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Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
ASOIAF and all of its characters belong to GRRM
I own nothing but the original characters I make.
"Dialogue"
'Thoughts'
-Author notes-
Chapter 43: Old Valyria
The small boat rocked gently on the grey waters. Joffrey sat in the stern, wrapped in a dark cloak as protection from the dampness of the sea.
His eyes were fixed on the wall of fog that rose before him, as if it were the edge of the world.
Behind him, the Storm Dancer was already fading into the haze...her masts and rigging swallowed by the unnatural mist that clung to the Smoking Sea. The ship had become a ghost, then a shadow, then a memory, until only the fog remained.
He had given Captain Xho strict orders. Twenty-four hours. If he did not return by then, the ship was to sail on without him. No searching, no waiting, no risking the crew for a prince who might already be dead. Not that the crew would have risked their lives to search for him anyway.
Sailors were a practical folk, a dead prince was just a corpse, and they had allegiance to no realm.
The captain had not argued. He had only nodded, his troubled dark eyes watched as Joffrey lowered himself into the rowboat and pushed off toward the ruins.
The summer islander had looked at him as a man looks at another man walking to his execution...with pity, and with relief that it was not him.
The Hound had not asked to accompany him. That was fine, since Joffrey had left him in charge of making sure the good captain kept his word and waited the full twenty-four hours. There was only so much trust one could place in a former pirate, after all. But he trusted the Hound...at least with something of little importance like this.
So for the next day, Joffrey was alone. The fog was all around him. The water beneath his boat was the color of old iron, slick and oily, as if it had been mixed with something that should not be in the sea. The air smelled of sulfur and salt, but there was something else mixed in...something older, something that made the hairs on his arms rise, and his breath come short.
He knew what it was. It was the same thing he had felt while inside the Winterfell crypts. It was the feeling of ancient magic.
He picked up the oars and rowed.
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It took him an hour to reach land. The rocky cliffs jutted from the grey water like broken teeth, their edges sharp and treacherous. Finding a safe spot to leave the boat was difficult...somewhere the tide would not claim it, somewhere the stone men would not find it, somewhere he could return to after his exploration.
He found a narrow inlet, half-hidden by fallen rock, and pulled the boat into its shadow. The keel scraped against stone, and the boat settled with a groan. He tied it to a broken column and hoped it would still be there when he returned.
Climbing the cliff face was easier. His enhanced body, strengthened by months of magical reinforcement, gripped the sharp rocks with ease. He pulled himself up hand over hand.
Within minutes, he stood at the top, looking out over the remains of Old Valyria.
Or at least, that was what he had hoped.
The fog was thicker up here...so thick that it seemed to press against his eyes, to fill his lungs, to cling to his skin like a wet cloth. He could see nothing past a few feet ahead of him. The world had shrunk to a circle of grey, and beyond that circle, there was nothing.
And the fog was not the only thing that was worse now. The air was thick with sulfur and volcanic ash, so corrosive that he could feel it burning his throat with every breath. A normal man would be dead within minutes.
Joffrey raised his hand and whispered. An air bubble formed around his head. A sphere of clean, cool air that separated him from the toxic fumes. He could breathe again.
"One problem solved," he muttered. "Let us keep going."
He had twenty-three hours left. Twenty-two, actually, since he had to make the trip back to the ship.
He walked.
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After a while, the fog began to part. Not much, but just enough for him to see the shapes of structures looming in the distance. From here, they looked like the bones of a ribcage, the skeleton of some great beast that had died and been picked clean by time.
Broken towers leaned against the sky, their tops lost in the haze. Bridges of fused stone spanned chasms that dropped into darkness, their arches still intact after four centuries of neglect. Archways stood alone, opening onto nothing, their carved lintels still showing the faint traces of dragons in flight.
Joffrey walked through it all, his eyes scanning, his magical senses reaching out like fingers in the dark. The ground beneath his feet was littered with the remnants of streets and plazas. Cobblestones that had once been smooth were now cracked and broken. Buildings that had once risen a hundred feet into the air now lay in scattered blocks, their stones claimed by the earth.
He passed a shattered column, its capital carved in the shape of a dragon's head. He passed a collapsed dome, its mosaic floor still visible beneath the ash. He passed the remains of what might have been a temple, its altar cracked in two, its statues toppled and broken.
In the shallows, he could see the outlines of statues, their faces worn smooth by centuries of wind and water, their arms outstretched as if reaching for something they had lost. They were the last witnesses to a civilization that had been consumed by its own fire.
And everywhere, the silence.
There were no sounds of insects, birds, or any other animals. The water did not lap against the stones as it should. It was as if the ruins were holding their breath, waiting for something that had not come in four hundred years.
Joffrey continued, following the thread of magic that pulled at him like a fishhook in his soul.
He could feel the magic here...it was stronger than anywhere he had been since arriving in this world. It was not the clean, structured magic he had learned in another life, the magic of wands and incantations and careful theory.
This was something wilder, something primitive, something that pulsed in the water and the stone and the very air. It was the echo of the Doom, the scar left on the land when their giant volcanoes had erupted and torn the heart out of an empire.
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The first buildings he explored had been looted long ago. The Valyrians had hoarded gold and jewels like dragons themselves, and the pirates and adventurers who had come after the Doom had stripped everything that could be carried.
He found shattered urns, broken statues, and the remains of furniture that had been smashed for its inlay. In one building, a mosaic floor showed the face of a dragon, its eyes plucked out, its teeth of pearl long since stolen.
He moved deeper.
The fog grew thicker, and the air grew heavier. The ground beneath his feet became softer, as if the earth itself was trying to swallow him.
Joffrey estimated that no normal human could survive here for more than a few seconds without heavy protection. The air was poisoned, the ground was unstable, and the fog played tricks on the eyes. But he had his magic, and his magic was stronger than any of this.
It was this power that guided him now...a thread of something that pulled him forward, deeper into the ruins, toward something that waited.
He followed it.
As he ventured deeper, the buildings became more intact. Here, the destruction of the Doom had been less complete, or perhaps some remnant of Valyrian magic had protected these structures from the worst of the cataclysm.
The streets were cleaner, the walls straighter, and for the first time, Joffrey could glimpse how the city might have looked before the Doom...a place of towers and bridges, of domes and spires, of a beauty that had been unimaginable to the men who came after.
And then he saw it.
At the end of a long, straight road, rising above the other structures like an obsidian shard, there was a building that did not belong among the ruins. It was whole...completely whole, unscarred by the destruction that had befallen this land. It was made of black stone, smooth and seamless, with no windows and no doors. Without any opening that Joffrey could see.
It rose from the broken ground like a pillar of darkness, its walls so black that they seemed to drink the light, its edges so sharp that they hurt to look at. There were no ornaments on its surface. No carvings, no inscriptions. It was a simple block of black stone surrounded by grey fog.
Joffrey walked toward it. He could feel something strong pulsing inside...a heartbeat of magic, slow and deep. He did not doubt that this was what he had been following since the beginning. If there was anything of value left on this cursed land, it had to be inside that tower.
He stood before the smooth stone wall and reached out with his magic.
The building resisted. He could feel the shell of an old enchantment, powerful and ancient, that had protected this place for centuries. It was a ward, primitive but effective...the kind of magic that had been woven before the Doom, by sorcerers whose names had been lost to time.
He closed his eyes and pushed deeper, letting his magic flow into the stone, feeling the patterns of the enchantment that held it together. This was like nothing he had encountered before...older than Hogwarts, older than the magic he had learned in his first life, older perhaps than anything in the world he had left behind.
But it was not beyond him.
He found the seam...a place where the enchantment turned back on itself, a weakness he could exploit. The Valyrians had been powerful, but they had not been perfect. No one was.
He pressed.
The stone before him rippled like water, and a door formed in the wall.
"What an interesting thing."Joffrey smiled with satisfaction and stepped through it.
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The air inside the tower was cool and dry, and it tasted of nothing at all. After the foulness of the Smoking Sea, the clean air was almost intoxicating.
"An air-purifying charm," Joffrey guessed. "Or something like it."
He raised his hand. "Lumos."
A small sphere of light appeared above his palm, bright and steady. It floated upward, illuminating the narrow corridor in which he stood. The walls were made of the same seamless black stone as the exterior, their surface smooth and unblemished. The ceiling was lost in darkness above him.
He walked forward.
The corridor led to a chamber, and the chamber was like nothing he had expected.
Tables of polished obsidian lined the walls, their surfaces cluttered with instruments. Some he recognized, like some alembics and retorts, alchemical tools used for purification and distillation. Others he did not...devices made of crystal and gold, their purposes as mysterious as the city that surrounded them.
Shelves held jars of preserved specimens: things that might have been organs, might have been seeds, might have been something else entirely, something that had no name in any language he knew.
It was a laboratory. A Valyrian laboratory, preserved for four hundred years, waiting for someone to unlock its secrets.
And at the center of the room, resting on a pedestal of fused stone, there was a book.
Joffrey's eyes were drawn to it immediately. It was large, bound in leather that might have been dragonhide, its pages edged in gold that had not tarnished in four hundred years. The cover bore a strange symbol...a creature with a human head and a dragon's body, its mouth open in a silent scream.
It was unsettling, the detail so fine that he could see the scales on the beast's neck, the wrinkles around the human eyes.
He placed his hand on the cover and felt warmth. There was magic woven into this old tome...not unusual, perhaps, for a book from Valyria, but still curious.
He opened it.
The pages were filled with writing in a script he did not fully know...Old Valyrian, the language of the Freehold. He had been studying it from fragments found in the Red Keep's basement, but he was still a novice.
Many words escaped his grasp. But he knew enough to understand the basic meaning of the sentences, enough to see that this was something precious.
As he turned the pages slowly, his eyes devoured the words, and his mind raced.
This is it, he thought. This is what I came here to find.
He did not care for the gold and jewels that the pirates and adventurers had stolen. He had had enough of that. What he wanted was knowledge...the wisdom of a fallen empire, the secrets that had died with the Doom.
And this book seemed to offer that.
He read as if in a trance, turning page after page, losing himself in the words. Time slipped away from him, unnoticed, unmarked. The light from his spell dimmed, and he did not brighten it. The air grew cooler, and he did not feel it.
He read until the words began to blur, until his eyes ached and his mind grew heavy.
"Tempus."
He spoke the spell without thinking, and the answer came back to him like a splash of cold water.
He had only a few hours left. If he did not return to the ship soon, they would sail without him.
He closed the book and tucked it into his cloak, pressing it against his chest. There were other things in the laboratory...instruments, jars, objects he did not have time to examine. But the book was the prize. The book was what he had come for.
And if he wanted to, he could always come back when he had more time.
This place was well protected. No muggle had breached it in four hundred years. It would still be here when he returned.
He turned to leave and stopped.
On a table near the entrance, half-hidden behind a stack of parchment, rested an object he had missed before. He knew it immediately, had read about it in Westerosi texts, and had wondered if any still existed in the world.
It was made of black stone, shaped like a candle. Its surface was smooth and cold, and when he touched it, he felt a faint pulse of magic still sleeping.
A glass candle.
He took it without hesitation, tucking it into his cloak beside the book.
Two treasures, then. More than he had hoped for.
He stepped through the rippling door and emerged into the fog, his bag heavy and his mind already turning toward the ship and the long journey east.
Behind him, the black tower stood silent and waiting, its door already fading back into seamless stone.
It would wait for his return.
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