The marble floor of the Crescent Chamber was polished to such a mirror-like finish that Rhea could see the reflection of her own worn, travel-stained boots against the pristine white stone.
The air up here was different. It didn't just feel thin; it felt sterile. There was no smell of earth, no scent of roasting meat or horse sweat like in the bustling courtyards of Runestone. It smelled only of cold stone, wind, and burning beeswax candles.
"Lord Yohn," a voice echoed across the chamber.
Stepping forward from a phalanx of guards clad in sky-blue cloaks and silver falcon crests was Ser Vardis Egen, the Captain of the Eyrie's guard. The man looked exhausted, the skin beneath his eyes bruised with dark circles. He offered a crisp, formal bow, but the tension in his shoulders was wound as tight as a winch-cable.
"Ser Vardis," her father rumbled, his massive bronze-clad frame seeming to take up half the room. He did not bow; he was a Lord Paramount's most powerful bannerman, and he carried the weight of it. "We came as swiftly as the mountain passes allowed. Tell me we are not the last to arrive."
"Lord Hunter and Lord Belmore arrived yesterday, My Lord. Lord Waynwood is expected on the morrow," Ser Vardis replied smoothly, though his eyes darted nervously toward the heavy weirwood doors that led deeper into the castle. "Lady Lysa... she is receiving no one today. The grief is heavy upon her."
"I did not ride for three weeks and climb a mountain to be turned away by a grieving widow's schedule," Yohn Royce said, his voice dropping an octave, resonating with a dangerous, immovable bass. "The Hand of the King is dead. The Vale is bleeding leadership. Open the doors, Ser Vardis. She will see House Royce."
For a moment, Rhea calculated the exact vector Ser Vardis's hand would take if he reached for his sword, and precisely how fast she would need to deploy a web-line to disarm him. But the captain merely swallowed hard, recognizing that standing between the Bronze Yohn and his liege lord's widow was a foolish endeavor. He nodded sharply to the guards, who heaved the massive, intricately carved weirwood doors open.
They stepped into the High Hall of the Arryns.
If the Eyrie was a masterpiece of engineering, the High Hall was its crown jewel. The walls were pure, blue-veined marble, soaring upwards to a vaulted ceiling that seemed to disappear into the shadows. Tall, narrow windows let in piercing shafts of high-altitude sunlight.
But Rhea's Expert Item Construction gift didn't focus on the masonry. It immediately drew her attention to the center of the room, to the raised dais where the thrones of the Arryns sat.
Sitting upon the weirwood throne, her posture rigid and her face pale as milk, was Lady Lysa Arryn.
Rhea had heard the whispers from the Runestone servants, of course. They said the Tully girl had grown strange in King's Landing, that her miscarriages had soured her mind. But seeing her in person, the reality was much worse. Lysa was a woman consumed by terror. Her blue eyes were wide, darting frantically around the empty hall as if she expected assassins to drop from the rafters. She clutched a heavy velvet shawl around her shoulders, her knuckles white.
And pressed tightly against her side, looking small, pale, and thoroughly miserable, was a boy of roughly six years old. Robert Arryn. The new Lord of the Vale.
"Lord Royce," Lysa's voice cut through the vast hall. It was shrill, lacking any of the measured, courtly grace Rhea's own mother possessed. "You brought an army to my gates. The scouts said you marched with a hundred heavy horse. Why?"
"To protect my liege lord's widow and his heir, My Lady," Yohn said, his heavy boots echoing like hammer strikes as he approached the dais, stopping at a respectful distance. He sank to one knee, the bronze plates of his armor grinding together. Andar followed suit. Lady Royce and Rhea dropped into deep, flawless curtsies.
"Protect us?" Lysa let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. "From whom, Lord Yohn? The mountain clans? The wind?" She leaned forward, her eyes suddenly burning with a manic, feverish intensity. "Or the Lannisters? Because they are the ones you should be marching against! They poisoned him! The Queen and her golden brother, they poured the tears of Lys into my Jon's cup!"
The declaration hung in the air, heavy and treasonous. Lady Royce sharply inhaled, her hand instinctively reaching out to grip Rhea's arm.
Yohn Royce slowly rose to his feet. His face was a mask of hard, pragmatic granite. "If the Lannisters murdered Lord Jon, then we must call the banners. We must fortify the Bloody Gate, send ravens to the Riverlands and the North—"
"No!" Lysa shrieked, clutching her son closer. The boy whimpered, shrinking against his mother's velvet gown. "No ravens! No banners! The Vale will bleed if we march! They will come for my sweetrobin next! The Bloody Gate is sealed. No one enters the Vale, and no one leaves. We are safe here. The Eyrie is impregnable."
Rhea kept her eyes politely lowered to the floorboards, but behind the veil of her pale hair, her mind was moving at a thousand miles an hour.
She's mad, Rhea realized with chilling clarity. She has the most defensible region in the Seven Kingdoms, tens of thousands of untouched knights, and she's going to lock the door and hide under the bed.
Rhea looked up, just slightly, catching sight of the sickly, trembling boy who technically held the power of life and death over her entire family. Robert Arryn was sniffling, his thin legs dangling off the edge of the massive chair.
She remembered her mother's words in the carriage. What are you fighting for? Rhea had spent seven years forging unbreakable swords and weaving magic into steel. She had prepared for a war of clashing armies and charging cavalry. But standing in this freezing, beautiful hall, watching a terrified woman paralyze an entire kingdom, the brutal truth of Westeros finally clicked into place.
A master-crafted sword was entirely useless if the hand holding it was trembling with cowardice.
The Eyrie wasn't a fortress. It was a tomb. And Lysa Arryn was sealing them all inside it.
Yohn Royce argued, his voice a low, booming rumble of reason against Lysa's shrill paranoia, but it was like throwing stones at a fog. Lady Lysa would not be moved. She dismissed them to their guest chambers with a wave of her trembling hand, demanding that they keep their guards confined to the lower barracks.
As they walked back through the Crescent Chamber, the silence among the Royces was deafening. Even Andar looked deeply unsettled, his hand resting restlessly on the pommel of his runic blade.
"She is unwell, Yohn," Lady Royce whispered once they were safely out of earshot of the sky-blue guards. "The grief has shattered her."
"Grief does not excuse leaving the borders undefended," Yohn growled quietly, his jaw locked in fury. "She has the Lords of the Vale pacing like caged wolves, and she offers us nothing but fear."
Rhea walked a few paces behind them, her breathing slow, rhythmic, and perfectly controlled. She reached out with her mind, feeling the faint, freezing tether of Horus circling high above the Giant's Lance.
She didn't need a forge up here. She didn't need an anvil or a hammer.
She looked at the sheer, vertical drop out the nearest window, the clouds swirling thousands of feet below. If the lords of the Vale were caged wolves, they needed someone to unlock the gate. They needed a spider in the rafters, weaving a web they couldn't see.
Rhea slipped her hands into the pockets of her dark woolen gown, her fingers grazing the cool metal of her hidden web-shooters.
The guest chambers assigned to House Royce were located in the Moon Tower, offering a view that was simultaneously breathtaking and utterly terrifying. The walls were carved from the same pale, blue-veined marble as the rest of the Eyrie, but here, high above the Crescent Chamber, the wind didn't just howl—it screamed. It battered against the thick, leaded glass of the narrow windows like a physical entity trying to break in.
Rhea stood by the glass, her forehead resting against the freezing pane.
Thousands of feet below, the Vale was swallowed by a sea of bruised, twilight clouds. She couldn't see the ground. She couldn't see the Gates of the Moon, or the goat paths, or the world of normal men. Up here, it felt as though they were adrift on a ship of stone, entirely untethered from reality.
She let out a slow, trembling breath, and the glass fogged over.
For the first time since she had been reborn into this brutal universe, Rhea felt overwhelmingly, paralyzingly small.
Her reincarnated mind, usually a fortress of cold calculations, blueprints, and tactical contingencies, was spinning uselessly. The encounter in the High Hall had rattled her far more than she wanted to admit. Seeing Lysa Arryn's descent into paranoid madness, seeing the frail, sickly Robert Arryn shrinking into his mother's skirts… it had brought the sheer, immovable weight of the A Song of Ice and Fire canon crashing down on her shoulders.
She knew the truth. It was a secret that could burn the Seven Kingdoms to ash.
Jon Arryn's dying words had been "The seed is strong." He had been talking about Robert Baratheon's bastards, the proof that Cersei's children were born of incest. But the darkest, most bitter irony of the Vale was the other seed. The seed that had been planted in Lysa Tully long before she was forced to marry an old man.
Robert Arryn wasn't Jon Arryn's trueborn son. He was the product of Lysa's obsessive, toxic affair with Petyr Baelish. Littlefinger.
The man who had convinced Lysa to poison her own husband with the Tears of Lys. The man who had convinced Lysa to write the letter to Catelyn Stark blaming the Lannisters, striking the very match that would ignite the War of the Five Kings.
Rhea knew all of it. The master blueprint of the continent's destruction was laid out perfectly in her mind.
So fix it, the cold, analytical part of her brain demanded. You are an engineer. You identify the structural flaw and you remove it. Expose Lysa. Expose Baelish.
Rhea squeezed her eyes shut, a bitter, helpless smile twisting her lips.
And how exactly do I do that? she argued back to herself.
She looked down at her hands. They were heavily calloused, undeniably strong for her age, but they were still the hands of a ten-year-old girl. She imagined walking up to her father, Bronze Yohn Royce, the most honorable and pragmatic man in the Vale, and telling him the truth.
Father, the Lord of the Eyrie is a bastard born of a brothel-keeper's son, and his mother murdered your liege lord because a man a thousand miles away told her to. Also, the Queen is sleeping with her twin brother.
She would be locked in a tower. Her mother would weep for her lost sanity, and the maesters would bleed her with leeches to cure her of "madness." Even if, by some absolute miracle, her father believed her... what then? Yohn Royce would draw his sword, declare Lysa a traitor, and plunge the Vale into a bloody civil war before the winter even set in. He would be executed for treason against the Crown, her brothers would be slaughtered, and House Royce would be eradicated.
She was not infallible. She was not a god. She was a child locked in a high tower, armed with the knowledge of the apocalypse and absolutely no political capital to stop it.
A sudden wave of dizziness washed over her.
Rhea stumbled back from the window, her hand flying to her temple. The room tilted dangerously. She tried to engage her Total Concentration Breathing to steady her heart rate, visualizing the oxygen flooding her cells to burn away the vertigo.
She drew a massive breath—and immediately doubled over, coughing violently.
The air at this altitude was simply too thin. The atmospheric pressure was completely wrong. Her lungs, trained for years in the heavy, sea-level air of Runestone, couldn't pull enough oxygen from the freezing, rarefied atmosphere of the Giant's Lance to sustain the superhuman technique.
She dropped to her knees on the thick Myrish carpet, gasping, her chest burning as if she had swallowed hot ash. The realization hit her like a physical blow: she was biologically grounded. If she tried to use her breathing techniques to fight up here, to swing a sword or sling a web, she would hyperventilate and pass out within minutes. Her web-fluid, synthesized for denser air, might even freeze in the shooters before it deployed.
Her meticulously crafted armor of invincibility was peeling away. She was just a little girl, suffocating on top of a mountain.
"Rhea!"
The heavy oak door flew open. Lady Royce rushed into the room, her mourning gown sweeping across the floorboards. She dropped to her knees beside her daughter, her soft, warm hands immediately framing Rhea's pale, soot-free face.
"I've got you, sweetling, I've got you," her mother murmured, her voice a soothing balm against the roaring wind outside. "It's the mountain sickness. It takes everyone the first few days. Breathe slowly. Shallow sips. Do not fight the air, let it come to you."
Rhea nodded weakly, forcing her panicked lungs to obey. She let go of the Total Concentration. She let go of the need to optimize her blood flow. She just breathed normally, resting her forehead against her mother's shoulder. She smelled of crushed lavender and warm wool.
"I feel... weak," Rhea whispered, hating the tremor in her voice. It felt like a betrayal of the forge, a betrayal of the iron she had tried to become.
"You are not weak, Rhea. You are human," Lady Royce said softly, stroking her daughter's pale hair. She helped Rhea off the floor, guiding her to the edge of the heavy featherbed. She pulled a thick, fur-lined blanket over Rhea's shoulders, tucking it in with practiced, motherly precision.
Lady Royce sat beside her, keeping one arm wrapped securely around Rhea's waist. For a long time, the only sound in the room was the whistling wind and the rhythmic crackle of the hearth fire Betha had built earlier.
"I hated it when I first came here, too," Lady Royce finally said, her eyes fixed on the dancing flames. "The air makes your head swim, and the silence... the silence of the Eyrie is heavier than stone. It makes you feel as though the rest of the world has vanished, and you are the only souls left in existence."
Rhea leaned into her mother's warmth. The carriage ride had cracked the shell she had built around her heart, but sitting here, stripped of her physical advantages and overwhelmed by the canon timeline, the shell finally shattered.
"I don't know how to fix it, Mother," Rhea confessed, her voice barely a whisper. She wasn't talking about the altitude. "The realm... Lady Lysa... it's all broken. The steel is brittle. And I... I am too small to hold the hammer."
Lady Royce looked down at her, her expression softening into something profoundly empathetic. She didn't dismiss Rhea's fears as childish nonsense, nor did she scold her for speaking of politics.
"Oh, my sweet, fierce girl," her mother sighed, pressing a kiss to the crown of Rhea's head. "You have carried the weight of Runestone on those little shoulders since you were old enough to lift a bucket of coal. Your father put a hammer in your hands and told you to forge our salvation. But Rhea... you are ten years old."
Lady Royce reached out, gently taking Rhea's calloused hand, tracing the thick skin with her thumb.
"You do not have to fix the world today," her mother said firmly. "The realm has been breaking and remaking itself for thousands of years. Kings rise and fall. Lords go mad. That is the tragedy of men. But you? You are a child. And while I know the gods have touched you with an ancient, heavy gift, I will not let you sacrifice your soul to the fires of that forge."
Rhea looked up, her gray eyes shining with unshed tears. "But if I don't prepare us... if I don't make us unbreakable..."
"Iron breaks, Rhea. Bronze bends, but eventually, it too shatters under enough force," Lady Royce said, her voice dropping to a fierce, protective whisper. "Do you know what endures? We do. This family. We endure because we hold fast to each other when the wind tries to blow us off the mountain."
Her mother smiled, a nostalgic, beautiful curve of her lips. "Do you remember when you were very small? Before the armory? You used to sit in the solar and trace the tapestries of the Winged Knight. You didn't look at them to find the flaws in the weaving, Rhea. You looked at them with wonder. You asked me if falcons could truly grow large enough to carry a man to the clouds."
Rhea blinked, a sudden, vivid memory surfacing from her modern life, bleeding seamlessly into her current one.
Before she had been an engineer calculating stress loads on suspension bridges, she had been a kid who loved fantasy novels. She remembered the smell of old paperbacks, the thrill of reading about dragons, wizards, and impossible castles in the sky. When she had reincarnated, the sheer terror of Westeros had completely eclipsed that wonder. She had treated the magic of this world—Horus, the runes, the web-shooters—as sterile tools for survival, not as the miracles they truly were.
She was sitting in the Eyrie. A castle built on the top of a mountain, accessible only by baskets winched through the clouds. It was the most fantastical, impossible, beautiful place she had ever seen.
And she was missing it because she was too busy worrying about the stress points.
"I remember," Rhea whispered, a small, genuine smile finally breaking through her soot-stained demeanor. "I asked if the Winged Knight's armor was made of moonlight."
"You did," Lady Royce laughed softly. "And I told you it was made of courage. Let yourself see the moonlight again, Rhea. The wars will come. The winter will come. But tonight, we are safe in the highest castle in the world. Let that be enough."
For the first time in seven years, Rhea didn't run a tactical simulation in her head. She didn't map the exits. She just closed her eyes, leaned against her mother, and let the warmth of the fire chase the chill from her bones. She allowed herself to be exactly what she was: a daughter, safe in her mother's arms.
An hour later, the heavy oak door opened again, admitting the imposing figures of Bronze Yohn and Andar. They brought with them the smell of cold stone and the heavy, metallic clink of armor.
The tense, political atmosphere they carried evaporated the moment Yohn saw his wife and daughter sitting quietly by the hearth.
Yohn paused, his broad shoulders slumping slightly as the sheer exhaustion of dealing with Lysa Arryn caught up with him. He unbuckled his heavy bronze sword belt, leaning the runic scabbard against the wall, and crossed the room.
"Is she unwell?" Yohn asked, his deep voice softening with a rare, paternal concern as he looked at Rhea huddled under the furs.
"The mountain air," Lady Royce answered smoothly, offering her husband a reassuring smile. "It takes a toll. But she is resting now."
Andar walked over, dragging a heavy wooden chair to the hearth, and collapsed into it with a groan. "The air is the least of the sickness in this castle," he muttered darkly. "The sky-blue cloaks look at us as if we're the ones who slipped the poison into Jon Arryn's cup. Lysa has commanded that no lords may gather in groups larger than three without a guard present. In our own liege lord's halls!"
"Hold your tongue, Andar," Yohn commanded, though there was no real heat in it. He sat heavily on the edge of the bed next to Rhea, the mattress groaning under his immense weight. "The walls of the Eyrie are thin, and Lady Lysa's paranoia is thick. We will speak no treason here."
"It isn't treason to state the truth, Father," Andar argued, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "She is paralyzing the Vale. Lord Hunter was nearly spitting blood in the courtyard. The mountain clans are growing bolder every day because they know the knights of the Vale are locked up here, playing nursemaid to a frightened woman and a shivering boy."
Rhea watched her older brother. Over the years, their secret dawn training sessions had forged a bond between them that was stronger than steel. She had watched Andar grow from an arrogant, somewhat clumsy squire into one of the deadliest swordsmen in the Vale. She had built his weapons, and he had protected her secrets.
Looking at him now, frustrated and eager to protect their homeland, she felt a surge of deep, sibling affection. He wasn't just an asset; he was her big brother.
"The boy is the Lord of the Eyrie," Yohn said heavily, rubbing a massive, scarred hand over his face. "And until he comes of age, Lysa speaks with the voice of the Falcon. We are sworn to House Arryn, Andar. By the Old Gods and the New. We do not break our oaths because the command is inconvenient."
"Even if the command leads us to ruin?" Andar challenged softly.
Yohn didn't answer immediately. He looked down at his own hands, calloused from a lifetime of war, then looked at Rhea.
"We endure," Yohn said, echoing his wife's words with a heavy finality. "We hold the Runestone. We protect our people. And we wait for the storm to pass."
Lady Royce stood up, gracefully smoothing the skirts of her mourning gown. "Enough talk of storms and treason. We are a family, and we have not shared a meal together without the presence of half the garrison in months."
She stepped out into the corridor, returning a moment later followed by two nervous-looking servants carrying heavy silver trays. There was roasted mountain goat, spiced root vegetables, dark bread, and a steaming pitcher of sweetened, mulled wine.
They ate in the solar, pulling their chairs close to the hearth.
For Rhea, it was a surreal experience. There was no sparring. There was no discussion of metallurgy, edge alignment, or the tensile strength of plate armor. Yohn Royce didn't look at her like a prodigy or a secret weapon; he just made sure she took a second helping of the roasted goat to keep her strength up. Andar didn't ask her for a new dagger or a lesson in footwork; instead, he recounted a hilariously embarrassing story about Lord Belmore's horse slipping in the mud at the Gates of the Moon, laughing so hard he nearly spilled his wine.
Rhea found herself laughing with them. It was a rusty, unfamiliar sound at first, but as the evening wore on, it flowed easier.
She looked around the small circle of firelight. This was what she was fighting for. Not the abstract concept of "House Royce," but for Yohn's quiet, stoic pride, for her mother's endless, graceful warmth, and for Andar's fierce, brotherly loyalty.
She realized that she didn't need to fix the entire world right now. Littlefinger was a monster, Lysa was a madwoman, and the War of the Five Kings was a looming leviathan. But those problems were a thousand miles away, or locked behind the high doors of the weirwood throne.
Right now, she was exactly where she needed to be.
Later that night, long after her parents had retired to their adjacent chambers and Andar had gone to the barracks to check on their men, Rhea found herself unable to sleep. The altitude sickness had passed, leaving her mind clear and sharp, but devoid of its usual frantic, calculating edge.
She wrapped a thick, fur-lined cloak over her nightgown, slipped her feet into soft leather boots, and quietly opened the heavy oak door of her chamber.
The corridors of the Eyrie were silent, illuminated only by the pale, ethereal light of the moon streaming through the high, arched windows. The sky-blue guards were sparse in the guest wings, their patrols predictable and easy to avoid.
Rhea didn't use her Total Concentration Breathing to muffle her footsteps. She didn't stick to the shadows like an assassin. She just walked, a ten-year-old girl wandering the halls of a floating castle.
She found her way to the Crescent Chamber, the large receiving hall where they had arrived. The massive weirwood doors leading to the High Hall were barred for the night, but the outer doors, leading to the moonlit balconies and the winch rooms, were unguarded.
Rhea pushed one of the heavy doors open and stepped out into the freezing night air.
The sky above the Vale was not a canopy; it was an ocean of stars. Without the light pollution of her old world, the Milky Way was a blinding, majestic river of diamonds spilled across the black void. The moon was a massive, glowing silver coin, casting deep, sharp shadows across the white marble of the castle.
She walked to the edge of the balcony, her hands gripping the smooth, freezing stone of the balustrade.
Below her, the Sky Cells were carved into the sheer, vertical drop of the Giant's Lance. She knew the terrifying psychological torture of those cells—floors that sloped downward toward the open air, the constant, howling wind, the maddening blue of the sky mocking the prisoners until they simply chose to step off the edge.
It was a cruel, barbaric piece of architecture. But looking at the castle as a whole, bathed in the moonlight, Rhea couldn't deny the sheer, overwhelming magic of it.
She reached into her mind, feeling for the familiar tether.
Horus.
A moment later, a shadow detached itself from the highest spire of the Moon Tower. The massive snow falcon plummeted toward the balcony in a silent, terrifying dive. At the last possible second, he flared his icy-blue wings, catching the updraft, and landed softly on the marble balustrade beside her.
He didn't click his beak. He didn't demand a hunt. The psychopathic familiar simply settled his feathers, turning his cold, highly intelligent eyes toward the horizon, standing vigil beside his master.
Rhea reached out, gently running her hand over the freezing, pristine feathers of his back. He didn't bite her. He leaned into the touch, the ambient temperature around them dropping sharply.
"It's beautiful, isn't it, JoJo?" Rhea whispered into the wind, using his old, multiversal name.
The falcon let out a soft, low trill of agreement.
She looked out over the Vale. She knew the darkness that was coming. She knew that in a few short years, the Starks would ride south, the Lannisters would burn the Riverlands, and the dragons would hatch in the East. She knew that Petyr Baelish was out there, spinning his webs of treason and lies, preparing to plunge the realm into chaos just to see what he could climb on the way down.
But as she stood there, with her magical ice-falcon on her arm and the stars burning above her, the crushing anxiety that had plagued her for seven years finally released its grip on her heart.
She didn't need to be infallible. She didn't need to be a god.
She was Rhea of House Royce. She had the blood of the First Men in her veins, the mind of a builder, and the gifts of a cosmic anomaly. She couldn't stop the War of the Five Kings from starting. She couldn't expose the bastards on the throne or the lies in the Eyrie today. She was too young, and the board was not yet set.
But she could use this time.
She wouldn't just forge swords and armor anymore. She would forge alliances. She would watch the lords of the Vale, learn their weaknesses, and understand their desires. She would let Littlefinger think he was the only player moving pieces in the shadows. She would let Lysa hide in her high tower.
Rhea smiled, a slow, sharp expression that belonged entirely to a daughter of the bronze kings.
Let the Great Houses play their Game of Thrones in the mud of the lowlands. She was going to wait in the clouds, gather her strength, and when the time was right, she was going to drop the sky on all of them.
She took one last, deep breath of the freezing mountain air—not to supercharge her muscles, but simply to taste the winter on the wind.
"Come on, Horus," Rhea said softly, turning her back on the sheer drop and heading back toward the warmth of her family's chambers. "We have a lot of growing up to do."