GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 410 - Chasing the Red Comet
Deep in the underground vault, Archmaester Ebrose knelt on the stone floor, his fingers digging into his temples.
Bloody tears streamed from his clouded eyes. Blood covered his mouth and nose.
That voice still echoed inside their skulls , cold, utterly devoid of emotion, yet more terrifying than any roar the Mad King Aerys had ever unleashed.
They were mortals who had peeked at a god's secrets. The god had crushed them like ants beneath an indifferent hand.
"Enough — stop this!"
Maester Vaellyn was the first to claw back even a shred of his senses.
He hauled himself off the floor and lunged for the stone table where the glass candle sat.
The blue flame still spun.
At its center, a pair of deep, unreadable eyes watched them without expression.
Vaellyn had no doubt: if the man behind those eyes chose to, he could shred every mind in this vault in an instant, leaving them all as drooling idiots.
"We — we meant no offense! Great King in the North!"
His voice came out shrill, cracked by terror. He didn't bother wiping the blood from his face. He prostrated himself before the flame, as low as his body would go.
"We only... we only wanted to verify an ancient legend. We didn't know we would disturb you..."
His words fell apart as he spoke them.
Reason. Logic. Precision.
The principles these maesters had lived by their entire lives. In this moment, all of it was laughable.
Before absolute power, only one instinct remained.
Begging.
The eyes in the flame flickered.
The mental pressure, that crushing, maddening weight, receded without a sound.
The screaming in the vault faded. What remained was ragged breathing and stifled groans.
Someone helped Archmaester Ebrose to his feet.
He stared at the dim figure within the flame. Every trace of a scholar's arrogance was gone from his eyes, replaced entirely by the fear and awe of a man who had just survived something he shouldn't have.
"Magic..." he murmured. "It's truly come back."
"The old age is finished." Maester Vaellyn's voice held a thread of bitterness , but beneath it, something rawer. The fervor of a man standing at the threshold of a new world. "A new age is here."
He bowed to the flame again.
"We are willing to serve you, respected King in the North. The Citadel... will pledge fealty to you."
The figure within the flame seemed satisfied with that.
"Very well."
"Since you hunger for knowledge, I will give you an opportunity."
"Within one month, every member of the Citadel's Conclave is to appear in Winterfell, bearing their chains."
"You will swear fealty to me in the godswood."
The color drained from Ebrose's face. From every face in the room.
The Citadel had maintained its neutrality since the day it was founded. It served all of Westeros , not any one king, not any one lord.
Pledge fealty to the King in the North?
That would be a complete break with the Iron Throne. A break with every other power in Westeros.
This was...
But they had no room to bargain. None at all.
"As a boon," the voice continued, carrying absolute authority and something else , a temptation that cut straight to the bone.
"I will teach you what you most desire."
"Engineering. Production. Magic. And beyond that... the true laws by which this world operates."
The words hit harder than the mental assault had.
Every maester in the vault stopped breathing.
The truths they had spent their lives hunting through dusty archives. The mysteries they had chased across dissection tables. That man was going to teach them himself?
Ebrose and Vaellyn looked at each other. In the other's eyes, each saw the same thing: a hunger too strong to contain. A fervor bordering on madness.
They could not refuse.
They had never been able to refuse.
"We... obey."
The moment Archmaester Ebrose forced those words out with the last of his strength, the flame on the glass candle died.
Gone. As if it had never been there.
The vault fell back into darkness and silence.
It left behind a group of disheveled, blood-smeared maesters , every robe torn, every face filthy , with eyes blazing like men who had lost their minds.
...
Winterfell. The godswood.
Lin En slowly opened his eyes. Something vast and galactic turned in his gaze, then settled into stillness.
Control the Citadel, and you controlled Westeros's "public opinion" and its "technology."
The maesters were pedantic. Rigid. Stubborn as stone. But among a crowd of mediocrities, they were genuinely the best on offer. With the right guidance, they would become the sharpest instrument he had for remaking this world.
A gust of wind cut through the godswood, lifting the snow from the ground.
Lin En looked up. Through the bare branches of the weirwood, past the pale tangle of limbs, his gaze found the gray sky beyond.
There, dragging a long tail of fire across the twilight, a blood-red star traced its ominous arc.
The Red Comet.
He could feel it , streams of ancient energy pouring down along the comet's path, spilling across the whole of the world. The magical elements in the air were stirring at a rate that hadn't been seen in an age.
The comet was a signal amplifier. It was waking everything in this land that had been sleeping.
Everything seemed to connect back to it.
A thought rose in Lin En's mind , bold, maybe half-mad , and once it surfaced, he couldn't push it back down.
What if he got closer?
What would happen if he touched the source of this directly?
The thought took root. There was no cutting it out now.
He wanted to see. He wanted to know what this Red Comet actually was , this thing that had set the whole world in motion.
He turned and walked out of the godswood.
He crossed the courtyard, climbed to the battlements, and made his way toward the snow-covered wilderness that stretched beyond Winterfell's walls.
The guards saw him coming and bowed, their eyes full of reverence.
He didn't acknowledge them.
He stopped at the edge of the wall and drew a long breath of ice-cold air.
Then he called out — a sound long and low and ancient.
ROOAAAR, !
An answer thundered back from somewhere beyond the horizon. A dragon's roar, enormous, crashing across the sky. And underneath the raw power, something unmistakable: joy. Excitement.
Then a shadow fell across the world.
It plunged from the clouds , a shape so vast it blotted out the sky. Wind screamed. Snow erupted in every direction. The soldiers on the wall were thrown sideways by the wall of air that hit them.
Winter was larger than Winterfell's great keep. Its black scales caught the pale light and threw it back as a cold metallic gleam. The center head was the largest, its slit pupils alive with something like lightning. The left head bore scales of icy, crystalline blue. The right burned with a low, dark flame.
Three heads. Three entirely different breaths.
Winter let out a sound of pure delight and dropped all three heads low, pressing in close with an affection that seemed almost absurd for something that size. Its warm breath melted the snow in a wide circle around it.
Lin En ran a hand across the cold, hard scales. Then he vaulted up and landed on its broad back.
"Let's go."
He patted the neck beneath him and pointed toward the blood-red light on the edge of the sky.
"Take me to it."
Winter understood. It always understood. A deafening ROOAAAR, ! burst from all three throats at once, three heads thrown back, all howling at the heavens together.
Its wings unfurled , vast enough to cover an entire training yard , and snapped open with a sound like a thunderclap.
One beat.
A gale tore through the castle. The walls of Winterfell trembled.
Winter's body surged upward, climbing hard and fast, driving toward that red star hanging in the darkening sky with a force that nothing on earth could have stopped.
On the wall, every soldier stood frozen, staring at the shadow that grew smaller and smaller until it vanished into the clouds. For a long time, no one spoke.
Their king had just ridden a three-headed dragon into the sky to chase a falling star.
This world. They understood it less and less with every passing day.
➤ Next: Crossing the Sunset Sea