Option A — Hype / Flashy
⚡🔥 POWER STONE SUPPORT = MORE CHAPTERS! 🔥⚡
Hey everyone—if you're enjoying this story and you want daily updates, your Power Stones make it happen.
📌 EVENT RULE:💎 Every 50 Power Stones = 1 BONUS CHAPTER 💎
The higher we push the count, the more extra chapters I can drop—so if you want this novel to update every day, let's stack those stones together.
✅ Want more chapters?✅ Want faster updates?✅ Want the story to keep rolling nonstop?
Then tap that Power Stone button and help hit the next milestone. Even 1 stone matters when everyone joins in.
Thank you for reading and supporting—let's crush the next goal. 🚀
-
--
Lonely Hill.
Administrative Hall.
The fire in the hearth burned hot, driving away the chill that seeped through gaps in the doors and windows.
A stag's head with massive antlers hung on the wall. In the flickering firelight, the shadow of those antlers sprawled across the stone behind it like enormous claws.
Before him stood a long, dark red wooden desk, piled with parchment rolls and books—mostly administrative documents awaiting signature.
On ordinary days, Domeric handled the affairs of Lonely Hill here.
Through the tall window behind him, he could see the town stretching out below, with the endless ridgeline of the mountains—Lonely Hill itself—rising beyond.
"Enough. If trouble comes, I'll meet it when it arrives." Domeric scratched his head and set the matter of the wizard aside.
What deserved his attention now was the growth of his domain.
He understood the reality: with the War of the Five Kings and the coming scramble for power, survival would belong to those who could expand, harden, and endure.
Lonely Hill's soil was poor for farming, but the land was riddled with open coal seams and rich iron—easy to work, cheap to extract, and highly profitable.
Add Domeric's knowledge of metallurgy—far beyond the crude methods of this world—and his finished ironwork sold across the Seven Kingdoms, earning him a fortune.
But it still wasn't enough.
He summoned his financial officer, who arrived clutching a thick stack of compiled accounts.
Lonely Hill's main outputs were ore and finished iron goods. Its major imports were grain and daily necessities, all shipped along the White Knife and out to the Shivering Sea.
Among the mineral output, besides coal and iron, there were also copper, sulfur, crystals, rubies, sapphires… luxury goods that brought Domeric an extra stream of income.
A pleasant surprise.
Then he reached the section on grain, and his brow tightened.
After all expenses were deducted, the gold dragons left in the treasury were being spent entirely on food.
In other words: the yearly output of mines and smithies supported nearly a hundred thousand mouths—but there wasn't a single coin left over.
Still, Domeric had to admit the cause: to face wildlings, hill clans, and raiders, he maintained an army of three thousand.
In Westeros, three thousand fully armed men was not a small number—House Bolton's proper host at the Dreadfort was only about twice that.
If he was bleeding coin because he had raised troops too aggressively, it was at least a rational problem.
In Domeric's view, gold dragons hoarded in a vault were nothing but rocks.
There was also the fur trade—though those profits mostly belonged to the nearby mountain clans.
They hunted in the Wolfswood and sold pelts to the miners and smiths of Lonely Hill. Because the trade helped diversify the local economy, Domeric levied no tax on it—an incentive for light industry.
Most of Lonely Hill's revenue went into feeding people and drilling troops. Beyond that, the greatest cost was sea freight.
Few northern lords maintained fleets. The North was too poor to shoulder the expense of building and sustaining one.
So when the Ironborn raided, most northern holds could do little but suffer—no ships, no answer.
White Harbor was the exception.
White Harbor was a great port—often called "the North's mouth"—an ice-free harbor south of Winterfell, and the seat of House Manderly.
It was also the largest settlement north of the Neck, and the smallest of the Five Great Cities.
Its location gave it far broader contact with the south than most of the North could manage.
And Lonely Hill's iron trade thrived largely because House Manderly's ships carried it.
If Lonely Hill had risen fast, White Harbor and the Manderlys had been the single greatest reason.
But in the last three years, the Manderlys had also profited handsomely from the same trade.
Now, with war looming, Domeric no longer wanted to pay crushing freight costs. He wanted that coin redirected into feeding people and training soldiers.
Yet he could not allow the iron trade to stall. It was his purse—and the foundation of everything he was building.
So how did he keep selling iron while refusing to pay shipping?
Could House Manderly ever agree to being… used?
Domeric rubbed his chin, thinking.
Then he remembered a name.
Wylyfide—Lord Manderly's granddaughter.
He pictured the girl's long brown hair, braided into dozens of thin plaits.
Perhaps that was where he should begin.
…
After the financial officer withdrew, Domeric rubbed his forehead and continued turning pages.
He forced himself to review these dry reports every day. It was habit—and it paid. Small irregularities revealed themselves in numbers: embezzlement, bribery, corruption.
Westerosi accountants were primitive. Their "creative bookkeeping" could not compare to the craft of Domeric's old world.
He also read a great deal of intelligence on the nobles of the Seven Kingdoms.
To change the future, he needed to understand the world as it was.
He worked late into the night, until the backlog of the last half month was finally digested.
Being a competent lord was not easy.
He returned to his quarters, ate, and washed. Then—carefully—he set warding sigils on his door and around his bed before lying down.
The wards were a Quarthi piece—purchased at high cost from a warlock across the Narrow Sea—meant to give early warning against strange assassins and sorcery.
The red comet was coming, and with it the return of deeper magic. In Domeric's mind, sorcery was not a force to be ignored.
Sleep still would not come.
He opened his eyes and practiced swordwork instead.
Shing. He drew a longsword.
He held it across his chest.
It was a knight's two-handed sword, forged from folded steel. The blade, scabbard, and hilt were plain—no ornament, no filigree—only sharpened edges ground to a keen bite.
Domeric rested his hand on the grip and simply… felt it.
As his fingers tightened, a sensation surfaced—something like bone and flesh joining.
Sword in hand.
A restless impulse rose in his chest.
He began to move.
At first he stepped slowly between the furniture, his strikes hesitant and measured. Then he accelerated—walking faster, then running, then springing and turning.
The blade flashed faster and faster until the room filled with the hiss of air—yet somehow, despite the speed, he never clipped so much as a chair leg.
In the cramped space he flowed, turning and folding his body, the sword's path unbroken, the light on the steel rippling like water.
There were no absurd flourishes—no "three blossoms of sword-flowers" from tavern tales.
Only fundamentals: cleave, thrust, tap, lift, bind, sweep, cut-up.
But the sword in his hand felt like an extra length of arm—eyes to hand, hand to blade, blade to target.
In his old life, Domeric had read stories where masters claimed training was the greatest pleasure in the world, deeper than books, gold, or beauty.
At the time he had scoffed. How could practice compare to coin and comfort?
Now that he had finally reached the threshold of true skill, he understood. The more he trained, the more endless the depth became.
Then, at the edge of his vision, a mosquito buzzed toward him—fat as a man's thumb.
Domeric twisted and thrust.
The buzzing stopped at once.
He crouched, pinched the insect's body from the floor—snapped in two—and frowned instead of smiling.
"What in all the gods' names… since when does the North have mosquitoes this large?"
-
-
-
🏰 Game of Thrones: Secrets Beneath the Dreadfort
📢 Dark Secrets Await in the North! 📢
Game of Thrones: Secrets Beneath the Dreadfort now has 30 chapters ahead available on Patreon! 🩸🐺
Uncover the secrets buried beneath the Dreadfort and the dark legacy of House Bolton before anyone else.
🛑 Also on Patreon, you can find exclusive novels not available anywhere else, including:
R18: Reincarnated in Her World
Cyberpunk: Lucy Adopted Me and I Got a System
Cyberpunk: The Relentless
My Girlfriend's a Cyberpsycho—Who Knew?
My Cyberpunk 2077 Simulator
The Rebirth of Harry Potter
Dragon King of Ice and Fire
Star Wars: Relics of the Past
🔗 www.patreon.com/c/MrMagnus👤 Patreon name: SrMagnus🐦 Twitter/X: https://x.com/SrMagnusBook
⚠️ Remember: I'll always post more chapters of the novel that gets the most Power Stones!