GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 409 - The Glass Candle Is Lit

Oldtown. The Citadel.

The intellectual capital of the Continent of Westeros. The beacon of knowledge.

No king's banners flew here, only the hurried, quiet footsteps of grey-robed maesters moving through vaulted corridors. The air was thick with the smell of old parchment and ink that had been soaking into the stone walls for centuries.

At the top of the Hightower, in the council chamber that served as the Citadel's seat of highest authority, the atmosphere was nothing like the calm outside.

"The red comet..."

Archmaester Ebros stood before a massive floor-to-ceiling window.

His face was a map of wrinkles, and the worry written across it was out of place on a man who had spent a lifetime cultivating detachment. He stared at the ominous red slash hanging in the twilight sky, that burning star reflected in the murk of his eyes.

"Ancient Valyrian texts record that when the first red comet streaked across the sky, Valyrian shepherds discovered dragons among the Fourteen Flames."

"They became Dragonlords. They conquered the entire world with Dragonflame."

The speaker was Maester Vaellyn, keeper of the Citadel's oldest and most obscure texts.

His voice was dry, like a man reciting history that had been forgotten for a thousand years.

"That is just a legend, Vaellyn."

Another maester, his neck strung with chains of every metal, retorted with the stubborn precision of a lifelong scholar.

"A poet's fantasy. A story the Valyrians invented to sanctify their own bloodline."

"And yet dragons have truly appeared."

Maester Vaellyn's words brought the chamber to silence.

"Not long ago. When this same red comet appeared again in our skies."

"Two true dragons awoke beside Lynn, the King in the North."

"Now the comet has returned. How many more great dragons might answer its call?"

"That is coincidence!" someone snapped.

"What kind of coincidence brings a species back from a hundred years of extinction?"

"What kind of coincidence gives an unknown young man the power to summon the dead and raise blizzards?"

The arguments collided and overlapped.

These were men who had spent their entire lives in pursuit of truth , and for the first time, they could feel how thin their knowledge actually was. The reason and logic they prided themselves on looked pale and faintly ridiculous against the reports coming out of the North.

Then came a soft knock at the chamber's heavy oak door.

A young apprentice entered, cradling a letter tube sealed in wax, his posture carefully respectful.

"Archmaester. A raven from Winterfell. A personal letter in Maester Archibald's own hand."

Every eye in the room fixed on that small tube.

Archibald was the eyes they had sent to Winterfell to observe the so-called new king. They needed an objective, rational report , something to expose those absurd rumors for what they were.

Ebros took the tube. He cut the wax seal carefully with a small knife and unrolled the parchment, dense with writing.

One glance.

That was all it took. The stillness he had cultivated over decades broke apart in an instant, and something turbulent moved through his eyes.

His voice, when he began to read aloud, had a tremor in it.

The letter was stranger than any minstrel's epic.

Archibald had written with what could only be called a fervent, almost frantic hand, describing in careful detail a procedure that had taken place in a Winterfell courtyard.

Boiling water. Spirits. Sewing needles.

Things these men considered not merely absurd but practically an insult to life itself. And yet those things had produced a miracle they had no framework to explain. A child who should have died in fever and agony was, seven days later, running around and shouting.

"...He has shown us a truth. One so simple it is almost shameful, yet deeper than all our tomes combined..."

Ebros read the letter's most critical line aloud.

"...We were wrong."

"Terribly wrong."

When the last word left his mouth, the chamber went silent as a tomb.

Wrong?

The Citadel, wrong?

That conclusion was harder for these proud men to swallow than dragons. Harder than admitting magic had returned. Because it meant that the beliefs they had given their entire lives to, the entire framework of knowledge they had built and defended , it had been a laughable mistake all along, and a Northern king had just proved it.

"Mad — Archibald has gone mad!"

"He's been bewitched by that Northern sorcerer! This is black magic, nothing more!"

"We should send someone to Winterfell at once and bring him back! Milk and poppy, calm him down!"

The brief silence shattered into something louder and more desperate than what had come before.

Doubt. Anger. A fear none of them wanted to name.

But Maester Vaellyn said nothing. He walked to the center of the chamber, looked up at the red comet still burning at the horizon, and murmured quietly to himself.

"Magic is returning."

"It never disappeared. It was only sleeping."

"The red comet woke the dragons. And it has woken everything else sleeping in the earth beneath our feet."

His words landed like cold water thrown over a fire.

"We can no longer lie to ourselves."

"We can only prepare for the worst."

Vaellyn turned. His gaze moved slowly across every face in the room.

"The old era is finished. A new one has begun. We are the guardians of wisdom in Westeros , and if we choose to look away from what is changing around us, this age will leave us behind entirely."

"So what do you propose, Vaellyn?" a maester asked, making no effort to hide his irritation. "That we start studying fairy-tale magic? Compete with street conjurers for coin?"

"No." Vaellyn shook his head.

His eyes moved to the far end of the chamber, to a corner concealed behind heavy curtains.

"We need proof. Only that. Proof of whether this world has truly changed."

Every head turned to follow his gaze. The uncertainty on their faces shifted into something else.

They knew what was in that corner.

A glass candle.

One of the Citadel's oldest and most mysterious relics.

Carved from obsidian, shaped like a twisted longsword, cold and inert. Legend held that in the age when magic flourished, these candles could be lit to see across a thousand miles , to look into another person's dreams, even to speak with someone at the far end of the world.

But that was legend. Just legend.

For hundreds of years, maesters had tried every method they could devise to make these obsidian lumps produce so much as a single spark. Nothing. They had been relegated to decoration, gathering dust in forgotten corners.

"You want to light it?"

Archmaester Ebros's voice carried a note of genuine disbelief.

Lighting a glass candle was close to taboo within the Citadel. It meant a betrayal of reason. A concession to the unknown. They were men of truth , they had no patience for mysterious and ungovernable things.

"It is the only way."

Vaellyn's voice left no room for argument.

"If it won't light, it proves the King in the North is nothing but a lucky young man who happened to hatch some dragons."

"But if..."

He left it there. He didn't need to finish.

If the candle lit ,

Then the world they knew would be turned entirely upside down. The age of magic, fully arrived.

The chamber fell into a smothering silence.

It lasted a long time.

Archmaester Ebros closed his eyes slowly. When he opened them, the hesitation was gone.

"Go. Let us try."

---

The Citadel. The underground vault.

The air tasted of sealed dust and deep time.

A glass candle carved from obsidian had been placed with great ceremony at the center of an ancient stone table. Pitch black. Surface twisted. In the torchlight, it reflected nothing , as though it pulled all light toward itself and gave none back.

Every member of the council stood gathered in the vault.

They held their breath, watching that cold candle. Waiting, the way one waits for a verdict that cannot be appealed.

Archmaester Ebros walked forward himself.

He drew a tinderbox from his robes. Took out the flint and steel.

His movements were slow. Each strike felt like a blow landing against every heart in the room.

CLINK!

The sharp sound rang through the silence of the vault.

A tiny spark leapt from the flint, traced a brief arc through the air, and dropped precisely onto the glass candle's wick , itself ground from obsidian.

Nothing happened.

The spark died the moment it touched.

Around the vault, a collective breath was released.

"You see, Vaellyn? I told you it was just—"

The maester's mockery never finished forming on his face.

The black candle's wick , cold, dead, silent , lit up.

Without warning. Without cause.

A point of faint light, barely there. Like the last ember in a dying fire, like it might vanish at any breath.

But it was lit.

And then that pinprick of light began to grow. Visibly, rapidly , brightening, swelling, impossible to explain.

It was not a normal flame.

It had no heat. It radiated nothing. Instead, the temperature inside the vault dropped sharply, several degrees in moments.

The flame was a color caught between ghostly blue and violet-black. It did not leap upward the way fire should. At the tip of the wick, it gathered into a slowly rotating vortex, constantly shifting, constantly changing.

"Gods above..."

"The age of magic... it has truly begun..."

One maester made a sound like a man talking in his sleep. His legs folded and he sat down hard on the stone floor.

Nobody laughed.

Because every person in that vault , Ebros included, Vaellyn included , could feel their own souls trembling in the presence of that flame.

"Quick — test its abilities!" someone called out.

Then they saw it. Images forming within the spinning dark fire.

Distorted. Blurred, as if glimpsed through dense fog.

Snow-capped mountains stretching endlessly. A forest locked in ice.

A massive army. Countless eyes burning with cold blue fire igniting in the darkness, spreading across the black like a sea of terrible stars.

The image shifted.

Winterfell. The great weirwood heart tree, weeping sap the color of blood.

A man stood beneath it, still and quiet.

Simple Northern clothing. Long black hair loose around his shoulders. His back was to them.

He seemed to sense something.

Slowly, he turned.

In that moment, every maester in the vault felt an invisible hand close around their heart and squeeze.

They could not see his face.

Only his eyes.

Eyes that seemed to hold the entire night sky inside them , vast, bottomless, something that could swallow everything and leave no trace.

Those eyes came through the distorted flame. Through distance and time. And they found every single person standing in that vault.

He had seen them.

The realization detonated in every mind at once.

"Put it out! Quickly!"

Archmaester Ebros's voice cracked into something close to a scream.

But it was already too late.

The man in the flame let the corner of his mouth curve , just slightly.

The next instant, the glass candle's dark fire erupted.

BOOM!

A torrent of pure will , carrying the cold of infinite frost and something that felt like the intention of death itself , came pouring through that invisible thread, crossing a thousand miles in no time at all, and crashed into the vault. Into the mind of every maester present.

"Ahhh—!"

Screams tore through the Citadel's underground chambers.

The maesters clutched their heads and writhed on the stone floor, blood running from their eyes, ears, noses, and mouths.

All that remained in their minds was that pair of cold, utterly expressionless eyes , and a voice that rang out from somewhere deep inside their own souls.

"I hate being disturbed when I'm thinking."

"It puts me in a very bad mood."

➤ Next: Chasing the Red Comet