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123 AC, Chroyane
"I have already underestimated you once, but I will not do so again. After all, that's what the Valyrians did when they came to this place." The sorcerer waved his hand, and the shroud faded away. "Isn't that right, Prince Garin?"
Helaena Targaryen had been familiar with Prince Garin of Chroyane. How could she not, when he, alongside Queen Nymeria, was one of the few Rhoynish rulers still named in the books of the library of the Red Keep.
Garin the Great was before her, the man who was able to defy Valyria at a time where it was at its strongest, who had brought down Dragonlords that had supported Volantis, the man who supposedly been responsible for Greyscale, the man who had stood when Chroyane fell, and defied the Valyrian invaders of his land, and strike at its military and nobles.
His feat was well-known for hundreds of years after his supposed death, proof of the lengths that Valyria would go to in the face of actual defiance, but also the removal of the illusion of invincibility that the Dragonlords possessed for thousands of years, since they defeated the Ghiscari Empire.
Garin should have perished a thousand years prior, and yet, according to Lord Harry, he was floating in front of her, imprisoned in the golden cage that the sorcerer had conjured for him.
She couldn't help but feel curious about the man, and she did her best to observe him. Without the shroud and mist obscuring his features, Helaena could see the face of the legendary figure.
Despite him being essentially a shade, more akin to a ghost than a man, she had to admit that he looked… ordinary. His eyes were dark, his face thin and somewhat gaunt. His frame was also very thin, and even his clothes looked utterly tattered with dark blood staining them where she had stabbed him just a few moments prior. She wouldn't have been surprised to see smallfolk in King's Landing with his same likeness.
She normally trusted Lord Harry's guesses, especially given that he got them right most of the time, but Helaena had to admit that a part of her was starting to doubt that he had gotten it correctly. And if it was correct, she would be completely and utterly disappointed with Prince Garin.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, given the way that Garin froze, his rage having seemingly left him for just a few seconds after Lord Harry's statement, it seemed like Harry had been correct. He turned back towards Harry and asked, with a hoarse voice, "How?"
"How what? How did I know who you are? How did I trap you here? How do I have such marvellous hair? It's such a vague question, after all."
"How are you keeping me here?"
Lord Harry snorted, "Do you think you're the only one who understands the nature of souls? I have to admit that even I would never be crazy enough to do what you did. I'm actually surprised that you didn't fracture your consciousness with every piece of mist in this city, though. Then again, it was a city-wide ritual, and those can be rather chaotic. I wonder what you could have lost when you made it. Then again, you probably don't even know anymore."
The shade froze for a few moments, "Sacrifice is a necessity for the most powerful of magics."
"Sacrifice is definitely a powerful regent, I'll admit to that, even if I don't particularly like the practice. I often find it quite lazy," Lord Harry replied casually, "But I can't deny its effectiveness, and the sacrifice of a quarter million people, of an entire city, well, that's certainly effective. Did you plan this in advance, using your people as a sacrifice, or was it a spur-of-the-moment thing?"
Prince Garin growled at this, his eyes and mouth darkened, as if turned into an abyss of pure rage. He all but screamed at them, his voice layered, "Do you think I wished my people harm? I am not one of these vile Valyrians who would spill blood as if it were wine. I watched as my people were enslaved by these wretched Dragonlords, and I prayed to Mother Rhoyne. I offered myself to forever rid her river from the taint of the Valyrians, to avenge the lives of her children. As they spent hours massacring and killing my people, my goddess heard my plea and answered my prayers. She gave me the strength to overpower the invaders to my home and their dragons, and they have been drowning since the day of their foolishness ever since. I have honoured my part to this day, until you came, stranger, and I will not be restrained by the likes of you!"
As he spoke, the rage in his voice grew, his very being darkening, as if ready to erupt, and then the golden cage rumbled as he released a screech that hurt her ears. She closed her eyes instinctively, and she watched Garin still imprisoned in Lord Harry's golden cage, with Lady Daphne giving him an unimpressed look.
Lord Harry, on the other hand, looked completely horrified, "You're a hack. This was the first actual piece of magic that I've been impressed with since coming here, at least one made by a human caster, and it turns out to be a complete fucking act of idiocy. I thought I was pissed before, but now I'm starting to get pissed off out of sheer disappointment."
Garin's shade remained in its prison, looking almost taken aback by the sorcerer's rant, which didn't even need to stop. "The mist was just a spell, wasn't it? A water spell that could be used to negate magic, probably one that you used against the Dragonlords that you beat, weakening their dragons enough to kill them. And your dumb ass tied your very being to the spell using a ritual that you didn't even prepare for. Even the sacrifice necessary for the ritual happened by complete accident, since you had a conceptual ownership over your people as their Prince and ruler. It was enough to empower you to cast the mist spell on a scale that shouldn't have even been possible, and to drown the city completely. However, when your soul was bound to the spell, it became permanent. It was all just a fluke. The fact that there's even a coherent part of you is already through pure chance. I can see it now."
Lady Daphne interjected for the first time since Harry started his rant, "How so? Even if it was a spell, the scale of it means that his soul would have been spread thin enough that it would lose the concept of an ego in mere days, let alone centuries, and yet he's still coherent."
"That's the beauty of it," Lord Harry answered with a smile, "The only thing that kept him whole was his legend. He's a story, a myth, that people have used for centuries as proof that they could defy Valyria, that they could defeat dragons. Now, that would have been the end of it if his soul wasn't practically bare to the world. There is power in belief, in myth, and Garin's legend empowered the spell, keeps it contained, and makes him coherent. But that doesn't mean that he isn't affected. The shade before us isn't Prince Garin of Chroyane, not anymore, just Garin the Great, or how people perceive him."
"I AM GARIN!" the shade exclaimed, the layered voices echoing in the ruins of Chroyane.
"Are you? Then tell me what you remember of your life beyond being a Rhoynar, your rage at Valyria. Tell me what you like, what you dislike, if you had any family members, if you had any lovers."
The shade's subdued silence was answer enough, and the sorcerer continued, "Even your memories of Chroyane's fall are likely suspect, twisted by people's perception of you. I should have seen it earlier. Anyone would have been more wary of our magic, which we were able to cast despite your mist, making us obviously the greater threat to you. And yet, you kept targeting Helaena like a bloodhound despite that. No man is this illogical, and it took me by surprise when you acted like this. That's because you are no man, just the culmination of the world's belief in Garin the Great, which twisted the poor man's soul, or what remained of it, into you. It is, by far, a far crueller fate than any Valyrian could have devised, and he did it all to himself, through pure chance. Or perhaps, it wasn't chance at all…"
"Fate?" The golden-haired woman asked, "Do you think that this was fated to happen? This world might be out of balance enough to even make this incident occur in the first place, but for such an abomination to be the result of the machinations of something like Fate seems very uncharacteristic."
Harry's face finally turned away from the shade and looked in the distance, "We've seen enough unnatural things that it would give a chance. Fate's influence is far weaker here, and the consequences of breaking its design are far less severe than back home. What if this wasn't some long-term machinations but an active reaction to something? What if someone broke a prophecy? What if the Valyrians had never attacked Chroyane in the first place? There's a reason why the Freehold hadn't tried to commit too much to attack Chroyane, but they suddenly happened.Fate could have reacted by arranging for this, because it had no other choice."
"You mean like some kind of cosmic chessboard, where every move entails the death of a civilisation?" Lady Daphne mused, "It would fit given the number of coincidences, much like how heavy-handed it was to ensure that the Targaryens would escape the Doom of Valyria, and it was obviously meant to orchestrate some kind of battle in the future."
Helaena found herself looking just as perplexed as the shade of Garin, understanding perhaps half of what was said, but she couldn't help but comment, "Could it be the Outsider?"
Both Potters turned sharply towards her as if they had forgotten that she was there and gave her questioning looks. The young princess gulped at the intimidating sight and continued, "The Outsider in Valyria. If you're right. If Fate saved my family from the Doom, wouldn't it make sense for its enemy to be the one who caused it in the first place?"
Both Potters shared a look before the man replied, "That's actually a very good theory, Helaena. The Outsider did show that it was above the laws of reality, which includes Fate. Which means that it could plan around it. It was also patient enough to spend centuries waiting for the Doom, but that was aimed to bind the Elder Dragons, not against Fate. It's too vague and convoluted to make any guesses."
Nodding in agreement, Lady Daphne continued, "What do you think was Fate's plan for Chroyane?"
"The most significant thing this whole mess achieved was to make it almost impossible for anyone to enter the city, including the Valyrians. To protect something, perhaps," the sorcerer replied, while humming to himself, "Or it could be the birth of Greyscale, but that wouldn't have required all of this if the disease had already existed. Then again, we know so little of Greyscale to postulate."
The man then turned towards Garin, "What can you tell us about Greyscale?"
A vicious smile appeared on the shade's face, and his features darkened, his voice returning to its layered state, "It is my vengeance. Born from the river's grief and my own despair. Every stone that grows, every scream that fades beneath the water, is a hymn to the pain Valyria brought to my people. They burned us. I made sure they would remember what burning feels like."
The mist surrounding the cage darkened, as if reacting to the shade's viciousness, before Lord Harry raised an unimpressed eyebrow and snapped his finger, making everything return to normal. "You don't know a damn thing, do you? Did you even create the curse? No, don't answer. I don't know what I expected when I asked you in the first place. Given what I know so far about what happened here, you're not even close to being capable of creating a curse like this one."
"I cursed…"
Lord Harry snapped his fingers again, and the shade's words would not form, "You think you created Greyscale, because your legends claim that you might have done it. That's not proof of anything. You aren't even the one who warped this place into this colourless ruin, are you?"
The ghost couldn't answer, given the sorcerer's silencing spell, but he did not attempt to speak either. Lord Harry rolled his eyes, "You know what? I'm done with this. I was thinking about making you suffer through some sort of ironic punishment for almost hurting Helaena. But you're so sad that I won't get any satisfaction out of it. This is probably going to hurt, by the way."
The sorcerer raised his hand and summoned some strange black stone, which floated above his palm. Garin's eyes widened in fright at the sight of the stone for some reason, only for him to be proved correct as he started to scream in pain, the sound somehow overwhelming the silencing spell. He then proceeded to burst into black flames, revealing a small spark of light that faded away into nothing.
Immediately after this, a pulse of power propagated across the ruined City of Chroyane, and the mist that occluded everything started to slowly dissipate into nothing. Helaena couldn't help but comment at the sight, "The spell is fading, isn't it?"
"Yes, but the world still has no colour," Lord Harry replied.
"What does that mean?"
Lady Daphne seemed the one who answered this time, "It means that Harry was right, that Garin wasn't the source of the curse or the warped reality."
"What happened to Garin?" The young princess asked.
"His soul moved on. Or rather, the last sliver of it that hadn't already been twisted beyond recognition," Lady Daphne said plainly, brushing her cloak back as she stepped forward. "Perhaps he would find peace in true death that he wasn't allowed to have in the twisted undeath that he suffered from for centuries. As for now, we need to focus on finding the source of this effect."
Harry nodded, gaze fixed on the distant horizon, specifically, facing one of the towering structures that was starting to appear, with the mist obscuring things. It was massive, easily larger than anything else in Chroyane, and perhaps even larger than the Red Keep. She recognised it immediately as the Temple of Sorrows. She could see the similarities to some of the drawings she had of Chroyane, only it was called the Temple of Love at the time. The central dome had collapsed in parts, but much of the structure still stood.
She noticed that their ship was moving towards it, and as they approached, Helaena saw that it was more akin to a temple than something like the Red Keep. There was a heaviness to it that had been missing before. Had Garin's mist hid the palace's presence from them somehow.
The Potters could easily feel it as well, given how tense they became, not even speaking a word as they approached the palace.
They docked in silence.
No one spoke as they stepped off the boat for the first time since the expedition started, nor when they moved toward the structure ahead. The steps leading to the palace were long and worn, some were even broken, and she had almost slipped a few times. That made climbing them slow, and Helaena couldn't help but feel the air became heavier as they approached the palace.
Finally, they reached the top, and they found themselves in a large hall whose ceiling had long since collapsed. And yet, Helaena couldn't help but notice the dozens of statues on either side of the hall, all destroyed. She could only make up their origin from the broken chunks of stone because of the few recognisable shapes of broken arms and torsos that littered the ground.
And yet, one statue stood intact.
It was on the far side of the hall, centred between both rows of broken statues at its right and left, and Helaena immediately recognised the material from her time in Valyria. Black Stone. She remembered how uneasy it made her feel and would recognise it with just a glance at most.
The statue was of a woman, kneeling on the ground. From its eyes, two narrow streams of water flowed downward, flowing towards the river through one of the holes in the ground.
This was it. She could feel it in her bones that this was the source of the shift in Chroyane's reality. Helaena stared at it, almost in awe at the disaster that this statue had somehow survived.
Of course, that was when the impossible happened.
The statue moved, its head snapping up towards them, with the sound of cracking stone echoing in the silent ruins of the Palace of Sorrows. Then its mouth opened, and it released a scream.
Despite the fact that the sound of the scream pained her utterly, the sound was very familiar. It was the same noise that she heard when Lord Harry separated the giant stone serpent from its greyscale.
However, it was also different; impossibly, she could almost hear words, intent, in the screaming. She didn't understand the language. She wasn't even sure it was a language at all. But the meaning struck her all the same, "WHY ARE YOU HERE?"
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AN: I'm not sure about this chapter. I tried to make Garin's case a bit different to explain how powerful he was and how he was still alive. There's still a bit that Harry missed, which would be explored in the next chapter. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
[---]
If you want to support me, check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions on them, so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.