291 AC — Norvos
It began with whispers in the market.
Merchants muttering over wine cups, caravan guards grumbling in the taverns, Luthar's ships are late… the caravan from Qohor was robbed in the passes… the debt collectors are circling.
Alexander heard it all as he moved through the streets, carrying cloth bolts and sacks of salt. He didn't know the full truth, but he knew the signs: Luthar's temper had grown sharper, the suppers leaner, the brazier fires left unlit to save on charcoal. The merchant's laugh, once loud enough to carry down the street, was now a rare, brittle thing.
By the time the first snow touched the rooftops, the truth was no longer whispered. Luthar was in trouble.
It was deep winter when Luthar called him into the study. The merchant sat hunched over his desk, maps and ledgers spread before him like pieces of a puzzle that refused to fit. A goblet of wine rested at his elbow, untouched, which told Alexander this was not a night for stories.
"Sit," Luthar said.
Alexander obeyed.
The merchant studied him for a long moment, his dark eyes flicking over the boy's lean frame, the set of his jaw.
"You've learned well," Luthar said at last. "You read, you reckon, you've got a head for more than fetching and carrying."
Alexander felt a flicker of pride, quickly smothered by the weight in Luthar's voice.
"But," the merchant went on, "a clever head won't keep my creditors from my door. The gods know I've tried."
There was a pause, a long, slow one, like the moment before a blade falls.
"I've had an offer," Luthar said. "From an old comrade. He runs… a different kind of trade. Men who fight for coin. Pits, mostly. He says you've the bones for it. The look."
Alexander stared at him. The words were plain enough, but their meaning hit like a fist to the ribs.
"You're selling me."
Luthar's jaw tightened. "I'm passing you to someone who'll feed you, train you, keep you alive. It's more than many get. You're a slave, boy. You go where you're sent."
Alexander wanted to speak, to argue, to curse, but his throat felt tight, the words turning to stone.
It was snowing the morning they left the house. Alexander carried nothing; there was nothing of his to take. Luthar walked beside him in silence, the streets muffled by fresh white drifts.
They crossed the market square, passed the frozen fountain, and climbed toward the eastern gate. There, beneath the shadow of the great bronze doors, a man was waiting.
He was tall and broad, his shoulders filling the space beneath a heavy fur cloak. His face was a weathered ruin of old scars, his nose bent from some long-healed break. At his belt hung a short sword, worn to the hilt.
"Is this him?" the man asked, his voice a gravelled rasp.
"This is him," Luthar said.
The man looked Alexander over, as one might look at a mule in a horse fair. "Thin. But the frame's there. How's he with a blade?"
"Better than most his age," Luthar replied.
The man grunted, then reached into his cloak and drew out a small pouch. The sound of coin clinked in the cold air. Luthar took it without counting.
Alexander watched the exchange in silence. It was quick, almost casual, the kind of transaction he'd seen a hundred times in the market. A bolt of silk, a jar of oil, a boy's life.
For a moment, after the coins had changed hands, Luthar hesitated. His gaze lingered on the boy, and something unreadable flickered in his eyes, guilt, perhaps, or something close to it.
"You listen to him," Luthar said finally, jerking his head toward the scarred man. "Do what he says. Keep your head down. Live long enough, and maybe you'll buy yourself out."
Alexander held his stare. He wanted to ask why, why teach him letters, numbers, the roads of Essos, only to hand him over like a sack of grain? But the words wouldn't come.
Instead, he nodded once, sharp and small.
Luthar turned without another word and walked back down the hill, his blue cloak vanishing into the falling snow.
The scarred man, whose name Alexander would later learn was Seravo, led him beyond the city walls, down a winding track toward the river. There, half-hidden among the willows, lay a low stone compound ringed by a palisade. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, blood, and wet straw.
Inside, men moved in the yard, bare-chested despite the cold, their bodies knotted with muscle, their skin mapped with scars. Some sparred with blunted swords, the clack of steel ringing sharp. Others lifted heavy stones or ran drills under the barked orders of a whip-wielding overseer.
Seravo stopped at the edge of the yard.
"This is where boys become fighters," he said. "Some live long enough to see coin. Most don't. You want to be one of the first, you'll do as you're told. You want to be one of the second… try running."
Alexander didn't answer. His breath misted in the cold air, his heart thudding in his chest.
He had been a slave all his life. But standing there, with the clang of steel in his ears and the scent of iron in his nose, he felt something else, not fear, not quite.
It was the first faint spark of defiance.
293 AC - Norvos
"Many men are shaped by hardship. Few are sharpened by it. The difference lies not in the weight of the blows, but in whether the soul bends or tempers. In the case of Alexander, the pits of Norvos might have broken another boy's spirit. Instead, they forged it."— From the annals of Maester Othmar, Oldtown
When Seravo first took him through the gates of the gladiator's yard, Alexander was little more than skin and bone wrapped over wiry muscle, quick enough on his feet, sharp in the eyes, but a child still.
In the first months, he was treated as any untested pit-slave: worse than a cur, beneath the notice of veterans, useful only for the foulest chores. He swept the sand of the practice rings until his fingers bled, carried buckets of slop to the latrines, fetched water for men who struck him if it spilled.
He was thrown into sparring before he had learned to hold his guard, set against older boys who relished beating him to the dirt. His nose was broken before his first week was done; by the second, his ribs bore the mottled purple-yellow of deep bruising. Nights, he lay on a straw pallet in the slave barracks, too sore to sleep, the groans of other broken bodies in the dark around him.
But Alexander had learned long before that survival was not just the work of muscle. He watched. He listened. In every blow that floored him, he saw the mistake that let it land; in every feint, the tell of the hand or eyes that betrayed it. He began to turn the beatings into lessons.
Where others lunged, he sidestepped. Where others swung wide, he kept his guard tight. His body remembered what his mind recorded, and day by day, the bruises became fewer, the matches lasted longer.
By the end of his first year, the scrawny boy who had entered the yard was gone. Hard labor and constant training had added slabs of muscle to his frame, shoulders broadening, forearms roped and strong. His height, too, betrayed his youth; at thirteen, he stood eye to eye with grown men, and though he had not yet filled out, the promise of his size was plain.
His reach was longer than his peers, his legs thick with the strength of a sprinter, and his chest could take a blow that would wind another boy. The overseers noted it, and Seravo, never a man to waste good stock, began to pair him against older, more skilled opponents.
It was here, in this crucible, that Luthar's earlier lessons bore fruit. Alexander knew the value of conserving energy, of letting an enemy tire himself before striking. He saw openings where others saw only danger, and struck with precision instead of fury.
When the overseers shouted for two to spar, he began not by charging, but by circling, studying. The men laughed at first, calling him slow, but they laughed less when he dropped opponents twice his age with a single well-placed strike.
By his second year, Seravo had stopped calling him "boy." In the yard, he was "the Lion Cub", still young, but already showing the teeth and the hunger of something that would grow into a predator.
Make no mistake: the pits took their toll. He bore scars already, a thin white line across the bridge of his nose, a puckered wound on his side where a blunted spear had split the skin, a tooth lost to an elbow in the clinch. Pain was a constant companion, and rest a luxury rarely granted.
But in that brutal forge, Alexander ceased to be a boy. He became a blade in the making, still unsharpened, but tempered by heat and hammer, his edge beginning to gleam beneath the blood and grime.