his final placement.
Then, the silence was shattered by a chorus of screams. Not of the living, but of the dying. A symphony of agony, despair, and terror that echoed through the nothingness, each note a soul being extinguished. He felt them, billions of them, a torrent of psychic anguish that threatened to overwhelm his own nascent consciousness. With the screams came a wave of unimaginable heat, a force so potent it felt as if it were unmaking reality itself.
And with the heat, came the knowledge. It flooded his mind, a deluge of memories that were not his own, of a city of impossible towers that kissed the clouds, of silver-haired riders on the backs of magnificent beasts that swam through the sky, of a civilization powered by fire and blood and magic so potent it bent the very laws of nature. Valyria. The name bloomed in his mind, vibrant and resonant, followed by a singular, cataclysmic word: Doom.
He was witnessing the death of an empire, the fall of the Valyrian Freehold, not as a distant historical event, but as a present, visceral reality. The earth buckled and broke, swallowing mountains whole. The Fourteen Flames, the volcanic chain that had been the heart of Valyria's power, erupted in a furious, synchronized tantrum, spewing molten rock and ash that blotted out the sun. The sea, once a placid blue, boiled and rose in a wrathful tsunami, its waves crashing against the fracturing peninsula, dragging cities and their inhabitants into a watery grave.
He felt the terror of the dragonlords as their mighty steeds, creatures of fire and scale, were consumed by the very element they commanded. He felt the desperation of the sorcerers as their spells unraveled, turning on them with vengeful fury. He felt the silent, chilling satisfaction of a hidden enemy, of faceless assassins who had sown the seeds of this destruction.
He was a ghost at the funeral of a civilization, a silent observer to an apocalypse. But he was not alone in this spectral realm for long. As the last screams of the dying faded into the roaring inferno, he felt a new presence, or rather, a multitude of presences. They were faint, flickering embers of consciousness, weakened and scattered by the cataclysm. They were the gods of Valyria, their divinity stripped bare, their power extinguished by the sudden, overwhelming annihilation of their worshippers.
There was Arrax, the ruler of their pantheon, his domain of law and order a cruel joke in this maelstrom of chaos. Balerion, the god of death, was now facing his own oblivion. Meraxes, the goddess of the sky, was falling from her celestial throne. One by one, he felt them wink out of existence, their divine sparks snuffed out like candles in a hurricane.
He should have been terrified, another insignificant mote of dust in the face of such cosmic destruction. But the businessman in him, the core of his being that had always been defined by opportunism and a ruthless pragmatism, saw not an ending, but a beginning. An acquisition.
He had no form, no voice, but he had a will, a will forged in the unforgiving crucible of corporate warfare. And in this realm of dying gods and shattered reality, his will was his only asset. He reached out, not with hands, but with the sheer, focused intent of his being, and did what he did best: he absorbed.
It started as a trickle, a faint warmth in the cold void. He latched onto the fading divinity of a minor godling of the hearth, a forgotten deity whose last follower had just been consumed by the firestorm. The god's essence was a pittance, a mere whisper of power, but it was enough. It gave him a foothold, an anchor in this swirling chaos.
Then, he moved faster, more aggressively. He was a shark in a sea of celestial blood, a predator who had just remembered his teeth. He devoured the lingering power of a god of artisans, his essence tasting of molten silver and polished obsidian. He consumed the divine spark of a goddess of fertility, her power a riot of blooming life now reduced to a wilting, tragic memory.
He grew bolder, his appetite whetted. He targeted the greater gods, the pillars of the Valyrian pantheon, even as they fought their own futile battles against the encroaching darkness. He felt a fleeting resistance from Vhagar, the goddess of war, her divine will a sharpened blade even in its death throes. But she was weak, her power base – the millions of Valyrian soldiers and warriors – now nothing but ash and bone. He overwhelmed her, the taste of her divinity like ozone and spilled blood.
One by one, he absorbed them all. The cunning of Tyraxes, the wisdom of Tessarion, the fiery breath of Gaelithox. He took their power, their knowledge, their very beings into himself. It was the ultimate hostile takeover, a leveraged buyout of a pantheon on the verge of bankruptcy.
And as he consumed the last of them, the last dying ember of Valyrian divinity, something within him fundamentally changed. The disembodied consciousness that had been a shrewd businessman from a world of steel and glass was reforged, remade. He was no longer just a soul; he was a nexus of divine power, a focal point for the stolen might of an entire pantheon.
The chaotic energy coalesced, and for the first time since his rebirth, he had form. Not a human form, but something far, far grander. He was a dragon. But not a dragon of Valyria, those sleek, almost serpentine creatures of fire and blood. His form was different, more primal, more… ancient.
His scales were the colour of midnight, each one a shard of polished obsidian that seemed to drink the light. They were thick, interlocking plates of natural armour, edged with a faint, silvery sheen. His horns were massive, curving forward from his skull like a king's crown, their tips sharp enough to rend stone. A frill of smaller horns and spines ran down his neck and back, culminating in a tail that was a weapon in itself, a bludgeon of bone and muscle tipped with a wicked, scythe-like blade. His wings were vast, membranous sheets of leathery skin that stretched between powerful, claw-tipped limbs, their span so wide they could blot out the sun.
This was the form of a Dovah of Skyrim, a creature of legend from a world of ice and snow, a world he only knew from the fantasy games he'd played in his brief moments of leisure. He had been a fan of the genre, of tales of dragons and gods and epic power struggles. It was a fitting, if ironic, twist of fate.
But the most significant change was not his physical form, but the world around him. As his new body settled into existence, the chaotic, fiery landscape of the Doom began to recede, replaced by something else entirely. The molten rivers cooled into shimmering, obsidian plains. The ash-filled sky cleared to reveal a star-dusted canopy of deep violet and indigo. The ground beneath his massive claws solidified into a landscape of jagged, crystalline mountains and petrified forests of black, unyielding wood.
He had not just been reborn; he had created. This was his divine domain, a pocket of reality shaped by his will and the stolen power of the Valyrian gods. It was a stark, beautiful, and utterly desolate place, a reflection of the cold, calculating mind that now ruled it.
He took a breath, his first in this new form, and the air itself seemed to hum with power. He could feel the threads of magic that wove through his domain, the faint, lingering echoes of the gods he had consumed. He could feel their sorrow, their rage, their despair. But beneath it all, he could feel their power, now his power.
He was a god. A dragon god. The only dragon god in this world.
A wave of exultation washed over him, a feeling of absolute power that was more intoxicating than any earthly pleasure he had ever known. He was immortal. He was a creator. He was the master of his own reality.
But then, as the initial euphoria began to fade, the shrewd businessman in him reasserted control. He had always been a man who looked for the catch, the hidden clause in the contract, the fine print that could turn a triumph into a disaster. And as he surveyed his new kingdom, a cold, hard knot of caution began to form in his gut.
He was a god, yes. But he was a god trapped in his own heaven. He tried to will himself back to the mortal world, to the ruins of Valyria that lay just beyond the veil of his domain. He could feel it, sense it, a world teeming with the raw, chaotic energy of post-apocalyptic life. But he could not reach it. An invisible barrier, as unyielding as diamond, held him back.
The realization dawned on him with the chilling finality of a death sentence. Gods were not meant to walk the mortal world. Their very presence was a violation of the natural order, a force too potent for the fragile tapestry of mortal existence to bear. He was a prisoner of his own divinity, a king confined to a gilded cage of his own making.
And then came the second, even more terrifying realization. He could feel his power, a vast and seemingly endless reservoir of divine energy. But he could also feel a slow, almost imperceptible drain, a constant, seeping loss. It was like a slow leak in the hull of a mighty ship, insignificant at first, but ultimately fatal.
He sifted through the stolen memories of the Valyrian gods, searching for an answer. And he found it, a truth as old as faith itself. Gods were not self-sustaining. They were symbiotic creatures, parasites on a cosmic scale. They fed on the belief of mortals, on the power of faith. Without a steady stream of prayer, of worship, of devotion, they would wither and die, their divine essence bleeding away into the aether.
The Valyrian gods had died not just because of the Doom, but because their followers had been extinguished in a single, fiery instant. Their power base had been annihilated, and they had starved to death in a matter of moments.
He was now facing the same fate. He was a god with no believers, a king with no subjects. His vast power was a finite resource, a dwindling inheritance that would eventually run out, leaving him as nothing more than a fading echo in an empty, self-made hell.
Panic, a raw, primal fear he hadn't felt since his earliest, most desperate days in the cutthroat world of business, clawed at him. But he suppressed it with an iron will. Panic was for the weak, the unprepared. He was a strategist, a planner, a man who had built an empire from nothing. This was just another hostile market, another seemingly insurmountable challenge.
He needed a plan. A business plan. A religion plan.
He settled his massive form onto a plateau of polished obsidian, his claws scraping against the crystalline surface. The businessman's mind, now housed within the skull of a dragon god, went to work.
His objective was clear: survival and growth. To achieve this, he needed to cultivate a following, to create a religion centered around himself. He needed to become a brand, a symbol that people would turn to, that they would invest their faith in.
But how to reach them? He was trapped in his divine domain, unable to directly interact with the mortal world. He couldn't perform grand miracles, couldn't appear in a blaze of glory to awe the masses into submission. Such crude tactics were beneath him anyway. He had always preferred the subtle approach, the gentle nudge that guided events in his favour, the whisper in the right ear that could topple kingdoms.
His caution, a trait that had saved him from countless disastrous deals in his past life, now became his guiding principle. He could not afford to be reckless. He was a new player in a very old game, and he did not yet know all the rules. There might be other powers in this world, other gods, other ancient beings who would not take kindly to a newcomer, especially one who had come into his power through such… unorthodox means.
He needed to be a ghost, a whisper, a rumour that spread on the wind. He needed to build his church from the shadows, to recruit his first followers from the fringes of society, the desperate, the broken, the forgotten. They would be his seed investors, the foundation upon which he would build his divine empire.
He closed his eyes, his massive head resting on his forelegs, and focused his consciousness. He could not touch the mortal world, but he could perceive it. Faintly, like a distorted reflection in a pool of dark water, he could see the aftermath of the Doom. He saw the shattered coastlines of Essos, the frightened refugees fleeing inland, the burgeoning chaos in the Free Cities as the power vacuum of Valyria's fall began to be felt.
He saw fear, and in that fear, he saw opportunity. People were scared. Their old gods were dead or silent. They were looking for answers, for protection, for a new source of hope in a world that had suddenly become much darker and more dangerous.
He would be their answer. He would be their hope. He would be their god.
He began to craft the core tenets of his new religion, the mission statement for his divine enterprise. It would not be a religion of fire and blood, of conquest and domination. That was the old Valyrian way, and it had led to their ruin. His would be a religion of subtlety, of knowledge, of self-reliance. He would not offer salvation on a silver platter; he would offer the tools for mortals to save themselves.
He would be the Silent God, the Whispering Wyrm, the Shadow on the Mountain. His followers would not build grand temples in his name, at least not at first. They would meet in secret, in hidden places, sharing the knowledge he would subtly impart to them. He would teach them how to read the signs, how to see the patterns in the chaos, how to be just a little bit smarter, a little bit shrewder, than their rivals. He would make them survivors, and in their survival, they would find their faith.
His first target would be the outcasts, the disenfranchised, the people who had been chewed up and spat out by the world. Slaves who yearned for freedom, merchants who had lost everything, scholars who sought forbidden knowledge. They were the ones who were most desperate, the ones most likely to listen to a new, unconventional voice.
He would reach them through dreams. It was a subtle, deniable form of communication, a whisper in the dark that could be dismissed as a figment of the imagination. He would plant ideas, offer guidance, lead them to opportunities they might have otherwise missed. A slave might dream of a weakness in his master's security, a merchant of a new trade route, a scholar of a hidden cache of ancient texts.
He would not demand their faith outright. That was too crude, too transactional. He would earn it, slowly, patiently, one small success at a time. He would be the silent partner in their lives, the unseen benefactor who guided them towards prosperity. And as they grew stronger, as their fortunes improved, their gratitude would turn to reverence, their reverence to faith.
It was a long-term strategy, a high-risk, high-reward venture. But it was the only one he had. He was a cautious, cunning, shrewd businessman, and he would approach the business of godhood with the same meticulous planning and ruthless efficiency that had made him a titan of industry in his previous life.
He opened his eyes, their slitted pupils glowing with a faint, internal light. He looked out over his desolate, beautiful kingdom, a realm of silent, unyielding power. It was empty now, but it would not be for long. He would populate it with the prayers of his followers, with the strength of their faith. He would build his divine empire one soul at a time.
He took another deep, resonant breath, the sound echoing through the crystalline mountains. The game had changed, the stakes were higher, but the player remained the same. And he always played to win.
The first whisper was already forming in his mind, a dream destined for a young, ambitious slave in the fighting pits of Meereen, a dream of a loosened chain and a moment of distraction. It was a small, almost insignificant beginning, a tiny seed planted in the fertile ground of despair. But from such small seeds, mighty empires could grow. And he, the last ember of Valyrian divinity, the dragon god of a new and terrible age, had all the time in the world to watch it bloom.