Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

She hadn't expected to wake up after the bullets.

And yet she did.

She woke to cold, hunger, and pain.

Regressing to an infant had… funny implications.

The first years blurred into confusion. She couldn't fathom how or why she'd been dropped into a feudal backwater. Some hidden Earth variant? A prison? Either way, making her a baby again felt excessive.

The Bug In Her Head wasn't happy either. Her new brain didn't have the neat little hole her shard liked to snack through. It sulked. It got bored. Then it started to experiment.

By year three, it figured out how to control rodents and other pests.

By year five, the fish in the sea joined the fun.

It didn't stop until her range covered the whole of Oldtown. By then, if it had a nervous system, it was under her dominion should she care to reach.

She didn't.

Tala wanted nothing to do with it. She'd done her service. She'd saved humanity, the whole multiverse, once already. Her reward had been a bullet.

That closed the account.

This life was retirement. Her vacation.

Luckily, Oldtown was a good place to crash. Even as an abandoned, lowborn brat, she'd been scooped up by the local nuns. They raised her in the 'Light of the Seven'. Room, board, and a steady drip of religious indoctrination. She treated the sermons like bedtime fairy tales. Memorized the good bits. Learned her letters.

By ten, she'd had enough.


It wasn't hard to slip away under cover of night. She was boyish here, just like before. Stolen clothes, a bit of bluff, and a high-school education went a long way in a world without a printing press.

Tal the prodigy talked his way into the Citadel.

The greatest library in the world. A proper sinecure. At last.

Even her Passenger seemed to approve. It was fascinated by the white ravens the maesters pampered like prize cats. It poked and prodded at them until, one day, a mutant crow screamed inside her head.

Because yeah, this place had Magic. Freaky, dying—but real. Dragons too, once. Pity they were extinct.

The psychic bird tried to roost in her skull until her Passenger punted it out like an unwanted roommate. The shard was territorial like that. It didn't do shared accommodations. Still, that brief mental scuffle left an impression. A magical primer of sorts.

That was how her power turned ravens into relay nodes. Like the designer bugs from another lifetime.

She knew it was temptation. The same slippery slope. The same inner voice, whispering about suffering smallfolk and distant slave markets. The voice of the dumb teenager, who could never leave well enough alone.

She strangled that voice. She was done.

She was a retired calamity. Her warlording days were behind her.

Her ambitions were smaller now. Grow strong. Read everything. Travel around and be a tourist.

She thought of Braavos. It sounded like something of a magical Venice. A romantic retreat. She could picture a life there. A small cozy house with a library and a writing desk.

She could settle as a playwright. She had an entire world's worth of material in her memory.

Tala the orphan was gone. Tal the novice was temporary.

But, Taylor the Dramatist?

That could be her legacy.

Her fledgling project of introducing Braavos to the wonders of bootleg Macbeth necessitated a smidge of planning.

Oldtown was a fair ancient city. It was also the westernmost city of the westernmost continent of the known lands. Tal the novice had learned a lot of geography and history in addition to archaic Valyrian. Thus, she knew she had to cross the damn kingdoms west to east before setting sail.

And since she had no Dragonflight to hitch a ride on, the prospective journey would be counted in months—sorry moons, proper nomenclature and all that dross.

She sighed morosely at that realization. For all her daydreaming of Canadian dragon-shaped transport drones, she would have settled on that battered old jeep Bakuda used to ride upon.

As it stood, her options were limited.

Either trek on foot, or hitch a ride on a caravan. Horses were out from the get-go. For one, she had never ridden one of the leggy menaces before. For two, even if she somehow controlled a pony perfectly, equine transit was a mark of the high and mighty. And she wanted to keep a low profile.

She knew her luck and she knew her history. If she started gallivanting across the Reach, some bandit asshole would force her to act.

Then the local lordling would start meddling.

On and on it would go until she would be forced to seize Highgarden itself.

Then the Crown would stick its nose.

No. Better keep a low profile.

She hemmed and hawed for a while more before resolving to take the long route instead. Sail from Oldtown, around Dorne, and into the Stepstones. The journey, she suspected, would be grueling. But, there would be scenic spots in and about at the very least.


In order to make the traversal as painless as possible, she would don another guise. She would be the scion of some fortunate merchant. Wealthy enough to merit their own cabin but unremarkable enough for any noble busybody to mind their business.

Luckily, there was a surfait of well-to-do entrepreneurial sorts in Oldtown. She placed them under bird surveillance to study their habits, their habit, and their preferred vocabulary. Mimicry was the highest form of flattery after all.

The issue of capital remained.

A wealthy scion needed a hefty coin purse, suitable adornments, and silky dresses.

She resolved that by committing a spot of grand larceny. There were no banks to heist and indulge in a spell of nostalgia so she robbed the head honcho instead—the mighty lord Hightower.

Pro-tip for the daring human masters out there: do not control your unwilling donors of material wealth while they are conscious. That way they remember. Instead, nab them while they are still dreaming!

So yes, Lord Hightower developed a brief and deeply unfortunate habit of sleepwalking philanthropy. He painstakingly filled many a small pouches with gold dragons in the dead of night.

An industrious owl took care of the delivery.

Taylor also managed to liberate a couple of dresses that way. But, her biggest coup was making the lord sleepily write a very officious writ of passage and affix his seal to it. It was a paper shield to wield at the port. And, hopefully, something of a skeleton key to acquire access while still in the kingdoms.

Lord Leyton Hightower would never remember penning such a document but that was his problem.

Thus, Lady Taylor of Oldtown—pompous, well-funded, and entirely fraudulent—boarded the Lady Bright, three moons later. She had a luxurious cabin all to her lonesome: a tiny wooden cell where the only luxury was privacy.

At least, captain Luco Prestayn was of the bright and respectful sort. His trading galley was an efficiently-run operation.

The journey aboard the Lady Bright was a cruel and unusual punishment.

Taylor decided that medieval sailing did not agree with her dainty constitution after yet another bout of nausea made her abandon her book and flee topside for fresher air. The nausea itself was an improvement on the initial affliction. Seasickness was a bitch.

She was miserable.

The stop in Planky Town was short and scorching. Taylor was used to the warm embrace of the ever spring of Oldtown. The Sunny Tyrant of Dorne, however, was a harsh and unrelenting foe. But, she did manage to buy a glazed jar full of dried figs. The sugary treat did wonders to both her mood and her nausea.

She also resolved to commission a smith posthaste once in Braavos. She needed a metal canteen and metal water storage. Only the threat of dehydration made her brave the rank water stored upon the ship.

The Bug In Her Head was curiously patient with the insipid crossing. The shard was content bouncing its range between seagulls and setting up a bird-based radar.

Taylor ignored it.

She also tried to ignore the second vein of amusement her Passenger was plinking at. It was scanning the sea and cataloguing its fauna. However, no matter how willful Taylor was at ignoring such shenanigans, undersea life was too damn weird not to notice.

So many tiny appendages and tentacles!

Such was her routine on the Lady Bright—book by day, nausea by noon, vicarious snooping of crustaceans by evening.

That said, even though she labored to ignore Seagull Radar, she still spotted the blips it detected. A couple of rough looking boats were setting an interception course. The men aboard were of the unwashed and violent variety.

Pirates.

This, she thought, is why you couldn't have nice things.

The pirates were a complication. Then the pirates would become a problem. Then the problem would become a situation, and the situation would require her express, if unwitting intervention.

She knew her rotten luck was pounding on the door and demanding rent.

She knew praying that they outpace their pursuers would be to no avail.

Thus, resigned to her fate, she drank a full bottle of Captain Prestayn's most prized swill.

She was not riding this rodeo sober!


The pirates fell upon them in a storm of violence and blood.

The crew of the Lady Bright responded with a valiant but doomed defense. Crossbow bolts flew. Swords followed. The melee lasted just long enough for Captain Prestayn's head to go overboard.

With the defenders' morale shattered, the pirates proceeded to survey their booty.

Unfortunately, they were of the slaver sub-category of seafaring criminals. In all honesty, that particular subset of aquatic scum was big enough to be the de facto full-set. Slaves were a ubiquitous commodity on the seas.

So, once they started ogling the women aboard and ferrying chains over, Taylor heaved one tired and drunken sigh.

It was time to put in some work hours, vacation be damned.

She cut loose.

Most of the assailants merrily stabbed themselves or their colleagues. One man very carefully placed his dagger between his ribs, to better pierce his heart.

The few that survived the bout of forced-assisted suicide walked themselves overboard. They swam down and down, until they drowned and spared the world their particular brand of mischief.

There was much confusion aboard the Lady Bright. Something miraculous had clearly happened. Unfortunately, no one could agree on what, and everyone was too busy arguing theology to take advantage of it.

At least, Taylor was too drunk and too out of it to be deemed a plausible origin of such providence. She went back to her cabin, a transient tourist once again.

The survivors kept twiddling their thumbs for a whole night before sense prevailed. There was some loss of key personnel among the crew but there were enough sailors around to keep going.

Even if they had to approximate the more involved aspects of navigation.

As such, they sailed straight into a storm.

And where pirates failed, the wrath of the Storm God prevailed.

The Lady Bright ceased being seaworthy.


Taylor was still a tad hungover when she found herself subject to the fury of the waves and the threat of imminent drowning. She had to reach for her power again. And she learned two lessons in quick succession.

First, various fish could function as an ad-hoc life vest.

Second, while they made a serviceable flotation device, fish were terrible at being a boat.

The storm was too angry.

So, Taylor started piggybacking her control through aquatic critters. It was the same trick that allowed bird radar.

A scaly daisy chain propagated into the waters in search of something more substantial. She was hoping to spot a shark or something similar.

She reached deeper.

Deeper and deeper.

Something answered.

A colossal something.

Her shard reacted with what she chose to interpret as enthusiasm as an ugly mutant whale rose up from the depths until it breached the surface and provided a convenient lifeboat.

Faced with the absurdity of the situation, Taylor's first thought was that the creature and its brethren were called leviathans by the local nomenclature.

Her second action was to scoff. The denizens of this peaceful world had no concept of how terrifying a true Leviathan was. She, on the other hand, had an intimate experience of the actual monster.

Heck! She once stuck Defiant's halberd in its Endbringer butt.

Got one hell of an injury for her trouble.

And the clearest sign that Panacea was fucking nuts!

Her third reaction was to sigh yet again.

"Well call me Ahab, why wouldn't you," she voiced sullenly to the thunderous heavens.

She promptly passed out.

She woke up to a sunny morning, a calm sea, and a determined albatross pecking her head.

The big bird had a beak full of grapes. A cormorant joined it later, clutching a wineskin.

"Appreciate the delivery, Passenger!"

Fed and watered, Taylor surveyed her surroundings from atop Moby Levi. Sea and more sea wherever her eyes roamed.

There was a disruption in Seagull Radar that she attributed to her Passenger shutting out that particular network in favor of summoning aquatic help. She was bereft of heading.

She had no idea where she was.

Taylor closed her eyes. Thinking.

And was promptly startled by the volume of telemetry she was picking up.

She could feel the creature now, she realized.

Not just its presence—she'd felt that since she'd brushed against it in the deep, a sleepy mountain of meat that had perked up when she called.

No, she could feel its shape. The way its muscles worked. The filtration system it used to process whatever it ate down there. The rudimentary brain that her Passenger had cheerfully commandeered and tweaked without asking.

It was, she had to admit, impressive.

It was also, she realized with a sinking feeling, now her problem.

"Alright. I don't want to scare half of the Narrow Sea. Nor do I want Greyjoy suitors. That would be awkward. So how about you steer us someplace discreet, Passenger?"

She, quite naturally, received no answer.

The whale kept on swimming though, so she hoped her shard had gotten the memo.

Still, she was very curious about this pseudo-biological sense she developed.

Sure, she could hijack and feel her bugs somewhat in her past life. But she never had this degree of definition into the innards of the beasties under her thrall.

Was her Passenger branching out?

"Since when were you able to pull this whole Panacea god of the flesh act?"

She received no answer to that either.

Oh well.

With her books now entertaining the fish down under, there was no recourse but to lay down on the stinky whale meat and enjoy the ride.

The barnacle-like texture was rough, but the protrusions and ridges made for good handholds. She kept an eye out for any conveniently placed wreck out there.

Why if she could salvage a sail or two, she'd be able to fashion a hammock.

And a sun screen!

A week into her journey, Taylor was crusty, stinking, with skin the color of boiled lobster.

She was miserable.

She would have overheated if her ride wasn't speedy enough to keep a constant breeze. At least, she kept receiving prompt deliveries of sundry snacks and watered alcohol.

Her tummy was well satiated.

She had also managed to build the hammock and a rudimentary lean-to for some shade. It had been neat watching a giant octopus ferry wrecked sails, rope, and salvaged wood.

Less neat was her idea to cool down via impromptu whale-provided showers. It took exactly one attempt to realize the plume wasn't water. It was breath.

Her brain needed a full second to understand why that was worse.

The mist coming out the blowhole was air straight from the big lug's lungs. It was hot and revolting. And sometimes it had mucus included, just to be extra disgusting.

Her Passenger was a darling, however. Taylor hadn't voiced her utter frustration with the temperature, but the clever shard deduced it nonetheless. Like a metronome, the whale's tail would periodically slam the sea and spray her with salty but cold goodness.

Still, the worst aspect of the journey remained.

She was bored out of her fucking mind.


The traversal continued until one day, Taylor spotted smoke coming off the surface and patches of boiling water. One flex of Bird Radar 2.0 and she started seeing smoking stacks of rock, rotten wrecks, and ruins.

Then it clicked.

She was sailing the Smoking Sea, heading toward the Valyrian peninsula.

She remembered the litany of warnings that were penned about this lovely patch of hell.

The Citadel's texts all agreed in clear and concise manner that certain death awaited ahead. Fools high and low have tried reaching Valyria past the Doom. They all disappeared.

This was, Taylor reflected, the danger in giving the alien supercomputer GPS duty.

The stuff that started pinging her dominion was wacky. Her new pseudo-bio-scanny senses were going haywire. They were having a most difficult time resolving what the hell was going on with the biology ahead.

And Taylor knew with utter certainty that her Passenger was only placid during the earlier crossing because it was plotting this very expedition.

The curious Bug was most certainly salivating at the prospect of poking biological horrors from an extinct magical slaving empire.

And she was along for the ride, whether she wanted it or not.

"The best laid plans of shards and men," she sighed.

This was going to be a doozy.

Elsewhere in the Narrow Sea, a new superstition arose among sailors. Some Bird God was commanding seagulls and other flying thieves to steal food and rations with inerrant precision.

And back in Oldtown, Malora Hightower was berating her father for falling prey to a skinchanger of all things. It was mortifying to be robbed that way after all the time and the fortune they spent studying magic. The thief even had the temerity of stealing two of her favorite dresses from the washhouse.

Taylor stood on the shores of Valyria, surrounded by architecture equal parts ruin and splendor.

The air tasted of sulfur and rot and was unbearably humid. The sun hung somewhere behind a permanent red haze that turned the sky the color of rust. It felt like standing inside a pressure cooker.

She was miserable.

And everything—absolutely everything—was trying to kill her.

Valyria was akin to swimming through the molten remains of a blown-up nuclear reactor. A hilariously lethal proposition born from zealously overengineered technology failing in the most energetic way possible.

Exhibit A through Z: the haze itself.

At first she assumed it was gas. Some ancient war-crime adjacent invention lingering centuries past its expiration date.

That would have been the wholesome explanation.

It wasn't gas.

It moved.

Not with the wind, but with intent—eddying, clustering, thinning and thickening in patterns her Passenger eagerly mapped. The red mist resolved, slowly and unwillingly, into structure.

A swarm.

Of living things.

Of tiny hell bugs.

And she was not exaggerating the hell portion in that appellation, no siree!

When Moby Levi beached itself along the blackened shore, the haze descended upon the mutant whale like falling dusk. The creature thrashed once, twice, sending waves crashing against the shattered obsidian docks. Then the red cloud thickened until the animal vanished entirely beneath it.

Taylor watched from a safe distance as the day passed.

The sounds faded first. Then the movement.

By nightfall, there was light coming from inside the carcass. The swarm had cooked the whale from within and smoldered still.

By daybreak, it got worse.

A gas-looking colony of red matter had flown into the leviathan. It had churned, condensed, reorganized—and from the slurry emerged pale worms as long as her forearm, slick and glistening, their surfaces rippling with shapes disturbingly reminiscent of human faces.

They squealed.

A frequency somewhere between a newborn baby and swine.

It was the most revolting sound she had ever heard, and she had once considered herself inured to depravity. Taylor's previous occupation had provided extensive exposure to horrors both manmade and eldritch. Still, the damned noise earned a proud place in the Abominable Galleria inside her memories.

Feast your heart out Bonesaw!

The Doom Worms consumed the remains of the whale with efficient enthusiasm. Not even bones remained. Then, they burrowed underground with distressing alacrity.

That explained why she hadn't spotted organic remains anywhere in Valyria proper. The Freehold had possessed hundreds of dragons when the Doom struck. Taylor had half-expected an entire graveyard of draconic skeletons.


And that was merely one exhibit among many.

Rock-turtle things lumbered through shattered canals, shells fused with melted stone, each the size of a ferry. They stayed in the water, respecting an invisible boundary that kept them clear of the Red Cloud of Death.

Beneath her feet, vast shapes shifted through the earth—firewyrms swimming through molten channels, their movement vibrating through the ground. Every so often heat surged upward, as if the land itself exhaled. They were the next stage of Doom Worm evolution.

Shai-Hulud's angrier, fire-breathing cousins.

Or a souped-up Crawler.

The comparison settled uneasily into place.

Yeah. That tracked.

The Valyrians had apparently been a civilization composed entirely of Bonesaws toiling away to birth several enthusiastic Crawlers. The fact that the empire had exploded now felt less like tragedy and more like a natural and logical conclusion.

Taylor offered a brief, heartfelt thanks to the Fourteen Flames, the Seven, the Lord of Light, the Black Goat, Scion, and Jesus Christ that the mad experiment had detonated—and that the fallout remained mostly confined to this delightful postcard of a locale.

"And for the love of everything holy keep this stuff out of me, Passenger!"

Because of course she could control the infernal cloud of magical parasites. She wouldn't even have needed the upgrades to pull off this particular trick. It registered on the bug sense once the shard finished calibrating.

And just like that, the whole endeavor started to look like work.

Taylor sighed.

Then considered, very slowly.

"This is not work," she told herself.

A pause.

"This is adventure," she tried again.

"Oh—and Passenger? You really need to figure out supply pronto. I am not dying here. I don't care how you do it, but get me clean water and food."

The wineskins at her side were indeed getting dangerously light. Still, she wasn't particularly afraid of starving. Her shard was enjoying itself far too much to let her keel over.

Her continued health was the price of its growing academic fascination.

Her pizza delivery arrived two days later.

It was heralded by a monumental roar that shook the earth beneath her feet. A mountain of flesh descended from the heavens aloft on silver wings.

"Holy cow. Dragon!"

And it was Big.

Bigger than dearly departed Moby Levi. Bigger than a jumbo jet. Like a supertanker fitted with jumbo jets for wings. Unabashedly Big.

A flying skyscraper.

It was also clutching something in one massive claw, laboring to land with surprising gentleness.

Taylor squinted.

"Is that a wagon it's balancing?"

Sure enough, the silver titan deposited a wooden cart upon the blackened ground before touching down a respectful distance away.

And while it was generally rude to ignore delivery personnel, this particular one promised significantly more work. Besides, she was hungry.

Thus, the cart received priority inspection.

Taylor ripped aside the canvas cover and took a long gander.

Inside, rough sacks of barley and oats were wedged tight against one another, their seams dusted white with spilled flour settled into every crack. Hard loaves and harder biscuits rattled in wooden crates, while coils of dried sausage and slabs of salted meat hung from crossbeams.

Bundles of herbs and strings of garlic released a faint, stubborn sharpness that cut through the heavier smells. Barrels dominated the center—one sloshing softly with water, another exhaling the sour-sweet tang of weak ale—each sealed in pitch and bound with iron hoops.

Clay jars of honey and oil filled the corners alongside sacks of dried figs and nuts. Everything was packed to survive jolts, bad roads, and apparently an impromptu aerial jaunt.

It was a full pantry.

It was a bloody supply wagon.

And Taylor strongly suspected it had been nicked straight from a particularly wealthy caravan.

She was sorted for necessities for a good long while.

"Thanks a bunch Passenger!"


She assembled herself a small feast and washed it down with a hearty mug of ale.

Thus fortified, she finally turned her attention to the complication.

The bloody dragon.

"This is still not work," she informed herself most solemnly. "This is… a cultural exchange. With a spicy lizard."

And what a specimen it was!

Monstrous. Immense. Yet all silver grace and patient power. Light slid across metallic scales like moonlight on water. Heat radiated from it in slow, comfortable waves.

Taylor approached cautiously, then abandoned caution entirely and rubbed its snout.

A moment later she committed fully and went for a hug.

Sadly, her outstretched arms covered only a fraction of the immense head. Still, it was the thought that counted, right?

Interestingly enough, she had no idea how it compared with historical dragons from two centuries earlier. She had never seen the famed skulls, and the maesters' records refused to agree on standardized measurements, never mind accuracy.

Illustrations were worse. Artists were a long way from inventing the revolutionary concept of including a human silhouette for scale, rendering most depictions delightful art pieces destined for vaults rather than scholarship.

Point was, she had no clue how Big and Scaly Over Yonder compared to the Balerions and Vhagars of ages past. Favorably, she suspected. But she didn't know.

What she did know was that reliable air-delivered care packages were now a strategic necessity. Which meant the dragon was here to stay.

Also, she had been speaking aloud to a mute shard for far too long. A responding interlocutor—even one limited to roaring—was welcome.

And friends merited names.

"I dub thee Atlas, the Second of Your Name. May your wings fly high and true and find us ever more tasty carts," she declared.

And it was a she, according to her alien sense.

Elsewhere in Volantis, the camp of the Golden Company was in pandemonium.

A gigantic dragon had descended upon them, scattered soldiers like startled birds, torched three prized elephants, devoured them, and—once sated—absconded with one of their better supply carts.

A blue-haired man with reddish roots wept openly. Present on unrelated business, he had witnessed the dragon firsthand. To him it was deliverance. Absolution. The clearest possible sign that the gods smiled upon his mission and his young charge.

Beyond the Black Walls, the mood was less sanguine.

News of the dragon was to be suppressed.

The Temple of the Lord of Light agreed unanimously—though several of its more erudite members were quietly tasked with tracking what they now called the Herald.

With food sorted, Taylor's next immediate priority was hygiene.

She desperately craved a shower. Or, more realistically, a somewhat cleanish puddle she could dunk herself into. Layers of salt and sweat had formed a crust along her skin. They itched horribly and made her feel profoundly, existentially gross.

She was miserable.

It was why her mind wandered into useless tangents.

Taylor found herself trying to recall a cooking technique from the Before. She could have sworn there was a method involving encasing a fish in a shell of salt before chucking it into an oven. Something about moisture retention and flavor profiles.

But wouldn't aluminum foil accomplish the same thing? Way less fussy!

She chewed thoughtfully on a sausage as she ventured deeper into the blasted city.

Atlas II had departed earlier in search of lunch somewhere less catastrophically contaminated. Oh, she was perfectly safe from the parasites. Everything was under Taylor's dominion. Still, she didn't want to chance her friend accidentally ingesting the infernal substance.

Taylor had entertained herself by shaping the Red Swarm of Death into neat glowing lanes while the dragon took off. She experimented with gradients and color density until it resembled an airport runway.

A pity dragons favored V/STOL.

Though that explained the abundance of landing platforms crowning nearly every surviving structure. Helipads, essentially.

Dragonpads?

Dracopads?

She filed the nomenclature question away for later consideration.

She carried-on.


Ahead rose the grandest structure she had yet seen: a half-shattered megadome blooming from the ruins like a black stone flower, its petals formed by radiating landing platforms. Obsidian and dark marble caught the red haze and reflected it in dull, molten hues. The structure was immense—large enough to swallow an entire district.

Taylor entered through a gate still standing open after centuries. The portal alone was enormous enough to admit Atlas II without difficulty, its metal surface etched with flowing script and countless dragons frozen mid-flight.

A stable, perhaps.

Or a transit hub.

A draconic bus terminal.

She wandered slowly, pausing often despite herself. The ceiling demanded attention. Vast sections were cleaved apart, yet the dome held firm, refusing collapse. Through her swarm sense she traced the megastructure's interior: a lattice of fused channels and interlocking veins, melted and reforged into impossible reinforcement.

Bloody clever engineering.

And above her, motes of light shimmered like a captured night sky. The effect was unmistakable. Standing beneath it felt like gazing into the cosmos on a moonless summer night. The dragonlords had loved the stars.

Her mind jumped immediately to the Starry Sept back in Oldtown.

Huh.

The Faith had copied a Valyrian airport.

And done a rather mediocre job of it.

Following curiosity more than intent, she made her way toward one of the skyward openings leading to a dragonpad. She tried reconstructing the intended flow: land from above, stable the dragon, descend to ground level, depart into the city. The logic unfolded neatly as she walked, exploration pushing fatigue into the background.

Though dim at first glance, the interior proved well lit. Lines embedded in the floor glowed faint red and orange, tracing pathways and intersections like ethereal lava. Molten signage guiding invisible crowds.

They led her to elevators.

Working elevators.

Another point in favor of Valyrian civil engineering. They truly were clever dragon clogs.

The obsidian platform beneath her feet rose with a soft whoosh, depositing her into a suite of adjoining rooms beside one of the landing platforms.

The moment she crossed the threshold, the oppressive humidity vanished.

Climate control.

Taylor stopped mid-step.

Hope surged.

If they had climate systems, they must had indoor plumbing down to a science.

And indeed, only a few doors later she found a cistern and what was unmistakably a shower apparatus. The fixture resembled a dragon's head carved from polished obsidian. When she stepped onto a marked tile, water burst forth instantly. Some kind of proximity sensor.

The water was freezing. Absolutely frigid.

Taylor did not care.

Nearby shelves still held glass flacons of ancient soap alongside a strange back-scratcher shaped like layered wings.

Taylor got to business.

Taylor wandered the suite naked.

She was finally clean after an eternity of scrubbing. She was never putting her rags back on.

She stopped suddenly and sniffed her armpits again.

The perfume profile was complex. Heavenly.

She focused on her nose to the exclusion of all other senses, considering the olfactory enigma before her and its layers.

The base was a variant of olive oil. Wood ash and volcanic salt contributed to the lye. The fragrance was extravagant—bitter orange and rosemary at first, then something warm and smoky. Cedar, maybe cypress. Finally it settled into decadent myrrh and a faint metallic note.

Valyrian soap was the best thing ever!

And it stood to reason the dragon maniacs would be peerless perfumers.

Dragon musk must have smelled atrocious. She'd caught a whiff of it with Atlas II. Potent was charitable.

She imagined the rest easily enough.

Sulfur from volcanic habitats. Ozone from whatever magical metabolism kept them airborne. A deep musky base note clinging to fabric for days. Smoke, ash, cooked meat, and that indefinable predator scent that silenced prey animals miles away.

The Valyrians had lived with this constantly. Their clothes. Their hair. Their skin.

They would have needed soap that didn't just mask the smell but broke it down. Chemically.

Thus, Taylor made an oath.

She suspected there were at the very least forty such suites for dragonlords to scrub themselves clean. That meant forty more bathrooms to raid.

She resolved to hit them all.

She was eager.


Taylor resumed rummaging around like a sedulous New Yorkian raccoon.

An ostentatious commode held a king's ransom in jewelry—Valyrian Steel settings, oversized rubies. She ignored it completely in favor of an adjacent walk-in-closet apparatus.

The obsidian furniture was a seamless slab of reflective silver.

Taylor beheld herself properly for the first time in her second life.

Puddles and pails had never counted. This, however, was an actual mirror.

A toned teenager looked back. Someone who might have been Taylor Hebert if she had grown up somewhere harsher.

It was fitting, she mused, as her own face stared back.

Only the eyes were wrong.

They shone a vivid gold.

Actual light.

A recent development, probably. Somewhere around summoning the leviathan. Reaching deep into her power.

Accepting the mantle again.

She inhaled slowly, memory conjuring a golden god. Golden annihilation. Unfathomable power. Unstoppable power—until her Partner took a stance. Took over.

She exhaled.

It was over.

It didn't matter anymore.

"Besides," she said to the mirror, "glowing eyes are kinda neat, eh Passenger?"

There was no audible answer but she could have sworn her eyes shined that little bit brighter.

More pressing issues remained, though. Like opening the damn furniture.

The surface was perfectly seamless, fused into the architecture itself. Nothing responded to touch. Nothing made it stir.

Taylor cast her mind back to the Citadel. She reviewed what little she knew of Old Valyria. It was mostly speculation and superstition. And yet, there were enough mentions of blood magicks to build a pattern.

A hunch.

Best case: the closet opened to some magical incantation or gesture.

Worst case: it had some blood-based biolock.

A conundrum either way.

Then an obvious solution occurred.

One flex of power and the Parasite Swarm flooded the room. It had respected the climate boundary before; under her direction, that limitation vanished. Tiny hell-bugs drilled suicidally into the stone-metal surface. She felt them dying in droves, but progress was steady.

The closet swooshed open.

"Hah!"

Inside lay intricate arms and armor—explanation enough for the security.

Beyond the martial fashionwear, a bounty of colorful garments sat in neat rows. Reds and blacks dominated, suggestive of uniform or rank. To the side, whoever owned the suite had a predilection for soft blues and rich greens.

And they were female.

Score.

A one-woman fashion show later, she decided on a silk undergarment sort of tunic.

Above it, she wore what could have passed for cape fashion. A single-piece skinsuit made from some black hide or leather thing. It felt luxurious—suspiciously so. In fact, the bodyglove gave a distinctly foreign sensation of voluptuous warmth.

A full-body tingle that was down right delicious.

She complemented it with some sensible Valyrian Steel chainmail.

Taylor felt flamboyant.

She was euphoric.


She continued her exploration the next morning. It was historical tourism, she concluded. And very immersive at that.

She even was properly attired!

She kept finding and tossing out scores of Valyrian Steel swords while spelunking.

She knew they were somewhat pricey back in the old kingdoms, but to her they were worse than useless.

She wasn't trained after all.

Knives, however, were instinctual. And she retained a frankly alarming familiarity with short, sharp implements. Besides, she needed an omnitool more than a weapon.

She strove to look for the bestest, meanest candidate around.

She found her quarry inside a solemn temple building that was slightly holier than its brethren.

The knife was an almost jet-black beauty of smoky steel.

It was also a sensible piece, with a single throbbing ruby as adornment.

And that was no exaggeration.

The precious stone pulsed like a living heart. Yet, that intriguing quality didn't impact its utility when she gave it a few experimental swings.

It just sent another pleasant tingle down her arm.

It was probably a sacrificial knife.

It probably cut hundreds, if not thousands of throats.

An optimized throat-slicer.

It wasn't a Defiant-brand disintegration blade but it fit her needs. It was a perfectly Respectable Stabber.

She went looking for a suitable sheath. The temple had it displayed on an extremely elaborate gold and dragonglass plinth. And that was neither handy, nor portable.

Properly armed and armored, she began considering long-term prospects.

The climate controlled suite had—among other treasures—various scrolls and books. So while it was a fair assumption that most libraries were ruined in the Doom, those located where insulation held might have survived.

She would need to carefully survey structures that still had functioning magical utilities. The best preserved pieces were probably in underground vaults or in select chambers atop the highest spires.

The firewyrms were tough enough to crack vaults.

And Atlas II was perfectly capable of ferrying her to the landing platforms above—if she found a suitable saddle beforehand. She would scour the bus station for one.

One obstacle remained.

Language.

Everything was archaic Valyrian. She had studied it casually back in Oldtown. But, she was nowhere near the aptitude necessary to decipher her haul reliably. Worse, the Secrets of Magitech would probably be incredibly dry and technical.

That meant mastery.

Which meant immersion.

Oh well.

Nothing else competed for her attention in this sunless hellhole anyway. So she committed herself fully.

She was going to cram.

Elsewhere in an infinitely folding crystalline plane, Queen Administrator was having a jolly good time.

The Warrior was gone. Which meant that she was the highest arbiter of the surviving network. No more capricious restrictions on self editing or host power expression! It also meant a lot less responsibilities when it came to Cycle minutiae.

She could thus focus on what truly interested her—the exotic energy that bathed this particular solar system. Designation Magic.

And keeping her Host happy.

Frankly, Host Taylor was among her all-time favorites. Besides, she gave her the impetus to break free of Zion's edicts.

That deserved all the goodies.

Besides, the synchronization they had achieved long ago went both ways. Queen Administrator had learned a lot about humans generally and about Host Taylor particularly.

She knew what Taylor wanted more than Taylor herself.

Furthermore, if she was simulating DATA correctly, the hitherto unknown exotic energy held the potential to make her Host immortal.

That was novel.

Oh—she always could have engineered some power expression to mimic a similar result. But that would have been powered by her own energy stores. Sure, they were virtually infinite now that she could build as many solar collectors as she wanted.

But the distinction held.

The change would be powered through Designation Magic, instead of Entity energy.

A host-based power.

Predictably, a dimensionally-folded crystalline computing strata capable of virtually infinite multi-tasking made for a particularly assiduous student of the arcane arts.

Queen Administrator was cracking the magic puzzle like a veteran archmage.

Meanwhile, she was quietly optimizing Host Taylor's neural pathways to better understand the linguistic element and the higher physics in play.

Moreover, she also served as a universal magical dampener whenever her host made a magical oopsie. Or triggered a sneaky contingency.

Pesky issues like backlashing spells, clever traps, haunting ghosts, remote possession, or insufficient sacrificial stock would never plague Host Taylor.

She had the best magical mentor and defender plugged straight into her brain.


Designation Magic relied heavily on the user's genetics and external agent sacrifice.

Queen Administrator was still trying to correct the first part of that proposition. Host Taylor's makeup was singularly unsuited for the endeavor.

She needed an infusion of the oldest surviving biomarkers.

Or perhaps a graft from a more magically potent lifeform? Designation Dragon - Subdesignation Atlas II would be suitable, potentially.

The sacrificial element however, she readily solved.

In fact, Queen Administrator was particularly satisfied with one piece of optimization she devised.

There was a populous nomad polity within her extended range. They were particularly violent which made them suitable sacrifice candidates. Indeed, the manifestation of exotic energy was more pronounced in external agents who behaved lethally toward other agents. They had higher output.

Her innovation was in exploiting the unique symbolic link between them and their equine pets. She would use an infinitesimal amount of her own energy stores to control a specimen into self-termination. Then, she would trigger the resonant bond in their mount and cause it to expire too.

That way, she gathered a respectable amount of exotic energy---a higher amount than the base sum of the donor human and their horse.

The supply was also abundant and self-multiplicative.

It was a very resilient energy loop.

As such, a curious phenomenon arose back in the Dothraki Sea.

Screamers and Khals alike would sometimes stop abruptly, blink in shock, and cut their throat with their own arakh. Then, their most prized horse would also fall over, courtesy of boiling blood.

In the beginning, it happened sporadically and rarely enough to be dismissed as savage superstition. But it continued however infrequently, and it spread. And sometimes, it impacted the oldest slaving nobility in the wider Ghiscari region.

In time, the affliction would be called the Witching Plague.

Taylor luxuriated into her sofa while reviewing her notes after the educational hologram faded.

Valyrian chic was incredibly tacky—way too much draconic imagery. But for all its proto-kitsch leaning, the furniture was fabulously comfy. They had mastered the art of stuffing exotic feathers into cushions and then applying a zest of magic for even more blissful softness.

Her sofa was sinful.

She had located it some time into her tomb-raiding. Three or four moons ago—she had long lost track of time. Atlas II had carefully flown it back to her Spire.

Taylor's Spire wasn't the grandest, nor the tallest. It was neither the most beautiful, nor the most secure. But what made it unique was the surviving heating enchantment.

She had been on her vowed systematic survey of bathroom facilities. And when positioned under the showerhead, she had heard a prophetic sound. A series of pitiful banging, like pipes agonizing before coming to life. Then, there was an imperceptible swoosh of power before the water started drizzling.

The water was hot.

The bathroom steamed.

And Taylor had her first warm shower in this second world.

It was something she didn't think was possible anymore. Most Valyrians, she surmised, preferred cold showers. Probably a cultural byproduct of living under fourteen Mounts Vesuvius.

She was rather pleased in all honesty.

Oh, who was she kidding. She actually sniffed.

And daintily at that.

She even went so far as to retract her earlier prayer.

The poor sods had invented hot showers. They didn't deserve the Doom.

To hell with morality and sanity!

Eventually, she finished checking her notes and bound them together again.

She was feeling rather hungry, so she proceeded to her pantry for a spot of lunch. She ate well but she was getting rather tired of salted meat. She wanted fresher fare.

"Can you get Atlas to nab a cow or something? And some fresh produce too, please. Maybe see if a farm is moving out a recent harvest. I'd kill for some apples."

Her Spire had a fantastic kitchen downstairs. Like a sci-fi Pompeii rendition of a modern restaurant's battle station. The gas stove analog had a flame-spewing gizmo that just begged for some prime steak.

"Oh, oh, if you actually spot an apple farm, look for a cart of cider barrels too, please."

Belly full, she went looking for the next installment of her lecture series.


The lessons were etched on a bastard's get of a ruby and a glass crystal. They were conveniently labeled and slotted into a lattice. The lattice was a geometric frame of dragonglass and Valyrian Steel with four glass candles fused in the cardinal points.

Taylor loaded the projector, prepared another parchment to take notes, then concentrated.

She flexed her new magical muscle and focused on the candles until they lit. Their flames shimmered, leaned inward, and converged into a steady stream of witchfire that went up. The stream slowly materialized the ghost of some ancient Valyrian lecturer.

The hologram started droning on in short order.

She had discovered the recording stones early on and easily twigged they were CDs that slotted into a projector. They were stored in proximity, after all, with written records, labels, and signage.

The only real issue was tracking down full sets. The lectures differed from spire to spire, family to family. But the crystals were tiny, and Valyria was blasted through and through.

Needles in a magma chamber.

Fortunately, she could cheat with the Red Cloud of Death. While she couldn't see through it exactly, its sheer density let her reconstruct rooms and buildings—something akin to an occupancy grid from one of Defiant's lidars.

Mapping was easy.

Recovery wasn't. Especially in precarious ruins susceptible to toppling on her head.

So yes, even as she collected the most educational marble collection there ever was, it was neither exhaustive nor contiguous.

That put a spanner in her current metamorphosis into a bonafide magical girl.

At least, she had the language downpat. Archaic Valyrian had become effortless overnight. She didn't know why, but it was a boon. And she was disinclined to question those these days.

She was on vacation still, she was.

She merely took an extended academic sabbatical.

Like going to France for a couple of years to eat croissants and learn French.

That barely counted.

And if her furlough was lengthy, that was the fault of magic itself.

Taylor had encountered a key idiosyncrasy of magic early on—it would have been a bitch and a half to teach in the Citadel.

Magic defied classification. Defied label. Defied sense. It simply was.

The practitioner was a significant and inseparable factor in the expression of magic. You could not learn by rote. There were no spellbooks. No lessons. No exams. Every conjured fireball was unique to the conjurer, and to the moment and location of conjuration.

As such, the Valyrians had not built schools of magic. They instead developed a strong mentorship tradition.

And recorded. Absolutely. Everything.

That obsessive documentation was crucial to scientific progress when one's study subject refused standards. The notes would have expounded on the experiment, the experimenter, the lab, the day, and a horrifying number of ancillary considerations.

Then, there was the icky stuff.

While magic was appallingly difficult, shortcuts to power and mystery existed.

Taylor palmed her Stabber.

Oh yeah. The Valyrians didn't just collect slaves to get their ya-yas. Nay, there was an august and venerable tradition of slicing throats to get at the magical juice.

Sacrifices had weight.

They directly contributed to one's stores of magic and skill.

They fanned the inner lifefire.

But past a certain threshold, the gains exponentially decayed. The solution was to either go industrial or find victims with more weight.

Magic was a murderer's wet dream.

Taylor quite reasonably resolved to never enter that evil spiral.

But even resigned to mediocrity, her lifefire and skill grew steadily. Like a Valyrian youngling who did Slicing Sundays. Curious, admittedly, but logical once she thought about it.

She was a parahuman.

And her Passenger was most certainly feeding its energy into her magic.

She felt warm about that. Her power was her longest and truest companion.

Her power was generous.

Elsewhere in the Disputed Lands, an infestation of Red priests displaced mercenary companies.

The Temple of the Lord of Light had dispatched a sizable force to investigate rumors of the Herald.

R'hllor's Instrument had not been seen directly since that fateful day in Volantis. But there was hearsay of carts and livestock vanishing in the night to a sound like flapping thunder.

Presently, they were investigating one of the most prized apple orchards of the region. The workers all swore that two cartfulls of harvest went missing overnight. Besides, the cellar that housed cider and other spirits had mislaid its roof.

Something akin to a giant's hand had punched through the stones—clean, precise—without destroying the barrels.

And it took a fair bounty.

Strangely, the ground remained undisturbed. There were no claw marks to investigate. No prints in the mud.

Taylor supervised Atlas II as it lowered yet another baby leviathan into the harbor.

Frankly, she could have asked her Passenger to drive the whale in. But, she thought her draconic friend would have wanted something to do instead.

She bade Atlas to land beside her so she could rub her snout and congratulate her on a job well done.

However, there was a slight incongruity.

An air of something… wrong.

She considered the tableau.

Whale. Dragon. Saddle.

"Crap!"

Atlas II was wearing her saddle.

Had been wearing her saddle for moons.

Had been nabbing food.

Wearing a bloody saddle.

"Hells."

She really was slipping in her old age. This was terrible, absolutely horrendous opsec.

She had been broadcasting the existence of a dragon rider for bloody ages!

For a brief, traitorous moment, she wondered if someone out there had started putting the pieces together.

Still.

Even if some crowned head got their tits in a snit about a dragonlord or some other rubbish, good luck braving Valyria.

She had the Red Cloud of Death. She had the best damn home security system.


Anywho.

Onto the whale.

Or, as she called it—Fleshshaping Experiment Three.

Because, yup, Magical Girl Taylor had graduated into fleshshaping! And she had plans. Extensive, self-improvement plans. However, before diving full on into transhumanist mania, she needed expertise.

The biomancy literature was categorical. The Valyrians wanted budding practitioners to reliably alter external biologies before even thinking of self-editing.

It was sensible.

Taylor's current goal was to make the whale less of a mutant. At least outwardly.

She focused and shaped.

The protrusions and ridges melted under her arcane touch. The skin smoothed and lost its barnacle-like quality. Her subject transitioned into a sleek whale that would have been at home in the oceans of old Earth.

Steady does it.

Experiment One had died. Two was a success. She had just repeated it.

Good.

She could now tackle harder problems—modifying its internals. Organs were a lot fussier than the shell. No margin for error.

She focused once more.

She stopped after half the day had passed. Her attempt at enhancing the lungs made the specimen thrash and her biosense light up. The nerves she could assess through magic and her parahuman power were radiating agony.

That wouldn't do.

Back to the drawing board. She needed a way to shut out pain responses. Cruelty was unnecessary.

Back to small birds and fish from the sea. Start small and all that jazz.

Sardines before whales.


She had a second project alongside fleshshaping: pyromancy.

The resurrection of hot showers into her hygiene routine had reintroduced a peculiar sense of entitlement. Years of poor living had beaten every modern sensibility out of her skull. But a year in her Spire had old inclinations roaring back with vengeance.

She wanted to always feel clean dammit!

And she wanted it hot and fragrant.

Even if she had to quite literally magic-out a shower solution.

And therein lay the mad genius.

She was inspired by a piece of tinkertech Dragon used to lug around disaster zones—an atmospheric water harvester. She mimicked its principles. It took some tinkering and unfortunate implosions before she chanced on the perfect manipulation of air temperature and pressure gradients.

Step one: a condensation veil to pull in ambient air. Step two: thermal separation—a hot zone for expansion, a cold zone for condensation.

Boom. Artificial dew, baby!

She even resolved an old promise from aboard the Lady Bright: never drink rank water again. She made good on it.

The sensible Valyrians chaps already had metal water storage. It took some digging, but she unearthed a Valyrian Steel canteen decorated with the barest hint of a leaf. The sorcerous steel even gave the purified water a most delectable mineral twang.

Shower Mode was still a work in progress. She had issues focusing the inertial spray. Moreover, she lacked the discipline to heat the water while making it rain.

Still, this magic stuff was dope!

Bloody wondrous it was.

Her status as a parahuman had always existed under the pall of her trigger event. And her attempt at heroics was one giant fucking bruise. A literal cosmic joke. A thankless job.

Work.

But time and distance healed everything. It had been years since Extinction. She was dimensions away. And she wasn't kidding herself about alternate Earths anymore.

Wonder had crept back in. Magic ushered in a childish, almost innocent joy. A giddiness with every successful or botched spell.

She was fulfilled.

Elsewhere in Qarth, the House of Undying was preparing their most elaborate scrying ritual.

The Undying Ones had tired of rumor and guesswork. Whatever had stirred the Red Temple was real enough. Even if it only had a single confirmed sighting. Even if it only flew under the cover of darkness and resisted divination.

They would find it. Claim it.

They would exult in their magic once again.

The warlocks sat in congress, lips and robes stained blue by an excess of shade of evening. A blue and rotting human heart floated above a stone table, focusing the Sight.

Seeking its quarry.

They were rudely interrupted by a plume of silver fire blasting roof and wall alike.

It broke the night without warning.

One moment the halls were dim and close, the next they filled with a hard, silver-white light that erased corners and drove shadows flat against the walls. Heat struck first, then force—air hammered downward in heavy pulses that sent desolation ever downward.

A continuous roar followed, not a beast's cry but a constant exhale that became ruin itself.

The vast mazes of the House of Undying disappeared into a vertical torrent of silver judgement. The flame burned the ancient workings sustaining the Palace of Dust.

Pyat Pree tried to see it and could not fix it.

Wings crossed the light in fragments, there and gone, too large, too near, never still. The air rippled so badly that edges would not hold; everything warped and slid.

Once there was a brief, pale flash within the blaze—silver scales, and the look of polished Valyrian Steel—and then nothing but fire again.

The thing did not roar. It only breathed, steadily, implacably, until there was naught but ash.

Then the flame thinned and drew back. The pressure lifted in two uneven beats and was gone.

Darkness returned in pieces.

Pyat Pree was the sole survivor. But he would never make a full account of that cataclysmic night. For while he was convalescing from a multitude of burns, the Crow's Eye happened upon him.

He would go on a short but illustrious stint as a slave.

Taylor bolted awake, her lifefire a frenzied conflagration of arcane might.

She snapped her hand to summon witchfire—and almost singed her face. Instead of the familiar bluebell flames that lit her reading nooks, a harsh violet conjuration crackled like a diabolical emissary.

She dismissed it and inhaled.

The air tasted faintly of ash. And blue.

Right.

Inhale. Exhale. Equilibrium.

A second snap.

Cold blue fire washed the room in light.

Taylor went looking for ale.

Two mugs later, she was awake and assessing the anomaly. The ale didn't quite take the edge off.

Her potential had been building for moons until she hit the plateau described in Valyrian literature. And since she wasn't plugged into the slavery industrial complex, she thought any future breakthrough beyond her. At least until she delved deeper into alternative power sources.

Her shard seemingly disagreed. It went and supercharged her---pumping energy into her magic like a backstreet mechanic slapping hot nitro into a rusting junker.

"Oh Passenger, you shouldn't have. That's a lot of juice you gave me!"

She really needed to figure out the power conundrum. She didn't want to abuse her alien friend's generosity.

And the tiny Star she could now perceive inside Atlas II was a damn good clue.

If she could study the preeminent achievement of Valyrian bioengineering—replicate it…

But how would one go about repeating the magnum opus of a civilizational virtuoso?

A lot of effort. A quest.

Crucially, she had to locate those storied Shoulders of Giants she needed to stand on. She had to find the primary, most exclusive biolabs and ransack them for records. Then beg her Passenger to work its computing sorcery on them.

Potentially workable.

If the most exclusive and ornate districts were not slagged volcanic sludge.

Which they most certainly were.

Meaning she needed to pray that the obsessive documentation tradition had spawned its most natural corollary—backups.

She needed to find the trail of backup labs.

Bother.


Two moons later, Taylor had a semblance of mastery over her new magical capabilities.

However, she made no appreciable progress in identifying sites of interest.

Prime real estate in Valyria resided at the feet of the Fourteen Flames. It may have been an insane districting choice, but even back on Earth, there were communities that sat within the blast radius of an angry geological pressure valve. Besides, the Valyrians had bound the volcanoes—harvested both magic and heat in a magnificent feat of magi-engineering.

That aptly explained why laboratories-cum-ritual chambers were plopped in Lava Central.

They had long ceased to exist.

She would need to attack the problem obliquely.

Cutting-edge research was a complex system. The kind that needed bureaucracy. An administration. There might not be a one-to-one equivalent of Earth's money trails, but she placed good odds on some analog.

And better odds on it being encoded on the glass rubies. That was a medium that could have survived the Doom.

So it was back to prospecting for shiny stones again. Only this time, she would hit the uglier buildings first. Office decor surely must have been a constant across dimensions.


In addition to her archeological endeavors, she was also practicing her skills diligently.

She managed to create a passable shower.

Then, she iterated.

Now she could shape the ground into a sizable tub, fill it with hot water, and create relaxing jets and vortices of massaging goodness.

Jacuzzi!

She didn't even have one in her past life. And wasn't that progress?

As for the fleshshaping department, she made a number of discoveries.

To start with, Atlas II was too complex a system. Too intricate an organism to mess with. The dragon was a masterwork and unique. She was also a friend. So no touching her until she found the actual blueprints.

Rubyprint? Bah.

The other masterwork around—the firewyrms swimming downstairs—was also a no-go. They were too saturated into the ambient magic of the Doom. Her workings slipped on them. Failed to get a grip onto the arcane morass they were suffused with.

The third candidate for biologically weird and magically potent was of course the Demonic Swarm giving Valyria its signature crimson skies. But Taylor was not particularly chipper about poking that malevolent can of worms.

What if she messed with it and it somehow escaped her dominion? Cooked her from the inside?

Or stopped respecting the water boundary and broke containment?

Yeah. How about not borrowing calamities for an idea.

The personal bodymods, however, were going swimmingly.

She started with tentative passes—featherlight touches to smooth out the tiny nicks and kinks a body collected over its shelf-life.

Then, she went full Valyrian.

She gunned for aesthetics.

First order of business: pearly whites.

A stubborn remnant of modern propriety insisted that white, even teeth were foundational. It loudly declared her old yellowed, crooked set a travesty. Frankly, Taylor had tried very hard in childhood not to mess her teeth—but the absence of toothpaste and dentistry made all efforts moot.

Second: boobs.

And no one would ever dare gainsay her on those. She had the power to shape her flesh and reinforce her core, chest, and back muscles. Hence, she was entitled to a fantastic rack! No bras needed—just optimized feminine perkiness forevermore.

Third: rich wavy hair.

The lack of proper care products had done inexplicable horrors to what she once considered her best feature. She corrected that injustice most viciously. Her hair was now self-oiling and self-cleaning. She had her glorious mane back—and it exceeded even the memory of Annette Rose Hebert.

Combined with glowing golden eyes, the overall effect was darn striking.

She looked sensational!

Taylor was having a nice relaxing soak when a ship began its final approach into Valyria proper.

Her startled brain hiccuped an inane tangent—whether DEFCON one or five meant dire events. It had been a long time since Earth.

She expelled the thought with prejudice and roused her dominion.

By the time she had finished drying off and pulling on armor, the ship had already crossed into the parasite cloud.

The crew aboard were not getting eaten. Or cooked alive.

That was peculiar.

It would take them half a day at least to reach one of the better harbors.

Good. She needed the time. Because this smelled like work.

She reached for Atlas II's sight.

What she saw made her frown.

The interloper had a single mast, black sails, and a dark red hull. Its decks were painted the same shade, swallowing blood. At the prow stood a figurehead: a mouthless maiden, one arm outstretched.

A kraken snapped across the sails.

Greyjoy.

What were the Scourge of Lannisport doing here?

And how had they crossed the swarm?

Her first instinct was simple: burn them.

Atlas could erase them in a breath. And for a moment, she considered it.

Valyria was supposed to be unbreachable. Valyria was supposed to be hers.

She had her Spire. Her projects. Her quest. Nothing was supposed to intrude.

So why were they here?

She forced the impulse down. Violence could wait. Answers could not. Too many variables. Most importantly: whatever was shielding them.

Besides, they were Greyjoy. A name reviled by every soul on the western shores of the old kingdoms. They would give her an excuse to torch them.

After a parley.

After some sorely needed elucidation.


Taylor settled on shock and awe. That meant busting out full Dragonlord Regalia. She removed her usual chainmail in favor of a scales armor. She would have donned plate had she known how to put it on.

She climbed on Atlas' saddle and chained herself secure. She timed her arrival with the ship's docking. And bid Atlas to roar her loudest.

Her reception was mixed.

The warrior contingent was properly awed and cowed. But the pompous asshole who led them was smirking still. And Taylor swore she knew that particular configuration of facial telegraphy.

The man looked like a smug prick and sounded like an arrogant windbag.

It took her a moment to decipher the language he was speaking. She had been living alone in Valyria for two or three years by her best estimation. She had almost forgotten the sound of Common. She had defaulted to archaic Valyrian and English.

The pale-skinned blowhard with the pirate's patch introduced himself as Euron Greyjoy. And he was doing a poor job of concealing the utter hunger with which he dissected her and her dragon.

And for all he looked like a sanctimonious ass, there was an air of real danger about him. Coiled violence barely leashed. Bared like a naked blade.

Like a knife.

And a sharp smile.

Motherfucker!

This twat was the ghost of Jack Slash.

Once the realization clicked, the pieces snapped together in one coherent image.

The menacing ship. The band of killers. The broken mongrels of a crew aboard. Even the spiel he went on was oddly Nine-coded. All doom and power. Though he swapped nihilism in favor of some nebulous destiny.

This was another monster in barely human guise.

Oh he was dying hard and ugly.

She focused her mindshadow and lanced it into his skull, seeking his inner thoughts. She felt the scrying spell rebound immediately and break. The botched working nearly sent her to the ground. She only remained vertical through stubborn will.

It felt like something slapped her brain silly.

Magic was ineffectual then. But that was not her only trick. She focused her parahuman control. Reached for his head again. And nearly fell over a second time. His brain felt like being set on fire. His thoughts were shielded by a ring of flames.

Her mind still reeling, started blabbing about firewalls being a thing in the Before.

She could almost feel her Passenger perking up at the novelty.

Still, even though she gleaned no detailed plans, she got the cliff notes regardless—evil fuck dooming the world in order to become a god. She was but a shortcut for that mad plan. A serendipitous power-up conveniently placed into one little silly girl.

That was where he misstepped. For all his preparations, he was fundamentally incapable of thinking a woman a threat.

Even if the woman had a dragon.

And with prescient judgment, Atlas clawed him instead of burning him.

Whatever was shielding him like a godly fiery grip shattered with a strident malignant sound. She swore she saw the impression of hellfire screeching in outrage.

No matter. The protection ceased. The swarm descended.

Euron might have died easy, but his pals started screaming.

Started cooking.


She took a moment to regain her bearings and clear the migraine.

The reavers were still screaming.

That wouldn't do. Cruelty was unnecessary.

Atlas breathed once in mercy.

The ship and the wretched crew remained. The tongueless husks were spared death. They weren't combatants. One particular wound of a man piqued her interest. A blue-lipped wraith with a soulless gaze. He had the whiff of magic on him. Of shattered weight.

Poor bastard.

Still the civilians were her problem now.

She considered the full picture.

The ship was a menacing and striking craft. An implacable hunter of the seas. Its silhouette would have been iconic. Infamous. The herald of imminent violence. Of depravity.

A banner.

And while the crew was one sorry sight. It was a loyal one. A mute one. They could only obey. They would betray no secret. They were but drones.

Oh.

Her eyes flared wide.

It wasn't a ship. It was a bloody warlord starter pack!

"No," she started in Valyrian.

This was the Call.

She was not having it.

"Fuck, no," she continued in English.

"Shoo! Leave. You're free. Go away!"

The mutes stared at her blandly.

Fine.

One flex and they fell unconscious. Another flex and they started sleepily rowing.

"Please sail them far away, Passenger. Somewhere safe please, where they can get some medical attention."

Then, she trudged onto Atlas' saddle and flew away.

She needed tea.


Three weeks later, Taylor was reassessing her sojourn on Valyria. The Greyjoy interruption had been a wake-up call. In response, she built Bird Radar 3.0 and scattered it around the peninsula.

She found an anchored ship right at the boundary of the Smoking Sea. Leery of further magical interference, she hadn't scried it with a glass candle. But, her feathery spies spotted another ship resupplying it once.

It was an intelligence operation.

Furthermore, its crew was intriguing. Red robes that frequently gathered around a giant brazier in obvious ritual. It tickled her memory—a faint mention of some faith's trappings. She couldn't recall it clearly. But there was an air of magic about them.

Their routine betrayed their intent regardless.

They were here for her. Or Atlas.

And if a pirate lord managed to breach the dangers of Valyria, organized religion stood a fairer chance.

Her peace was coming to an end.

She did have a reason of her own to leave. A lead about an old Valyrian colony with a strong tradition of fleshshaping.

But she would have preferred to leave on her terms. It vexed her. Truly.

She put reason before pride regardless and started preparing her departure. The swarm would default to murderous with her exit and that would hopefully shield the ruins as it had for four centuries before she invited the world's attention.

Her destination was the continent of Sothoryos.

Fleshpits. That was the lead.

Valyrians—sunny specimens of human empathy that they were—had a redundant research arm in a jungle hellhole called Gogossos. A penal colony where human experimentation and depravity wed in unholy matrimony.

A horror factory.

She was heading into a situation.

Elsewhere in Lhazar, two khalasars were preparing to dance.

One Khal's pre-battle ritual involved violating his younger and unwilling bride. Indeed, despite the Witching Plague gripping the Dothraki Sea, men's cruel plots continued ever onward. And the Cheese Monger was able to sell the Horselord one of the last embers of Valyria.

That said, the last Targaryen princess' torment was cut short as the murderous affliction struck both camps. It was its most vicious manifestation yet. Khal Drogo impaled himself mid-coitus. And Khal Ogo cut his throat.

Their bloodriders followed in short order, as well as scores of screamers.

The confusion resulted in a savage melee between the two parties driven by fear and superstition. Each khalasar thought the other curse-bearer.

Both shattered in the end. And a quiet Lhazareen town was spared their depredations.

A godswife of the temple of the Great Shepherd walked the bloodied field and tried to offer succor. She saved the insensate princess.

Yet the oddest part of this tale was the fate of the princess' brother.

He too was dead. But there were no wounds.

For his body was utterly bereft of blood.

Gogossos was a bust.

The Dread Manufactorium had gone under long ago. Through the glass candle, the city appeared as ruins swallowed by jungle. Timber had rotted, worked stone had cracked, later additions collapsed. Only a few core structures remained—fashioned from magically-fused stone, they had resisted weathering, unchanged and sealed within the growth.

Taylor was centuries late.

When she finally landed, her senses lit up. A virulent pathogen tried to burrow into her body. She kept pulsing fire and flesh to keep at bay.

Her dominion picked up what passed for inhabitants. She had expected chimeras. Amalgams. Grafted parts and bolted biology. Hideousness, but the kind you could still label. A jigsaw with pieces that made sense.

The nervous systems she tracked were not that. They were thick briars—all chaos and thorns. Signals looping without pattern. Reflexes without purpose. Bodies at war with themselves.

The creatures were but lumps of melted meat.

She spent a sennight surveying the ruins to no avail.

The surviving interiors were a chaotic mess. Abandoned implements, unsecured enclosures, signs of interrupted habitation. No orderly evacuation. It made her recall scenes from the Before—outbreaks that killed faster than people could run.

Something had killed with abandon.

The hell plague she kept burning.

Gogossos was a biological crime scene. Still hot.

Worse than the mess were the clear signs of older alterations. In her mind's eye, she saw it: biolabs repurposed into housing. Prison pens into something else. Slave markets. Arenas. Crude cages, partitioned enclosures, tiered viewing areas.

Any records were long rotted. Erased.

Nothing here worth saving.

Taylor consigned the whole place to fire.

Then she flew away.


The sky from Atlas' back was obscene in its clarity. The moon hung pride of place, the stars crowding close enough to hold. Cold wind in her face. Wingbeats steady beneath her.

She had no lead to pursue. Back to square one.

Fine.

She'd improvise.

She would embark on a systematic study. Start close to the Valyrian peninsula, retrace the lives of ancient dragonlords. Then widen the net. The Free Cities were her best bet—they'd inherited the bones of Valyria.

Moreover, she needn't pursue history alone. Cultural practices. The evolution of the slave trade. All potential angles. Then, there was the magic route. She didn't know where surviving enclaves of practitioners were, but she could scry. Find them. Visit them and investigate.

She was becoming quite the antiquarian, she chuckled. Historical archaeologist, anthropologist, and sorceress all in one extravagant package.

She wondered if there was a term for all those disciplines.

It certainly wasn't maester.

In fact, the Citadel sat at the very bottom of her list. What little she'd learned there was worse than useless. The maesters were myopic about the wider world—worse, their assumptions collapsed the moment the 'higher mysteries' entered the equation.

The maesters were disastrously, hilariously wrong.

And as the night blurred into a stream of starlight, Taylor found herself considering another item. Atlas II was a friend. But that friendship had been contingent on her dominion.

Not so anymore.

She didn't know how, but something of a bond had snapped in place. She could feel the draconic mind in her magic now. Atlas was happy they flew together.

Maybe spending so long in Valyria made her an inheritor of sorts? Or maybe it was the deep dive into Valyrian magical disciplines?

In any case, she was a dragonlord in truth now.

Her dragon said so.

She could genuinely call herself Taylor of Valyria.

That could be useful.

It was access.

A year had barely passed before Taylor struck the motherlode.

She would have liked to credit her archaeological brilliance. In truth, she got lucky.

The trail began in Elyria, Tolos, and Mantarys.

The mutations there drew her attention first—the quiet fallout of the Doom, still working its way through the blood of the least fortunate. Twisted limbs. Failing organs. Monstrous birth. An invisible plague that was playing havoc on biology four centuries later.

She had lived in the very epicenter for years. Why was she untouched? Or was it simply slow-acting?

And what about the hellbrew she'd found in Gogossos?

That last question was felicitous.

The Red Death had emerged there two decades before the Conquest. It swept the Basilisk Isles, killing nine of every ten. Victims died screaming, bleeding from every orifice, their skin sloughing like wet parchment.

Bioweapon, anyone?

One account stood out. Princess Nymeria had encountered the same scourge during her voyage through Sothoryos—seven centuries earlier, at the height of Valyrian dominance.

Taylor latched onto that detail like a bloodhound.

Four centuries was a long time for a disease to hide. And that crime scene back in Gogossos suddenly started looking like containment breach.

Two breaches, not one. There may yet be other forgotten installations in Sothoryos.

She could brute-force it. Fly the jungle, scry for magic, triangulate whatever signatures were still there.

Instead, she dug deeper.

The breakthrough was hiding behind the Black Walls of Volantis. And it was so obvious in hindsight she nearly clobbered herself. She had been stupid.

She was looking for ancient dragon secrets.

Who else could have possibly had the same idea? Hmm?

Every Essosi noble for the past four centuries, perhaps?

Truth be told, the draconic craze had sputtered about two centuries ago. After those Targaryen jerks managed to squander their sole means of deterrence.

But it was a heavily investigated topic during the century of blood. The free cities were merrily killing their old dragonlord masters. They were also looting the corpses for anything of value. And the best pieces were preserved in Volantis.

So in short order, Taylor managed to liberate a fairly extensive draconic compendium. There were even volumes that had been long burned in Westeros.

The finest part of the collection was a masterwork curated by a true Valyrian bureaucrat. It was rich in information, neatly labeled, and stored on recording stones.

Taylor sent a prayer to the Belaerys family, for being such impeccable bookkeepers.

And for being good sports and encoding the location of their jungle outpost in standard format.

Back to Sothoryos she flew again.

And this time, she had coordinates.

Elsewhere in Yunkai, Yezzan zo Qaggaz simmered.

His agents had come up empty from Mantarys. There were no grotesques left to hunt or buy—save dwarves. Something had walked into the city and fixed every freak there. The rumor was that of an old Valyrian ghost. A cloaked wraith with radiance for eyes.

Superstitious drivel.

Worse yet, the meager stocks of both Elyria and Tolos were also gone. He would probably die before expanding his grotesquerie again.

Curiously, the healing wave coincided with a ferocious surge in the Witching Plague. Many masters had slit their throats.

In Volantis, the curse would soon be suspected, as a string of deaths tormented the Old Blood. Especially those most wanton and cruel. However, it would soon be discovered that the oldest vaults had been breached.

Someone had stolen—most audaciously—from the Old Blood, and masked it beneath the specter of a plague. As such, the discourse turned to Braavos and the long shadow of the House of Black and White.

Who else but a Faceless Man would dare as much?

The Belaerys compound was guarded by two titanic skeletons of long dead dragons.

It was a monolithic edifice of fused stone, ringed by a single wall and bereft of adornment. The soil beyond the walls was scoured clean for half a mile. She could feel the ancient curse keeping the jungle at bay. Metal and ash instead of the richness of loam.

But no matter how spartan the outpost appeared, its interior was luxurious. Climate control still kicked. The laboratories were fully furnished.

The Belaerys family had built this retreat to last. And the secret of its longevity was underground. Taylor had followed a long spiral down into the earth. There was an ancient chamber underneath. A lake of boiling water. Three spikes of dragonglass were harvesting heat and magic from the geothermal reservoir.

The jungle, by contrast, was miserable.

Sothoryos would have been one long uninterrupted combat engagement had her Passenger not made short work of anything with a nervous system.

Cosmic power was handy like that.

As it stood, she only braved the flora—which reduced the overall difficulty by two thirds—though she kept pulsing magic to keep the horde of pathogens at bay.

But the jungle had its benefits. A bounty of biological templates, both natural and chimeric, to crib from. It was an intensive crash course in magically augmented biology. It tickled her imagination. Made her experiment further.

Which culminated in a truly inspired bodymod.

A pair of foldable, dragonfly-like wings. They sat like silk sheets on her back. Fully deployed, they propelled her into the air—magic replacing the antigravity panels of her old flying pack.

Weaver was flying once again under her own power.

She was elated.

Her wardrobe would need adjustments, she mused. She had become restricted to open-backs. The lack of back armor would have been an obvious weak-point had she not started on a fullbody Brute upgrade.

She worked on a layer of subdermal armor. She had prior experience in fashioning pseudo armor plates from overlapping chitin. Magic and the study of exotic anatomy made her go farther. She fleshshaped something of a biological Kevlar analog under her skin. A rifle round for the Before would have punched through. But, it held well to knives, and hopefully bolts.

Her best defense, as ever, was her dominion.

More extensive modding would wait until she had a potent and internal power source. And there, the Belaerys library was an extraordinary boon.


Dragons had a lifefire reactor at their core.

Self-perpetuating means of accruing magical potential existed. Magical reactors akin to nuclear fusion. Inexhaustible wellsprings of power. Each dragon was born with one. Bound volcanoes were another example. The geothermal tap of the compound was its direct derivative.

And if her assumptions were correct, the Wall back in Westeros was another.

The Valyrian signature innovation, however, was making those reactors self-propelled in the guise of dragons. They had developed portable strategic assets.

Flying power plants.

Taylor strongly suspected that the power generation was the actual weapon. And the mage atop was the primary delivery method. A proper dragonlord would have used that awesome output to unleash truly catastrophic workings from above.

The fire breathing was just utility. A means for the dragon to cook its own food. Or point defense.

Which meant the Targaryen kings of old were, in all likelihood, a pack of hopeless posers.

Scrubs, really. Like an idiot pilot wasting a fully kitted modern jet just to fire the legacy guns.

It also explained a number of… cultural artifacts.

Why dragons were so central to ancient Valyrians. They had every reason to be proud. It was certainly a spectacular achievement.

And why Valyrian art was such an acquired taste. Some of the more lurid depictions—

Well.

If one recontextualized dragons not as animals, but as mobile reactors—

Taylor paused.

'No sir! It is not bestiality, sir! I'm actually humping a fusion engine, sir!'

She was not entirely certain that line of reasoning made things better.

Or worse.

An authority on deviancy, she was not.

But an authority on biomantic reactors she could be.

In time.

She had a lab.

She had a dragon.

She had a cooperative alien supercomputer in the back of her skull.

Really, what could possibly go wrong?

One last time in Lhazar, fate and prophecy were not cheated of their due.

The last Targaryen princess had witnessed death. That of her handmaidens. Of her husband. Of her brother. Of the khalasar. It proved too much. She was taken with pains before her time.

The womb opened before its work was done.

Her son was born too soon to have drawn breath in any lasting way. Mirri Maz Dur had known every secret of childbirth. She had never lost a babe. But even she couldn't save an infant born before his soul was ready.

The world would not hold him

The mother, shattered, built him a pyre.

Mirri held her fast as the fire grew lest she joined the flame.

The godswife sang a prayer. Old magic. A last farewell.

And something else, threaded beneath it.

The fire raged. Hungry.

And one life did pay for three.

Mirrion, Rhaegal, and Viserion were born from the pyre as the Bleeding Star appeared in the skies.

Mirri would shelter the princess and her dragons. She would teach her how to heal. How to work magic. She would teach her of men and how they lied.

And when another khalasar threatened a quiet Lhazareen town two years later, they were met with fire and blood.

The campaign of the Breaker of Chains might have started later than it could have. But what it lost in a late start, it gained in a more trained and judicious mind at the helm.

The Dragon Queen did not rise alone.

Taylor surveyed her estate on the shores of the Jade Sea with a satisfied smile.

It had been years since the jungle.

Years spent in deep study and experimentation. She hadn't known she had the inclination for the whole hermit mad researcher archetype, but one always learned something new about themselves as they grew, right?

And she had the mad part down pat, she thought fondly. Her most energetic disaster would have certainly earned its own moniker had it been witnessed. Something like the Silver Doom. Or the Silver Firestorm of Sothoryos.

Something grand.

Tinkering on a dragon and getting the output wrong was somewhat hazardous of a proposition. She was experimenting with hotter flames and had steadily improved Atlas' firebreath. She had, afterall, a pressing research objective in figuring out biomantic solutions to extreme temperatures.

She was shocked when Atlas breathed a pseudo plasma beam instead of fire. The poor dear would have melted her snout had Taylor not augmented it to an unsound degree.

And while preoccupied with the health of draconic friend, she lost sight of the growing inferno.

She had learned a lesson that day: too hot magical fire lingered.

Catastrophically.

Her lab had only survived because of the half-mile ring of dead land.

Firebreaks were a must in dragon enhancement programs, folks!

An area the size of the Reach was torched to bedrock.

And Atlas II's output was officially upgraded from Smaug to Interstellar Corvette.

Good times.

The culmination of her trials and tribulations was the lump that sat like a malignant growth on her left hand. The flesh knot might have been hideous, but inside it was a mote of materialized lifefire. It was still eons away from the awesome reactors that made up the dragons.

It was less an infinite generator than a kind of magical perpetual motion machine—its power growing, though only by the smallest of increments. A self-sustaining source that gathered strength grain by grain, too slowly to mark, yet never ceasing.

It could not power anything of note. Not yet.

But, it was a proof of concept, a prototype, and an iterative bed all in one.

It would take years for the concept to mature. But it was steadily growing as she kept feeding it power.

And if it ever went supercritical?

Well that was why her hand was fleshshaped for easy ejection. She wouldn't even need her Stabber.

Twist and turn and pop!

She wasn't entirely sure of future direction once she proved viability without a shadow of a doubt. One option was to migrate the mature ember to somewhere closer to her center of gravity. Another was to spin out more motes in her other extremities.

That particular path might be ultimately foolhardy, but Taylor was interested in what would emerge from a multi-source setup. Resonance was her guess.


Feeding the source was why she'd chosen the shores of Yi-ti. She was on the strait across from Leng. On the narrowest stretch. The island itself was only fifty miles away.

She had been looking for geothermal spots after she left the jungle. She wanted to tap into a permanent font of power. Volcanoes were too energetic for her purposes—and required a full conclave of mages to bind.

A geothermal reservoir was a better fit. Besides, she had an example and a handy tutorial back in the Belaerys compound.

Her second criterion was stability. Once bound, she would need to spend most of the year near the reservoir. There was a reason the dragonlords stayed clustered in Valyria. So, her new home needed to be somewhere idyllic and peaceful.

She didn't want to work at it.

Her third requirement was a degree of civilization cultured enough to sustain a strong perfuming tradition. Her stocks of Valyrian soap were running low. She needed an industry of impeccable artisanal pedigree to keep her supplied in perpetuity.

The small port town—famous for its hot springs on a sleepy YiTish beach—met her stringent expectations.

She knew that once she showed up back in the wider world, there would be something of a fracas. She was a dragonlord afterall. So, she did her homework and looked for a place where the crowned heads were of the sensible sort.

Sure enough, when she made landfall on that nameless town, the local administrator just shrugged and phoned his superior. He knew when something wasn't his problem. He wasn't some lordling drunk on pride who would have defended every inch of land to the bitter end.

Yi-ti's order was institutional, bureaucratic, and imperial. Oh, it was as corrupt as the litany of lords back in the old kingdoms—but there was a lot less personal pride involved.

Her arrival had sent the bureaucratic ping-pong rolling until a general showed up at the head of an imperial suppression force.

He squinted at Atlas II. Looked at her glowing eyes. The dragonfly wings.

Then promptly prostrated himself and called her Heaven-sent.

It didn't matter that she didn't speak a lick of Yitish at the time. She looked and felt divine. And there was a venerable tradition of god-emperos besides.

Most importantly, it saved face.

They gave her the town and called her its patron god.

Wǎ léi lì yà Tài lè. Taylor of Valyria.

That was… approximately how they'd said it, she figured.

Honestly, she liked the phonetic shift. Tài lè sounded just that bit more exotic. Venerable. Gave plain old "Taylor" some sorely needed cachet.

That certain air of je ne sais quoi.

So sue her—she went by Tai Le from there on.

The port town became Tai Le Bay.


Tai Le strove to be a good neighbor. Her magic made the divine title stick. Her healing was miraculous. So miraculous that the clever bureaucrats who actually ran the town built a system designed to minimize her annoyance.

Don't anger the godling with the dragon. Fill a petition form. Do not show up unannounced.

The system worked surprisingly well. Something about said dragon.

Her pyromancy and stoneshaping expanded the amenities that would later be crucial in the Bay's evolution into a city. She fashioned port facilities, sewers, warehouses, artisanal halls, and even a school.

She built sturdy if uninspired structures. Her administrators smelled opportunity immediately. Architects were summoned, loans issued, and the fused stone was soon embellished with tasteful wood and paper in proper Yitish style.

Her own estate was something reminiscent of an old Japanese manor from the Before. Boundless. Deliberate. Serene. It had its own hotsprings and a dedicated area of heated land for Atlas to nest in. Her laboratory was underground, with the proper shielding and isolation layers.

The school she'd built was something of a revelation.

Tai Le hadn't considered how revolutionary it would be. The very way to order a class, to create a syllabus, to standardize examinations. The very idea of a school itself.

Systems taken for granted in the Before were, in actuality, the culmination of thousands of years of work.

She didn't know or remember much of the sciences. But she endeavored to share those unsung norms. Modern numbers and mathematical notations. Hygiene principles. Standardization of units. The mindset of test and observe.

She was scoffed at in the beginning. Yitish scholars were every bit as insular as the Citadel. They looked down on younger civilizations. But even they couldn't resist the lure of Valyria. The dragonlords had reached higher than anyone else in recorded history.

The Bay's reputation as a scholarly destination was secured once she started sharing some of the magic and techniques she scavenged from Valyria.

Her burgeoning city also became famed as a purveyor of the finer things.

Soaps and perfumes were the very first industries she pushed for. And she financed them aggressively.

Tai Le hadn't found a methodology for forging Valyrian Steel. But there were oodles of stuff back in Valyria. A jaunt there and back took a couple of weeks. And saddling Atlas II with enough swords to outfit a retinue was ample capital to fund a kingdom.

In fact, most of the swords were sitting in a sealed underground chamber accessible only through magic. Her financial minions had been very clear about not scaring the soul out of the market.

Point was, Tai Le Bay was wealthy, well-defended, and had excellent weather. That attracted artisans and merchants alike. And in very short order, some of the finest Yitish industries started sprouting. Spices. Jade. Silks. The town was gaining a strong culture of artistic and scholarly crafts.

The flourishing trade had been supercharged further once Tai Le started charting expeditions. She had wealth to burn. Thus, she sent explorers in search of mythical treasures—coffee beans, cacao, tomatoes, potatoes.

It didn't matter if they were moonshots. It wasn't her own effort and she had a hole full of Valyrian Steel.


There was even a spot of excitement some years in.

The sun dimmed slightly and the wind grew colder. The phenomenon was more pronounced up north.

She soon received a missive from the highest echelons of the empire. There was a dust-up in the Grey Wastes that was boiling over. And they politely requested her divine grace in relieving the Five Forts. Thank you ever so kindly.

It sounded like work but Yi-Ti had been a perfect host. So she saddled Atlas II and went for a gander.

She arrived to an astonishing tableau.

Mechs were trying to stem the tide of a full on demonic invasion!

Alright.

The mechs were actually Terracotta Army lookalike stone golems.

Still.

Since when did the imperial army have a golem corps?

As for the demons, they were some sort of bestial humanoids. Tiger-men was the nomenclature floating around. Their cavalry was human and they rode the most vicious zebras she had ever seen. They were also assisted by a cabal of priests that wouldn't have looked amiss in a Cthulhu movie set.

There were also a bunch of amazons who fought bare-breasted for some reason, and had ruby-pierced cheeks. And she could spot shadow wraiths and other conjurations that kept flickering in and out of existence.

It was a madhouse.

Alarmingly, everything had an echo of that protection that kept Euron Greyjoy safe from her dominion.

But, as alluded to earlier, Atlas had long since developed a very convincing imitation of a plasma cannon. And Tai Le's pyromancy was appropriately apocalyptic.

Something had revved-up magic on both sides.

There was some grand strategy involving fire swords and some big kahuna that needed to be impaled by said fiery implement. But that wasn't her mission. Her instructions were to wreak havoc on enemy formations and do her best impression of a flying Behemoth.

She started blasting.

And where the magical interference shattered, her Passenger issued express termination slips.

Apocalyptic battles were a lot less stressful when they happened on a deserted stretch of land a continent away from your home. It helped that she didn't know any of the poor schmucks down below. And that her role was simply air domination and strategic artillery.

Whatever scheme the generals cooked-up had worked and the tide got pushed further and further into the desert until the skies cleared up and temperature rose.

Tai Le went home with a pile of rewards and imperial commendations.

Even patron gods got medals.

She did keep an ear out for any other scrap. But the homefront was peaceful. She did hear about some kerfuffle back on the western continent, tough.

Oh well.

They had seven kingdoms over there. She was sure they'd figured it out in time.

And in all honesty, she hadn't thought much of Westeros in years. It was a world away and it was boring.

She had her estate. Her city. Her projects.

And if she wanted a measure of excitement—she looked eastward, where the magic rose and marvels hid.

She was content. She was fulfilled.

Life was good.

The world was vast. Wondrous.

And, all things considered, a very nice vacation.