GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 411 - Crossing the Sunset Sea

Winter's massive form tore through the clouds, driving into the sky like nothing in the world could stop it.

The wind screamed past Lynn's ears, whipping his black hair wild.

Winterfell fell away beneath him. The endless snow-capped mountains shrank with it, both dissolving into a smear of silver-white.

He tilted his head back, eyes locking on the blood-red streak stretched across the edge of the sky.

The Red Comet.

It hung there like a wound that refused to close, suspended against the twilight, radiating something ominous , a deadly, magnetic pull that was impossible to look away from.

All three of Winter's heads rumbled at once, low and excited. Each beat of its wings sent a pressure wave rolling out behind them.

The dragon's speed was something else entirely. A black lightning bolt splitting the sky over the Continent of Westeros.

They flew west, toward where the sun was dying.

The jagged coastline appeared below them before long. Beyond it stretched a blue so deep and so vast it had no end , violent, ancient, and indifferent.

The Sunset Sea.

The edge of the world, in the Westerosi mind. A graveyard that had swallowed countless ambitions and dreams without so much as a ripple.

Fragments surfaced in Lynn's memory , scattered passages from the Citadel's tomes, records of this sea so sparse they barely filled a page.

Brandon the Shipwright, ancestor of House Stark, had sailed west and never returned. His entire fleet went with him, swallowed by the mist.

Some Lannister ancestor had boasted of reaching the world's end and coming back with untold gold.

Later generations chalked it up to a drunken story.

And then there were the Ironborn , those who styled themselves the finest sailors on the Seven Seas. Generation after generation of Crow's Eyes and Red-Hairs had driven their longships into this water, each convinced they'd be the ones to conquer it. They all ended up as feed for sea monsters.

This sea was a natural barrier. A line the gods themselves had drawn, splitting the world in two.

Winter roared. It felt the hostility rising from the water below.

It accelerated — a black meteor plunging headlong into the Sunset Sea's domain.

The world changed in an instant.

The surface, relatively calm just moments before, erupted without warning. Towering waves rose like moving mountains, crashing down with the kind of force that would reduce the sturdiest warship to splinters.

The storms here made anything on the Narrow Sea look like a summer drizzle. The entire ocean seemed alive, heaving itself upward, determined to tear apart anything that dared enter.

Lynn sat steady on the dragon's back. His magic had formed an invisible barrier around him, a shell that kept the wind and rain at arm's length.

Winter's three heads swept the surrounding storm, watchful and alert. Its body moved through the chaos with contemptuous ease.

Then Lynn's eyes sharpened.

Below, a whirlpool was forming — vast, silent, and wrong.

The water spun in great dark circles, releasing a deep, grinding sound like the gates of something terrible cranking open.

Then they came.

Dozens of tentacles burst from the whirlpool's center, each one thicker than Winter's own body. They erupted from the water with enough force to send spray flying skyward, bone spurs at their tips like rows of blades, carrying a wave of rot-stench as they lashed upward toward the dragon.

A sea monster.

Winter's roar shook the storm. It didn't flinch.

The left head snapped open. A blast of dragon breath, saturated with absolute cold, screamed forward.

CRACK,—

The tentacle froze mid-arc. For one suspended moment it hung there, a sculpture of pale crystal. Then it shattered, raining ice down into the churning sea below.

The right head answered. Dark red dragonflame poured out like a torrent of lava, wrapping a second tentacle and burning it to charcoal in seconds.

A cold light moved through Lynn's eyes. He raised his hand toward the churning surface below.

"Freeze."

At the quiet command, the sea solidified. Miles of open water hardened in an instant , a sheet of ice several meters thick, and it happened faster than the eye could process.

The sea monster's body slammed to a stop beneath it, locked solid, only its thrashing tentacles still visible above the surface.

Stripped of the water's support, those tentacles slowed. Became clumsy.

Winter moved.

All three heads breathed at once.

Frost. Flame. Lightning.

Three kinds of ruin converged on the sea monster's exposed head , a mass of flesh the size of a small hill.

BOOM,,

The impact was so deep it barely sounded like a sound at all.

The head came apart. Green blood geysered upward, spreading across the ice in every direction, staining it an eerie, unnatural blue.

The shriek that followed was something Lynn felt more than heard. Every tentacle went limp at once. The enormous body rolled and began its long descent into the dark.

A crisis that could have ended an entire fleet was over in a few breaths.

Lynn patted Winter's neck. Forward.

One man and one dragon, still heading west.

The storm was the only constant out here. They flew like that for another five days.

When Winter tired, it settled onto the surface and drifted, letting the waves carry it while it rested. Sea monsters came in various shapes during that stretch. None of them lasted long.

When Lynn finally spotted land again, he almost convinced himself it wasn't real.

The coastline was buried under white mist so dense it seemed to have weight. The kind of fog that didn't thin , it simply existed, a wall of white pressing down on everything beneath it. Even the midday sun couldn't get through. The world here existed in a flat, hazy gray-white, as if the light had given up trying.

The silence was worse than the mist.

No wind. No sound at all.

Winter descended slowly and touched down on black sand. Lynn dropped from the dragon's back, his boots landing with a soft crunch. He took in his surroundings.

The vegetation here was wrong.

Every tree had been twisted into shapes that looked less like growth and more like struggling , contorted branches draped in pale, grayish moss. Nothing here had any color worth naming.

It felt like a place the rest of the world had simply forgotten. A stretch of existence that had never known fire, never known life in any real sense. Primal. Utterly desolate.

He left Winter where it was and moved into the jungle alone, stepping carefully.

He found signs almost immediately.

Ferns crushed underfoot. Animal bones, cracked and split. And then a fire pit , barely that, just stones and packed mud scraped together by someone who needed it to work, not to last.

He crouched over the ashes.

They were still warm.

➤ Next: Primitives and the Red Comet