The Chronicle of the Lion of Essos
Set down in the year 327 AC by Maester Othmar of Oldtown, late in his years, in service to the Prince of Pentos.
"In the long turning of the wheel of time, men rise and fall, kings are crowned and buried, cities built and burned to ash. Yet, once in a hundred generations, a soul is born whose fire burns too bright for the age that made him, and his shadow lies across all the lands of men. This is the account of such a soul."
When I was but a young acolyte in Oldtown, I heard sailors' tales from beyond the Narrow Sea, drunken brags in taverns of a boy in Norvos who would one day shake the foundations of empires. They said he would ride farther than the Valyrian dragonlords, fight greater battles than the Free Cities had known since the Century of Blood, and bring more crowns to his feet than Nymeria brought ships to Dorne.
They called him by many names: the Silver Lion, the Storm of Essos, the Breaker of Chains, but in my pages, I shall name him as he was born: Alexander, son of no one, property of a merchant, and destined to become master of kings.
In the years I served as a scribe in Pentos, I pieced together the fragments of his rise from the lips of old soldiers, merchants, freedmen, and even priests of the many-faced gods. What I set down here is truth as close as one might come in this world, for truth in the telling of great men is oft buried beneath the stones of their legend.
287 AC — The Free City of Norvos
The bells of Norvos were ringing. Not for victory, nor for mourning, but because it was market-day, and the sound rolled down from the high hill of the bearded priests to the lower streets, where merchants shouted in half a dozen tongues.
Down among the stink of tanneries and spice-booths, a boy ran barefoot, a bundle of dyed cloth clutched tight against his chest. His hair was the pale gold of summer wheat, matted with sweat, and his small body carried the lean hardness of a child who had never eaten his fill.
Alexander had been born in the cellars of Master Luthar Veylin's house, a cramped warren beneath the merchant's storehouse. His mother, a Lyseni laundress, had died of fever when he was three. His father was… well, Master Luthar claimed it was some sellsword from the Second Sons he'd once commanded. Perhaps true, perhaps a story told for his own amusement.
Luthar himself was a man built like an aging bear, his face mapped with old scars, his belly thick with years of wine and roasted goat. He kept half a dozen household slaves and twice that number hired men to guard his caravans. He was kinder than some masters, crueler than others, his blows fell rarely, but when they came, they came hard.
Alexander learned early that a quick tongue was worth more than a quick hand, and that to survive in Luthar's house was to listen more than speak.
That morning, he had been sent to deliver a bolt of fine Myrish silk to a buyer near the river docks. He moved through the crowded lanes like a cat, weaving past peddlers and fishmongers, past a pair of sellswords dicing in the shade, their swords leaning against the wall.
Near the river, the stench hit him, rotting weeds, fish-guts, and the sour tang of tar. Barges slid past, heavy with timber from the hills upriver, and beyond them the wide expanse of the Norvos river glimmered under the sun.
He was nearly to the cloth-merchant's stall when a commotion broke out, a group of men in mismatched armor were driving a gaggle of chained captives down the street. Slavers from the Disputed Lands, judging by their accents. Alexander slowed, eyes lingering. Men, women, and children stumbled past, their faces hollow, their wrists bound.
One of them, a boy no older than himself, looked up, and in that brief glance something sparked, a shared recognition, not of each other, but of the iron weight of the chain.
A hard shove from behind snapped him out of it. A dockhand cursed at him to move, and Alexander darted forward, the cloth still tight in his grip. Yet the image of the chained boy burned in his mind.
That night, as he lay on the straw pallet in the cellar, he thought of the slavers' faces, the lazy way they struck the captives with their whips. And though he did not yet know it, that was the night the first stone was laid in the road that would carry him across continents, to battlefields and thrones.
A road that would begin here, in the shadows of Norvos, with a boy who owned nothing but his will.