Arthur stood on the battlement with Rickard beside him and watched the fleet burn.
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[QUEST ACQUIRED]
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THE BLACK DRAGON
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Description:
The enemy has revealed its greatest weapon. A dragon flies over Dragonstone and the royal fleet burns beneath it. The enemy commander rides upon its back. If they are not stopped, everything you have built will follow the ships into the fire.
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Objectives:
• Slay the enemy commander
• Slay the dragon
Optional Objective:
• ???
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Rewards:
• Otherworld Token (Legendary)
• Dragon Soul
Optional Reward:
• ???
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Arthur dismissed it with a thought.
"Rickard."
The northerner turned. His face was pale beneath the blood and grime but he was still present.
"Get to the eastern wall. There are scorpions mounted every forty feet along it, the Blackfyres built them for the siege. Find one, get a crew on it, and start shooting. We need every weapon on this fortress pointed at the sky."
Rickard looked at the dragon wheeling over the harbour. Then he looked back at Arthur.
"I will not lie to you, Arthur. I am terrified. I have never seen anything like that and I don't think there is a man alive who has, every instinct in my body is telling me to find a deep hole and climb into it and pray."
He drew his sword.
"But I will not be bending the knee to a bloody dragon today. We northerners did that once already and the family has never lived it down."
Arthur's mouth curved despite everything.
"Good man."
Rickard ran off and Arthur stood alone on the battlement.
He closed his eyes.
He had spent a year on this.
A year of reading the Dragon Dictionary, a year of meditation in the Godswood, a year of feeling the shapes of the words forming in the back of his throat. A year of truly understanding what each of the words meant beyond what was written on a page.
He opened his eyes and looked at the dragon that was banking over the eastern side of the harbour, its wings spread as it lined up another run.
He drew a breath that went all the way down to the bottom of his lungs and past that.
He then released the words.
JOOR ZAH FRUL
The words came out of him like a gust of wind from a storm. It felt as though his throat was tearing itself in half. The air in front of him rippled visibly, a shimmering wave of distortion that raced outward from his mouth across the harbour at a speed that made it look as though the sky itself had been struck.
The wave then hit the dragon.
Arthur saw the moment of impact, the great black body shuddering in the air as the shout slammed into it with the weight of a mountain. Its wings faltered and its head jerked back. For one heartbeat, one single glorious heartbeat, the dragon seemed to hang in the sky as though it would fall.
Then it beat its wings and kept flying.
Nothing happened.
Arthur stood on the battlement with his throat raw and his lungs burning and his hand braced on the wall and watched the dragon complete its bank and dive toward the harbour and breathe fire across another line of ships.
"No." The word came out as a croak. "No. No, that was supposed to—"
It was supposed to work... but it didn't and he knew why.
He had known why since he started learning the shout yet had hoped the gods would be kind enough to grand him some small manner of mercy. But in the end it had always been in the back of his mind. The dictionary had been clear. Dragonrend was created to force the concept of mortality upon creatures that had never known it, immortal spirits of the sky that could not conceive of their own death. The shout worked because it introduced something alien into a mind that had no defence against it.
The dragons of Valyria were not immortal.
They aged and sickened and fell in battle and were killed by other dragons and by men with scorpions.
They knew what death was.
They were mortal creatures.
Arthur slammed his fist into the wall hard enough to make his hand bleed.
"DAMN IT."
The dragon breathed fire across the harbour and four more ships became torches.
He had to do something else.
He had to bring it down.
He looked down at his hands and thought for a moment as he watched the blood drip between his fingers.
He had to bring down the dragon.
What could he use... he wondered as he looked up at the sky watching as numerous scorpion bolts missed and grazed off the dragons hide.
His eyes then widened as he got an idea, it was likely to fail but he would have to try.
[Genesis]
Years ago he had used this very ability to make the royal family a new set of Valyrian steel swords, something that when his trait was upgraded became almost offensively easy.
But now he needed something else.
He closed his eyes to focus as he fully visualised exactly what he wanted to make.
A scorpion bolt.
Four feet long.
Thick as a man's wrist, with a head shaped for penetration and attached to it, a rope. Not hemp. Not silk but something stronger than either, woven from fibres that had Valyrian steel threaded through them, a rope that could hold the weight of a dragon.
The energy left him in a torrent and almost sent him to the ground. He caught himself on the wall and hung there gasping while the world swam around him.
It was actually the rope that managed to take the most energy out of him. As far as he knew not even the valyrians had known how to achieve what he did, weaving metal fibres into the rope and making it extremely strong would be beyond even their craftsmen.
Eventually the light around him from [Genesis] faded and when it cleared, the bolt was in his hands.
Four feet of dark rippled steel with a barbed head and a large coil of rope attached to its tail, the grey-silver rope shined faintly and was lighter than expected.
Arrhur didn't dwell on it for long and ran along the eastern wall past the crews of Targaryen soldiers manning the scorpions and to his friends.
Rickard was on the third scorpion from the tower, hauling on the winch with two other men. Tywin was beside him with a bolt in his hands. Brynden was further along the wall with Llewyn, and Ser Duncan the Tall manning scorpions of their own.
Prince Duncan came running along the battlement toward Arthur with his sword in his hand and his face in a panic.
"Arthur! We have to go down there. My father is on the flagship. That bastard is burning the fleet, we have to—"
"Your father has Gerold and half the Kingsguard with him. He can take care of himself." Arthur did not slow. "What we need to do is bring that dragon down. If it stays in the air it burns the fleet along with the rest of us."
Tywin looked up as Arthur reached the scorpion and his eyes went to the bolt in Arthur's hands.
For a moment the Lion of Lannister's face showed something that Arthur had never seen on it before.
Awe and slight envy.
"Is that," Tywin said, "what I think it is."
"Valyrian steel." Arthur held the bolt up. "I found it inside the keep The Blackfyres must have brought it with them from Essos."
"By the gods." Rickard had let go of the winch and was staring at the bolt. "Where did they find such a thing. Who makes a scorpion bolt from Valyrian steel."
"I don't know and I don't care." Arthur began to uncoil the rope. "But if there is anything on this island that will punch through those scales, this is it."
He tied the rope to the bolt's tail with a knot that would not slip, and then he ran the other end to the heavy iron ring set into the stone of the wall behind the scorpion and he tied that end too, doubling the knot and hauling it tight until the iron ring groaned.
He loaded the bolt into the scorpion.
Prince Duncan was beside him now, and Tywin on the other side, and Rickard at the winch.
"One shot," Duncan said quietly. "We have one bolt, Arthur if you miss—"
"I won't miss."
Arthur put his hands on the scorpion's aiming lever and looked at the sky.
The dragon had finished another run across the harbour and was rising, gaining height for its next dive. In perhaps ten seconds it would pass the eastern wall at a range of three hundred yards and a height of two hundred feet.
Arthur watched it come and got ready....
Now!
[The World]
Time stopped and Arthur adjusted the scorpion.
He had four and a half seconds and he used every one of them. He calculated the range. He calculated the drop. He calculated the lead, where the dragon would be when the bolt arrived.
He adjusted the aim one final time.
Time resumed.
He pulled the trigger.
The scorpion fired with a crack like a tree splitting and the bolt leapt from the groove with the rope streaming behind it. Arthur watched it cross the three hundred yards in a single held breath before the bolt struck the dragon in its hind leg which was not where arrhur was aiming, but he'd take it.
SCREEEEEEEEAAACH
The sound was different from the shriek it had made before. That had been a war cry. This was puree pain. The great dragon convulsed in the air and spun in a half-circle as it fell to the ocean.
Arthur felt hope bloom in his chest before it was immediately crushed when the dragon flapped its wings and managed to get back up in the air.
"Shit," Arthur breathed.
He had hoped the bolt would go through the body and find the heart or the lungs or the spine. He had hoped for the dragon to fold in the air and fall. Instead it was wounded, enraged and still flying.
But that's why he had the rope.
Speaking of, the rope suddenly went taut.
It snapped up off the battlement with a crack, every coil pulling straight at once, and the iron ring in the wall groaned as the full weight of a dragon in flight hit it. The dragon felt the resistance and screamed again and beat its wings harder, trying to climb, trying to pull free.
"WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR." Arthur's voice cracked across the wall. "FIRE. EVERY SCORPION. FIRE NOW."
Bolts leapt from every scorpion along the eastern wall, twenty of them, thirty, a volley that filled the air between the fortress and the tethered dragon. Most missed. The dragon was thrashing and the bolts flew wide or high or short. But it was closer now, held closer by the rope, and some of them hit. Three bolts skidded off the scales. Two more struck true and stuck, one in the flank and one in the base of the tail, and the dragon's scream rose to a pitch that made men on the wall drop their weapons and clutch their ears.
That was when the iron ring tore out of the wall.
It came free with a sound like a bone breaking and the rope whipped up off the battlement las the dragon's pull yanked it free.
Arthur did not think, and he wasn't quite sure what was possessing him in that moment, but his hand simply went out and closed around the rope as it whipped past him, and he was pulled off the battlement of Dragonstone and into the sky.
One moment there was stone under his feet and the next there was nothing, only air and the rope in his hands and the dragon above him climbing higher and higher.
(AN: sadly Dragonrend doesn't work, I thought about making it work but tbh it just wouldn't make sense. It was designed to make immortal beings feel the concept of mortality, something that the dragons in asoiaf already understand. Not that it's gonna be useless however. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)
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