Chapter 2
The feast roared. Drums pounded like frantic hearts. Men laughed, gorging on roasted horseflesh, spilling *kumis* down their chests. The air reeked of sweat, smoke, burnt meat, and violence barely leashed. I crouched near a dung pile, forgotten. My ribs screamed with every breath. The split lip had reopened. Every cheer, every clatter of arakhs, scraped raw nerves already flayed by weeks of abuse. Daenerys sat beside Drogo on the raised platform. Pale, stiff in her wedding silks. A terrified doll. Drogo, massive and brutal, tore meat with his teeth, his dark eyes scanning his warriors like a predator surveying prey. His bloodriders, Qotho, Cohollo, Haggo, swaggered nearby, mocking a slave girl struggling with a heavy wineskin. Qotho kicked her legs out. Laughter erupted. Something inside me, already fractured by the pain and the impossible truth of the *King* in my shadow, finally snapped. Not a shout. Not a whimper. A cold, silent severing. The rage wasn't fire anymore. It was absolute zero. A void demanding annihilation. *Kill them all.* The thought wasn't mine alone. It echoed from the abyss within my shadow. The subspace *shivered*. A low, subsonic hum vibrated through the earth, felt in my molars. My shadow, cast long and distorted by the firelight, seemed to *deepen*. To become infinite. The cold emanating from it intensified, a glacial counterpoint to the bonfires. *Yes,* I thought, the word a blade forged in that cold fury. *Every last one.* I didn't need words. I focused the totality of my hatred, my pain, my absolute command onto the vast, slumbering presence coiled in the impossible dark beneath me. I pictured them: Drogo's smug face, Qotho's sneer, every leering, laughing, whip-wielding rider who saw me, saw any slave, as less than dirt. *RISE.* The command was silent, final. The ground *lurched*. Not an earthquake. A fundamental wrongness. The feast noises choked off. Heads snapped around. Drums faltered. My shadow *exploded*. Not upwards, but *outwards*, swallowing the firelight, becoming a pool of absolute, hungry darkness that spread faster than thought. From its impossible depths, the air screamed as it was torn apart. He emerged. Not all at once. First, the immense, serpentine necks, thicker than the mightiest tree trunks, impossibly long, uncoiling with terrifying grace. Three heads, crowned with horns like shattered mountains, eyes burning with gravitational fury – gold, not fire, but the cold, destructive light of dying stars. Then the vast, bat-like wings, unfurling from the shadow-subspace, blotting out the moon, the stars, the very sky. They stretched wider than the entire khalasar camp, leathery membranes crackling with contained energy. Finally, the titanic body, armored in scales like molten gold, settled onto the earth with a *crunch* that flattened tents and sent men tumbling. King Ghidorah. Mine. The silence was absolute for one heartbeat. Then the screaming began. Panic was instant. Utter. Horses screamed and bolted, trampling men. Warriors scrambled for arakhs, spears, anything. Drogo surged to his feet, roaring, but his voice was lost in the rising wave of terror. Ghidorah didn't roar. The sound he made was the shriek of a planet's core tearing open. The central head, slightly larger than the other two, tilted down. Its eyes fixed on Drogo standing frozen on the platform, Daenerys shrinking back beside him. The golden maw opened. Not fire. Not heat. A beam of pure, crackling gravitational destruction lanced out. It didn't burn; it *unmade*. Drogo, the platform, the ground beneath him, simply… ceased to exist in a silent, blinding flash of gold. A crater smoked where he stood. Daenerys, thrown clear by the blast wave, lay stunned in the dirt, untouched by the beam itself but battered. Chaos became slaughter. The two other heads moved with terrifying speed and precision. The left head snapped, crushing a dozen fleeing warriors into paste. The right head swept its beam in a low arc, slicing through a cluster of tents and the fifty men within. Screams were cut short, replaced by the hiss of vaporized earth and flesh. I stood at the epicenter of the nightmare, untouched by the beams, the debris, the panic. The cold from my shadow was intense now, a protective shroud. The pain in my ribs, my lip, my back – it was still there, but distant. Overshadowed by the cold fury, the grim satisfaction watching through Ghidorah's senses. I didn't direct each strike. I had given the command: *Every male Dothraki.* The King understood. He hunted. He wasn't fighting. He was *eradicating*. Beams of golden ruin lanced across the steppe, incinerating knots of warriors trying to mount horses. Heads darted, snapping, crushing, swallowing men whole. Wings beat once, a hurricane gust flattening tents and sending men flying like chaff, only to be caught mid-air by a flick of a serpentine neck and crushed. Arakhs shattered against golden scales. Arrows were motes of dust. Qotho tried to charge, screaming, his arakh raised. The left head plucked him from the ground like a berry. A crunch. Silence. Haggo vanished in a golden flash. Cohollo was stomped flat under a taloned foot the size of a wagon. It was methodical. Merciless. Ghidorah moved through the dying khalasar like a farmer scything wheat. No male was spared. No quarter given. Warriors, horse boys, old men – if they were Dothraki and male, they were targets. The beams were surgical, avoiding the terrified clusters of women and children who cowered, screaming, or the stunned Daenerys. Only the men. Only *my* tormentors. The scale of destruction was beyond comprehension. The vast camp became a hellscape of craters, flattened earth, burning debris, and the stench of ozone and cooked meat. The noise was a symphony of destruction: the shriek of the beams, the thunderous impacts, the final, choked screams, the terrified wails of the survivors. Finally, the movement ceased. Ghidorah stood immense in the center of the carnage, his three heads surveying the ruin, golden light dripping from their jaws. No male Dothraki moved. None lived. Thousands, gone in minutes. The steppe wind moaned through the silence, carrying ash and the smell of ending. The connection hummed. The vast awareness of the King brushed against mine, a silent question. *Done?* I looked at the devastation. At the crater where Drogo ceased to be. At the terrified women clutching children. At Daenerys, pushing herself up on trembling arms, her violet eyes wide with primal terror, fixed on the impossible monster… and then, flickering to me. Standing untouched in the shadow of annihilation. A cold, hard certainty settled within me. The rage was banked, not gone. Fuel for what came next. This was just the beginning of the debt being paid. *For now,* I thought back to the King. The immense form began to sink, dissolving back into the pool of impossible darkness at my feet, the vast wings folding away into shadow-subspace. The crushing presence receded, leaving only the smell of destruction and the echoing silence. The cold receded from my skin. The pain in my body flared back, sharp and immediate. But it was different now. I wasn't the slave anymore. I was the shadow. I was the storm. I looked at Daenerys, her face pale as milk in the moonlight, then at the cowering women and children. I turned and walked away from the ruins of the khalasar, towards the empty steppe. My shadow, normal once more, stretched long and dark before me on the churned earth. Inside it, the King rested. Waiting.