(The Ascent to the Giant's Lance - Autumn, 125 AC)
Most men looked up at the Eyrie and felt vertigo. They saw an impossible fortress, a splinter of white stone driven into the sky, defying the gods and mocking gravity. They saw the legend of Artys Arryn and the flight of the falcon.
Aeryn Royce-Targaryen did not feel vertigo. He felt structural curiosity.
He had left Vermithor hunting wild goats in the lower foothills. He could have flown to the summit in a matter of minutes, landing in the courtyard with fire and glory, reminding every lord in the Vale of his bloodline. But flying was cheating. Flying did not explain how they had done it.
Aeryn wanted to understand the skeleton of the mountain.
The journey began at the Gates of the Moon, the base fortress guarding the approach. From there, the ascent was a logistical torture that Aeryn analyzed with every step of his mule. The path was narrow, treacherous, and deliberately designed so that no army could march up in formation.
They passed Stone, the first waycastle. Then Snow, where the air became so thin that the guards breathed in shallow, ragged gasps.
Aeryn, wrapped in layers of bear fur and reinforced grey wool, ignored the cold. He was watching the rock.
"Metamorphic granite," he muttered to himself, touching the cliff face as his mule slipped on the loose gravel. "High density. Resistant to wind erosion, but incredibly difficult to carve. They must have used diamond-tipped tools or... ancient dragonfire to soften the veins."
His escort, the Captain of Lady Jeyne's household guard, glanced at him with a mixture of confusion and unease. The Prince had not said a word about the landscape, which was spectacular, nor about the biting wind. He only spoke to the stones.
Finally, they reached Sky.
Here, the path for the mules ended. Before them opened the final abyss: a vertical wall of six hundred feet leading up to the main fortress. There were no stairs. There were no ramps.
There was only a basket.
Aeryn dismounted, adjusting the straps of his mechanical leg brace. The wind at this altitude did not blow; it howled. It was an invisible predator trying to strip the flesh from their bones.
Aeryn approached the edge. There stood the mechanism. A gigantic winch made of weirwood, ropes as thick as a man's thigh, and a basket of oak reinforced with iron bands.
"Prince Aeryn?" asked the winch operator, a burly man with arms like tree trunks, shivering slightly despite his heavy cloak. "Are you ready to ascend? The view can be... dizziness-inducing for some."
Aeryn ignored the question. He walked past the man and approached the winch. He ignored the view of the valley, which stretched out like a green and brown tapestry thousands of feet below. His violet eyes locked onto the gears.
"The gear ratio," Aeryn said, pointing to the main cogwheel. "Is it five-to-one or six-to-one?"
The operator blinked, taken aback. "My Lord?"
"The force required to lift the basket with a full load," Aeryn explained, running his good hand over the animal fat lubricating the massive axle. "If the ratio is five-to-one, you are lifting two hundred pounds with forty pounds of force. But I see a double pulley system on the upper beam. That reduces friction but increases the length of rope required."
Aeryn looked up, craning his neck toward the beam jutting out from the castle, high above them.
"Who maintains the ropes?" Aeryn asked, his voice suddenly serious.
"We change them every two years, my Prince," the man replied nervously. "They are braided hemp from the Arbor."
"Hemp rots with the moisture of the clouds," Aeryn noted, frowning as he inspected the fibers. "And the cold crystallizes the residual sap in the fibers, making them brittle. These should be treated with pine tar or beeswax."
Aeryn pulled out a small knife and scraped the surface of the rope. It was dry.
"I will go up," Aeryn said, stepping into the basket. "But when I come down, I am sending three barrels of beeswax from Runestone. You are going to wax every inch of this cable, or the next time Lady Jeyne ascends, the internal friction could snap the core."
The operator swallowed hard, his face pale. "Yes... yes, my Lord."
The ascent was slow and swaying. As the basket rose into the sky, Aeryn did not look down at the world he was leaving behind. He took out a notebook and a stick of charcoal. He sketched the schematic of the winch. He calculated the weight of the basket, the wind speed, and the tension of the cable.
By the time the basket hit the wooden floor of the Eyrie's landing platform, Aeryn was not impressed by the magic of the place. He was awestruck by the physics.
...
(The High Hall of the Eyrie)
The castle was small compared to Harrenhal or the Red Keep, but it was exquisite. Seven white towers clustered together like spears of ice. The interior was a masterpiece of blue marble and fluted columns, bathed in the pure, cold light of the upper atmosphere.
Lady Jeyne Arryn, the Maiden of the Vale, sat on the Weirwood Throne. She wore a gown of sky-blue velvet and a silver circlet shaped like falcon's wings. Around her, the court of the Eyrie watched the newcomer with a mix of fascination and fear.
They expected a warrior, the boy who had tamed the second-largest dragon in the world. They expected Targaryen arrogance, fire, and noise.
Aeryn entered. He wore his grey tunic and carried his bronze-capped cane. He walked with that rhythmic limp—step, clank, step, clank—the metallic sound of his leg echoing against the pristine marble.
He did not bow deeply. He gave a sharp, technical nod, an acknowledgement of one ruler to another.
"Lady Jeyne," Aeryn said. "Thank you for receiving me. You have an oxidation problem on the bolts of the lower portcullis."
Jeyne Arryn blinked, surprised, and then let out a clear, resonant laugh that broke the tension in the room.
"Welcome, cousin," she said, smiling. "Most guests comment on the beauty of my tapestries or the purity of the air. You give me a maintenance report before you've even tasted bread and salt."
"Beauty is subjective," Aeryn replied, walking closer to the dais. "Corrosion is objective."
Jeyne rose and stepped down from the high seat. "Come, 'Lord Engineer.' Let us eat. We have matters to discuss, but first I want to know why you have been looking at my walls as if you want to disassemble them."
...
(The Private Solar - The Moon Tower)
They ate roasted capons and drank sweet wine from the Arbor on a private terrace that hung over the void. The view was, without a doubt, the most spectacular in Westeros. One could see the Mountains of the Moon, the Vale of Arryn spreading out like a living map, and in the distance, the shimmer of the Narrow Sea.
On the table, however, what mattered was not the food. It was the parchment.
The Treaty of Trade Integration.
Aeryn explained the terms with the same cold precision he had used to analyze the winch.
"The Trade Council will centralize the tariffs," he said, moving a wine goblet to represent Gulltown and a salt cellar for Runestone. "By eliminating internal customs, we reduce the transport cost by thirty percent. That makes Vale grain competitive in Braavos and Pentos against the grain from the Reach."
Jeyne listened intently. She was a shrewd ruler, accustomed to defending her position in a world of men who underestimated her.
"Lord Grafton wept when he sent me his letter," Jeyne commented, amused. "He said you had put a dragon on his balcony and stolen his future."
"I gave him a future," Aeryn corrected, cutting a piece of meat with surgical precision. "I only took away his monopoly. Now he is richer than before, he just has less power to strangle his neighbors."
Jeyne signed the document. With that stroke of the quill, the economy of the Vale was unified under Aeryn's de facto administration.
"Done," she said, rolling up the parchment. "Now, Aeryn, tell me the truth. Did you come all this way just for this? We could have done this by raven."
Aeryn set down his goblet. He stood up and walked to the edge of the balcony, looking at the structure of the tower itself.
"I wanted to see the foundations," he admitted.
"The foundations?"
"Artys Arryn did not build this with magic," Aeryn said, pointing to the masonry work. "Look at the angle of this wall. It is tilted inward by five degrees. That distributes the weight toward the center of gravity of the mountain pinnacle. If it were straight, the wind shear would have toppled it centuries ago."
He turned to Jeyne, his eyes shining with an intellectual passion he rarely showed.
"How did they get the marble up here, cousin? The blue marble quarries are on Tarth, not in the Vale. They had to bring it by ship, then by mule to the Gates of the Moon, and then... what? Did they hoist it block by block with the winch?"
"They say they used griffins," Jeyne joked softly.
"No," Aeryn said, dead serious. "They used counterweights. They must have built a temporary scaffolding system, perhaps a series of spiral wooden ramps that no longer exist. The logistics... it must have cost more lives than Aegon's Conquest."
Aeryn leaned over the railing, dangerously far.
"And the water? There are no springs up here. You catch rain and snowmelt in cisterns carved into the cold rock beneath the cellars. But if there is a drought... the Eyrie is vulnerable. It is impregnable to an army, but fragile to biology."
Jeyne watched him. She had met many ambitious men. Daemon Targaryen wanted power. Otto Hightower wanted influence. Corlys Velaryon wanted legacy.
Aeryn Royce wanted to understand the mechanism of the world.
"You are strange, Aeryn," Jeyne said softly. "You look at my castle and you don't see a home. You see an equation."
"Everything is an equation, cousin," Aeryn replied, his voice carried away by the wind. "War, trade, loyalty. If you understand the variables, you can predict the outcome."
"And what outcome do you predict for us?" she asked, her playfulness vanishing. "The King is dying. Rhaenyra and Alicent are sharpening their claws. The Vale will have to choose."
Aeryn stepped back from the edge. The wind whipped his silver hair.
"The Eyrie is a static system," Aeryn said. "It is designed to isolate itself. To close the Bloody Gate and wait for the world below to tire of knocking."
He touched his brace, the cold metal beneath his fingers.
"But isolation is inefficient. When the war comes, Jeyne, do not hide up here. The Eyrie is a trap if the enemy has dragons."
Jeyne tensed. "Are you threatening me?"
"I am advising you," Aeryn said calmly. "Vhagar could burn these seven towers in an hour. There is nowhere to run. The only real defense is not height. It is integration."
Aeryn pointed down, toward where Runestone could not be seen, but felt.
"I have built a system that connects. My roads, my ships, my silos. If the Vale remains united, we are too heavy to be moved. If we divide, we are rubble."
Jeyne Arryn stood and joined him at the railing. They looked at the sunset over the mountains together.
"You remind me of my father," she said after a moment. "He worried too much about details, too. But you... you are different. You have no fear."
"Fear is a lack of data," Aeryn replied. "And I intend to have all the data."
...
(The Winch Room - Later That Night)
Aeryn did not go to sleep. He convinced the Castellan to let him into the Winch Room, the hidden heart of the castle where the massive chains of the cargo elevators were coiled.
He spent three hours there.
He sketched the gears. He measured the thickness of the axles. He calculated the breaking tension.
He discovered that the Arryns had used a primitive but effective iron alloy for the gear teeth, something that had been lost to history. He took mental notes to replicate it in the foundries of Runestone.
As he ran his hand along the oiled wood of a giant pulley, Aeryn felt a deep admiration for the dead architects. They didn't have dragons. They didn't have the Vault. They didn't have the gold he had. And yet, they had conquered the mountain with pure geometry.
"Beautiful," Aeryn whispered in the dark.
It was the first time he had used that word to describe something other than his own city or his aunt Helaena.
When he finally descended in the basket the next morning, the signed Treaty in his pocket and his mind full of blueprints stolen from history, Aeryn knew one thing for certain.
The Vale was his. Jeyne Arryn held the title, but Aeryn Royce now understood how the gears worked that held it together. And he who controls the gears, controls the machine.
Upon reaching the ground at the Gates of the Moon, Vermithor descended from a nearby peak, shaking the snow from his wings. The dragon roared, a sound that made the snow on the summits tremble.
Aeryn climbed into his saddle, clicking his mechanical arm into the brace.
"Home, boy," Aeryn said, looking one last time at the impossible white needle in the sky. "We have to redesign the harbor cranes. I have a new idea about counterweights."
The political visit had been a success. But the technical visit had been a revelation.