(The High Pass - Construction Site of the Western Aqueduct, 123 AC)
Progress had a sound. In the Vale of Arryn, it sounded like the rhythmic clink-clink-clink of a thousand chisels hitting grey granite.
Aeryn Royce-Targaryen stood on a wooden scaffolding suspended over a dizzying drop. He was eleven years old, taller now, his limbs lengthening into the wiry strength of adolescence. He wore a heavy coat of wool lined with bronze chainmail, and his mechanical brace was locked into a climbing claw anchored to the rock face.
Below him, the aqueduct was taking shape. It was a marvel of engineering—a river of stone suspended in the sky, designed to bring the glacial meltwater of the Giant's Lance directly to the reservoirs of Runestone.
"The gradient is off by two degrees in Sector Five," Aeryn shouted over the wind, pointing to a plumb line swaying in the breeze.
Master Mason Gylbert, who had kept his hand (barely) and was now the most meticulous builder in the Vale out of sheer terror, nodded frantically. "I will have the pylons shaved down, My Lord. It will be perfect."
"It must be," Aeryn said, checking his schematics. "Water does not forgive mistakes. It finds the weakness and it destroys the..."
CRACK.
A sound like thunder, but sharper.
A massive boulder, the size of a carriage, detached itself from the scree slope a thousand feet above them. It bounced once, shattering a pine tree, and then smashed into the scaffolding of Sector Four.
Wood splintered. Men screamed. The boulder plowed through the masonry work, taking three masons and fifty feet of expensive stonework into the abyss below.
Aeryn didn't flinch. His eyes snapped upward.
"Shields!"
The Bronze Guard detail, stationed on the ridge, raised their shields instantly. But the attack wasn't arrows. It was gravity.
More rocks rained down. And with them came the war cries.
From the mists of the peaks, they emerged. Hundreds of them. They were not the ragged scavengers Aeryn had broken two years ago. These men wore mismatched plate armor stolen from dead knights. They carried steel axes. And they moved with a disturbing unity.
The Stone Crows and the Burned Men had stopped fighting each other. They had united against the machine that was eating their mountain.
"Protect the Prince!" Ser Vardis roared, drawing his sword.
"Secure the skilled labor!" Aeryn counter-ordered, unhooking his brace from the wall. "Masons first! Soldiers second!"
Aeryn scrambled up the ladder to the ridge, his movements efficient, mechanical. He reached the top just as a clansman—a Burned Man with a red hand painted across his face—crested the rise.
The savage swung a rusty morningstar.
Aeryn didn't have a sword. He had his cane—a heavy rod of ironwood capped with a solid bronze knob.
He stepped inside the swing. Physics.
Aeryn drove the bronze cap into the man's solar plexus. The savage doubled over. Aeryn pivoted on his good leg and brought the cane down on the back of the man's neck. Crack.
The man fell and didn't rise.
"My Prince, we must retreat!" Vardis yelled, cutting down another attacker. "There are too many! They are swarming the upper ridge!"
Aeryn looked at the aqueduct. The central arch was cracking under the bombardment of rocks. Months of work. Thousands of gold dragons.
"They are breaking the system," Aeryn whispered.
He felt a cold, metallic anger. Not fear. Offense. They were destroying order.
"Pull back to the lower fort," Aeryn ordered. "Abandon the site."
As they retreated down the mountain path, Aeryn looked back. The clansmen weren't chasing them. They were standing on the ruined scaffolding, smashing the stone arches with hammers, howling at the sky.
They weren't just killing men. They were killing the future.
...
(Runestone - The Map Room, That Night)
The mood in the Map Room was venomous.
Lord Redfort slammed his fist onto the table. "They are unified! Crow-Feather has brokered a pact between the tribes. They say the 'Bronze Demon'—that's you, my Prince—is stealing the mountain's blood by redirecting the water."
"They are savages with superstitions," Lord Belmore spat. "We must ride out in force. A hunt. Run them down."
Aeryn stood at the head of the table. He was cleaning the soot from his mechanical brace with a rag.
"A hunt?" Aeryn asked softly. "You hunt deer, My Lord. You hunt foxes. These are not animals. They are an infection."
He walked to the large relief map of the Vale occupying the center of the room.
"For centuries, the Arryns have treated the clans as a weather event," Aeryn said. "You fight them in the summer, they hide in the winter, and you repeat the cycle the next year. It is inefficient. It is a waste of resources."
He picked up a marker.
"Today, they destroyed Sector Four. They targeted the structural weak points. That implies intelligence. Crow-Feather is not just a savage; he is a tactician."
Aeryn drew a red circle around the Giant's Lance.
"They use the terrain against us. The caves, the high passes, the thin air. We cannot hunt them in their home. We must make their home uninhabitable."
"How?" Ser Vardis asked. "We cannot burn the entire mountain range."
"No," Aeryn said. "But we can close the doors."
He placed bronze markers on the three main passes leading to the peaks.
"I am declaring a Zone of Exclusion. We are not going to patrol the roads anymore. We are going to seize the foothills. Every valley, every goat path, every stream that leads up to the peaks will be fortified."
Aeryn looked at his lords.
"We stop the trade. We stop the raids. We starve them out. And when they come down in force to break the siege... and they will come down..."
Aeryn turned toward the great window.
Outside, the silhouette of Vermithor was etched against the silver light of the full moon. The dragon was no longer just a massive beast; he was a living mountain range. His bronze scales, hardened by nearly a century of existence, gleamed with a deep, metallic luster that no younger flame could ever replicate.
In both sheer mass and wingspan, the Bronze Fury now dwarfed Meleys and far surpassed the size of Caraxes, reclaiming his undisputed place as the second-largest dragon in the world. Only the ancient shadow of Vhagar was capable of stretching further than his own. His chest, a furnace of volcanic heat, expanded with a rhythmic power that vibrated the very foundations of Runestone, a silent reminder to the entire Vale that while Aeryn was the mind, Vermithor was the Final Judgment.
"When they come down," Aeryn finished, turning back to the room, "we will not meet them with knights charging for glory. We will meet them with the Machine."
He turned to his Minister of Works.
"How long to repair the aqueduct?"
"Three months, My Lord," the minister replied nervously. "If... if the attacks stop."
"The attacks will stop," Aeryn said. "Draft the orders for the Bronze Guard. Full mobilization. 1,200 men. We march to the Shuddering Gorge in two days."
Lord Redfort looked at the boy. "The Gorge? That is a death trap. Narrow, steep walls. If they catch us there..."
"It is a funnel," Aeryn corrected. "And I am the one holding the bottle."
...
(The Rookery - Later)
Aeryn stood alone in the cold night air. He held a letter in his hand, written on fine parchment. It was a report from his new contact in Braavos.
The contract is accepted. The face is chosen.
Aeryn burned the letter in a brazier.
He looked North, toward the jagged peaks that looked like the teeth of a monster biting into the sky.
"You broke my stone," Aeryn whispered to the invisible enemy. "So I will break your world."
He didn't hate them. He really didn't. But they were in the way of the perfect city. And in Aeryn's calculus, obstruction was a capital offense.
He went inside to sharpen his cane. The time for policing was over. The time for industrial warfare had begun.