"I told you, that foreign god king has gone mad. He's clearly trying to get someone to shove the Iron Chair right under his ass.
If we really followed his way of doing things, we Free Folk would have become Kings of the North long ago.
Over the past few thousand years, quite a few Starks have been caught by the people beyond the Wall and had their heads chopped off!"
Tormund muttered loudly, his voice far from quiet, drawing angry glares from the Second Stag and the surrounding Knights of the Fiery Heart.
Jon and the northern nobles also looked irritated and indignant.
"Duke Stark, Queen Sansa, you've misunderstood His Majesty Stannis!"
Davos sighed and said sincerely, "Winterfell is thousands of kilometers away from King's Landing. By the time I take the declaration signed by His Majesty Aegon and manage to find the various commanders at the front, months will likely have passed, and they will already have withdrawn their forces and returned home.
Therefore, we need wyverns as a means of flight.
If I can reach King's Landing in time, no matter how much support from the lords I secure, and no matter whether I can take King's Landing or not, that will be my responsibility and will have nothing to do with His Majesty Aegon.
But if I can only travel by ship, it means that the command authority transferred by His Majesty Aegon is utterly worthless.
And can something that is utterly worthless be used as ransom to free King Aegon?"
"You're really good at twisting concepts," Sansa sneered.
The Onion Knight shook his head and said, "Going back to the earlier question, if your army were short on food, would you leave the warhorses of captured noble prisoners alive?You wouldn't!
No one would be that pedantic.
By the same logic, if you were in King Stannis's position, could you really give up the chance to become a wyvern rider?"
At this moment, Aegon was carried in on a soft couch by several knights. Before the couch had even fully turned through the doorway, his voice rang out:
"Choices made in times of crisis best reveal a person's moral baseline. Clearly, the moment you say such things, the moment Stannis makes such a choice, you are no different from ordinary people."
"Hmph. Are ordinary people qualified to call themselves kings?" Aegon sneered repeatedly.
Melisandre glanced at him and said with a smile, "Pretty words are easy for anyone to say, but when you plotted to kill me, you seemed just like an ordinary man driven by a thirst for power."
She had been downstairs earlier and only came up now together with Aegon and his group.
Although the red-robed priestess looked like a bewitching immortal, her slender waist graceful as swirling snow in the wind, a single glance from her and one sharp remark were enough to make Aegon's face turn pale, and he did not even dare to look at her again.
It was not only Aegon who was afraid. Once Mel entered the hall and spoke, Sansa and the others all showed wary expressions and stiffened in place. This was a monster who could lose her head, turn to ashes, and still be resurrected.The people who had been arguing fiercely moments before suddenly fell silent.
"Well? Have you managed to control the wyverns?" the Second Stag asked expectantly.
A trace of surprise and uncertainty appeared on Melisandre's radiant face as she shook her head. "Daenerys's mark of the holy rider is… extremely powerful.
I underestimated it before and thought I could easily shatter it.
And indeed, after the sacrifice was completed, with the help of the Great Lord of Light, a single strike crushed the contract mark in the wyvern's mind.
But when I used the Lord of Light's divine power to condense a new control rune, the shattered mark actually restored itself completely.
Not only did it recover, it also…"
It was even sensed by the Dragon Queen tens of thousands of miles away, who then struck back fiercely, even extinguishing one of the thoughts descended by the Lord of Light.
The magical principle behind contracting wyverns was learned from Sheep-Egg. By borrowing the authority of a higher dragon, one could suppress lower dragons and wyverns.
Thus, within the sea of consciousness of Aegon's counterfeit Balerion, there existed a massive dark thought.
This was not a free-floating thought, but one fused with divine power and branded onto the wyvern's soul in the form of runes.
It was similar to the way Kui Xi left a fragment of his soul on a target to locate their position. Daenerys could also vaguely sense the wyvern's direction through that thought, meaning cardinal direction rather than a precise location, and could transmit soul-based attacks through it.
However, Sheep-Egg's technique had already reached perfection and did not have the flaw of Kui Xi's positioning spell, in which the target could reverse-locate the caster through the soul fragment left on them and retaliate.
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect spell, only different emphases.
Kui Xi's positioning spell focused on precise location and could project a soul avatar.
Its main purpose was to assist divination, so that he could show off in front of mortal emperors.
Back when Daenerys was still an ordinary mortal, he had utterly stunned her and made her regard him as a being beyond comprehension.
Sheep-Egg's contract mark never aimed at precise positioning. Contracting the wyvern and punishing disobedient ones at the soul level was the true purpose.
Simply put, once the contract mark was triggered, Daenerys could sense it and transmit a soul attack into the wyvern's sea of consciousness, but others could not use the contract mark within the wyvern's mind to reverse-locate or attack Daenerys.
Mel knew this, so she sacrificed forty flayed men and used R'hllor's divine might to instantly annihilate the small contract mark, leaving Daenerys no chance to retaliate, just as Daenerys herself had done when she seized Sheep-Egg's wyverns.
If it had been Sheep-Egg, once the contract mark disappeared, the wyvern would have become unclaimed, and R'hllor could then leave behind a single thought to serve as a dragon soul, simulating His own contract mark. Other gods might not be able to do this, but R'hllor certainly could, since Sheep-Egg learned everything from Him.
Unfortunately, Daenerys's methods were extraordinary. When she seized Sheep-Egg's wyverns, she had already considered the possibility of being robbed in turn, and thus improved the contract mark, granting it the immortal property of a greenseer's soul.
After Aunt Mel's sacrifice, the sigil of the pact within Aegon's winged dragon's sea of consciousness did indeed vanish in an instant. However, when she guided a single thought of R'hllor to construct the "Mark of the Red God" inside the dragon, Dany's pact sigil quietly restored itself.This disturbance even alerted Dany in Slaver's Bay.
Fivefold dragon spirit, the warrior mantle of the Seven Gods, the soul-destroying strike derived from the Dragonslayer's Horn, and Dany's own sword-god divinity. In a split second, an incomparably brilliant sword light crossed tens of thousands of miles and cleaved into the newly formed Mark of the Red God.
The scene was like Aunt Mel sneaking into Dany's home to steal something, opening the safe, only to find a nuclear bomb with its countdown at zero.
Caught completely unprepared, Aunt Mel bled from all seven orifices on the spot and nearly fainted. Had she truly lost consciousness, she likely would have been crushed by the dragon like a stone mill.
R'hllor was, after all, a true god. Using only a single thought to withstand a "nuclear explosion," he actually endured it. Then came a second sword light, a third.The battlefield was inside the dragon's sea of consciousness. With two top-tier powers wreaking havoc like this, it would have been strange if the creature did not go mad.
That very day, Balerion injured its eyes and wings, smashed into the city wall, and suffered another round of serious damage. Later, in order to capture it, Stannis, following Aunt Mel's instructions, had the dragon dragged down from the wall and roll into the courtyard. He then ordered his men to drive iron spikes and hardwood stakes into its wings, tail, and feet, and even brought out anchor chains to lock its mouth shut.
Only then was a fifty-meter-long monster subdued.
But once it went berserk, the chains snapped. It threw back its head and let out a cathartic wail of grief, shaking the entirety of Winterfell. The wooden stakes and iron spikes broke and tore free under the grinding of bone and flesh. Though it was covered in wounds and drenched in blood, pain only drove a mad creature further into madness.
Then the "bootleg Godzilla movie" that Jon and Sansa had once seen began to play out.
Thinking of the Red God's thought that had ultimately been annihilated, Aunt Mel's expression grew more solemn than ever before.
Yes, Dany had won.
Her pact sigil could regenerate endlessly, no matter how R'hllor toyed with it. Yet the damage she inflicted upon R'hllor's thoughts accumulated in very real terms.
If Aunt Mel had immediately sacrificed Theon next and allowed R'hllor to send down another will along with a great deal of divine power, she certainly could have driven Dany away.
But Aunt Mel wanted to burn Theon, while Stannis was unwilling to completely tear his relationship with Jon apart.
"Go on, then. What happened next?" Jon could not help asking.
Aunt Mel fell into thought. However, Jon and the others were listening with rapt attention. After waiting a long time without hearing what came next, they grew restless.
"Come see me tonight, and I'll tell you," she said.
Right in front of Stannis, Aunt Mel shot Jon a seductive look, her words unusually flirtatious.
Sansa stared, dumbfounded, her gaze flicking back and forth between Jon and Melisandre.
Stannis did not get angry. He did not even give the two flirting adulterers a warning glare.
Aegon looked at Aunt Mel and said smugly, "You suffered backlash, didn't you? When I went down earlier, I saw you wiping a nosebleed."
"Take King Aegon away. Guard him well. No accidents are permitted," Aunt Mel said flatly.
"Heh, I guessed right!"
Aegon was carried away against his will, still laughing loudly. "You see how formidable my aunt is now, don't you?Her power is not limited to dragons. Even if you compare sorcery alone, she is stronger than you.
So the next time you make any risky decisions, think it over again and again. Remember, the war in Slaver's Bay will not last forever."
Aegon was not some lunatic who went around proclaiming "my aunt is Dany." Mainly, he was scared, afraid that the Red Woman would get him killed.
When he had gone down earlier to soothe Balerion, he heard Aunt Mel say to the Knight of the Fiery Heart that the forty sacrifices burned before were of poor quality and not as effective as king's blood. If Aegon could not control the dragon, then no matter what, Theon Greyjoy was to be brought and sacrificed to the Lord of Light.
He had shuddered a few times on the spot when he heard that.
Had he not barely managed to calm Balerion, Theon likely would have been sacrificed already.
Whether Theon lived or died did not concern Aegon. What made him tremble was Melisandre's casual attitude toward disposing of someone with king's blood.Theon was the only son of a duke.What a ruthless, heartless woman. He had to bring up Aunt Dany to make her feel some apprehension.
In truth, Aegon was overthinking it. There was no need for his reminder.
In Melisandre's eyes, the nobles of the Seven Kingdoms and the gods, including but not limited to the Seven and the Drowned God, were all "firewood" that could be burned to kindle R'hllor's glory.
She had no scruples. Whoever it was, whatever it was, once it was to be burned, she would not hesitate in the slightest. Only the Dragon Queen's grand nephew was someone Aunt Mel truly did not dare touch.
Back then, even Aemon on the Wall had made her itch with temptation. She had very much wanted to burn him and see whether a dragon egg might hatch, but out of fear of Dany, she had reluctantly given up.
Now Dany was dozens of times stronger than when she first arrived at the Wall, and the Dragon Queen's love for her grand nephew exceeded her regard for old Aemon by several hundredfold.
How could she dare make a move?
Aegon was carried away. His threatening words did not stir the slightest ripple in Aunt Mel's heart, but they very much made Stannis and the others feel the pressure.
"How is Balerion now?" Stannis asked with a frown.
"His consciousness is damaged, his emotions extremely unstable. Aegon can only soothe him. He has already driven him away from Winterfell to Winter Town outside the walls to wait out the cold."
Jon's expression changed, and he said displeased, "Winter Town has many Northmen living there. How can you drive a mad dragon there?"
A red-faced fat man spoke up. "Instead of worrying about those townsfolk, it would be better to hurry and have people prepare straw and large canvas tents. A winged dragon is not a true dragon. In a weakened state, it cannot withstand the severe cold of the North."
(End of chapter)
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