Chapter 81: Exploration of Dragon Cave (1)
At noon, while eating his lunch, Ian's thoughts turned again to the clues for the treasure hunt.
He had already dispatched Bronn and Rohr to gather news around Flea Bottom, but they had not reported back in the past two days.
That meant he was still working with only four clues: [Flea Bottom], [Underground], [Death], and [Ruins].
Honestly, if he could just ignore that one damnable constraint—[Flea Bottom]—the answer seemed to scream at him: the Dragonpit.
The Dragonpit was the colossal structure the Targaryens had built to house their dragons, seated atop the Hill of Rhaenys in King's Landing. It was said that its great gates were wide enough for thirty knights to ride through abreast.
But its glory was long past. During the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, after Queen Rhaenyra's faction had taken King's Landing, a riot had erupted. Tens of thousands of starving citizens, incited by a mad prophet, had stormed the Dragonpit. They had managed to slay five dragons, including the queen's own mount, Syrax, as well as Shrykos, Morghul, Tyraxes, and Dreamfyre.
In the aftermath of that riot, the Dragonpit was left a smoldering, burned-out shell. It perfectly fit the clue of [Ruins].
Then there was [Death]. The slaughter of five dragons and thousands of civilians during the storming of the Dragonpit was reason enough. But the place was steeped in even more death than that.
In the year 209 AC, the Great Spring Sickness had devastated Westeros, and King's Landing had borne the brunt of it. Four-tenths of the city's population had perished in a terrifyingly short time.
The plague was indiscriminate, claiming the 'Good King' Daeron II and his two heirs, the High Septon himself, a third of the Most Devout, and nearly all the silent sisters in the city.
The streets of King's Landing had been choked with corpses. In desperation, the Hand of the King, Brynden Rivers, had proposed a grim solution to the new king, Aerys I. The bodies were to be transported to the Dragonpit and incinerated by the pyromancers. That night, the entire city could see the eerie, dark green firelight flickering from within the Dragonpit's shattered dome.
Therefore, if any place in King's Landing best fit the clue of [Death], the Dragonpit was surely a prime candidate.
Finally, there was [Underground]. This clue was less direct, but since a significant portion of the Dragonpit was indeed built below ground level, it was entirely plausible that the treasure box was hidden in its cellars.
At this point, only one problem remained—the Dragonpit was not in Flea Bottom.
So what place in Flea Bottom *did* fit all these clues? Ian drew a blank. As far as he could recall from the original histories and their related accounts, no such place was ever mentioned.
Then again, the original stories left out countless details. It wasn't as if they would record every insignificant fact, like some poor hovel in Flea Bottom having an ancient stone slab in its cellar that the tenants used to bury their dead.
After all, the original work was just a story. This place… this was a complete world.
*Wait,* he thought, his mind latching onto a detail. *Wildfire.* Before the fall of King's Landing, King Aerys II had commanded the pyromancers to burn the entire city. That order was what led Jaime Lannister to kill him, earning the man his infamous title: 'Kingslayer.'
The story of the wildfire caches had to be true; it was confirmed by numerous later events. During the War of the Five Kings, when Stannis Baratheon's army threatened the city, a prostitute and her client had fallen through the rotten floorboards of the Dragonpit ruins, discovering a forgotten cache of wildfire stored there by the pyromancer Rossart during Robert's Rebellion.
In another version of the tale, Cersei had used wildfire to destroy the Great Sept of Baelor, eliminating all her enemies in one fiery blast. While the specifics of that plot seemed foolish, the underlying fact remained: caches of wildfire were hidden beneath the Great Sept.
If the entire substructure of King's Landing was riddled with tunnels for storing wildfire, then perhaps the clues were pointing to something else entirely. Could the box be hidden in a forgotten tunnel that stretched from the Dragonpit all the way to Flea Bottom?
A jolt of excitement shot through him.
If this guess was true, then the treasure box was as good as his.
To connect the clues to the Dragonpit required, at a minimum, purchasing the third clue. And buying the third clue cost seven points.
With the main questline being nearly impossible to complete, a player would have to personally kill at least two other players to earn enough points for three clues.
Of course, such players undoubtedly existed, likely lurking in King's Landing or Pentos. But whether any of them would be willing to wager all their points on a single theory was another matter.
As for the players who hadn't made the connection to the Dragonpit, their attention—whether they were actively hunting for the treasure or lying in wait to ambush others—would be focused entirely on Flea Bottom.
This meant that even if Ian marched his men to the Dragonpit in broad daylight, it was unlikely any other player would even notice.
***
At dusk, Ian collected his new suit of plate armor from Tobho Mott's forge. He, Rohr, Case, and Bronn then donned simple, concealing robes they had purchased earlier and began the walk northeast along the Street of Steel, heading towards the Hill of Rhaenys.
The 'Black Falcon' Dorian and his lieutenants followed with two groups of men, one trailing close and the other at a distance. Their destination was the same: the ruins of the Dragonpit at the summit of the hill.
After a full day of inquiries, Rohr and Bronn had returned with two definitive conclusions for Ian.
First, death was a daily, unremarkable occurrence in every corner of Flea Bottom.
Second, they had found nothing that could reasonably be called 'ruins' anywhere within its sprawling slums.
And so, Ian had made his decision. The Dragonpit would be their first target.
Before twilight fully descended, he and his party arrived.
Standing before the giant bronze doors, which had been sealed for more than a century, Ian finally laid eyes on the legendary structure. He gazed up at the colossal ruin, a blackened skeleton against the bruised evening sky. The great dome had long since collapsed, leaving a jagged maw open to the heavens. It felt like staring at a page torn from a thick, tragic history book.
But he didn't allow himself time for sentiment. After a brief survey of the entrance, he ordered his men to begin searching for a way inside the Dragonpit.
The area was practically deserted, which made Ian feel uncomfortably conspicuous.
He had noticed on the way up the Hill of Rhaenys that the crowds thinned the closer they got to the summit. Now, standing before the Dragonpit itself, there was almost no one else in sight.
Well, not *quite* no one. Ian's ear caught certain discordant sounds coming from behind a nearby stone wall.
*There are still some freelance prostitutes,* he corrected himself mentally, *the ones unwilling to give the brothels a cut, who hide in the ruins to service their clients.*
After all, ever since Lord Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish had used his position as Master of Coin to monopolize nearly the entire flesh trade in King's Landing, the cut demanded by the brothels had become outrageous. It was so extreme that nearly all the women working in them had become little more than his debt-slaves, toiling to make him richer.
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