Disclaimer:
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 44: The Last Guardians of the Empire
The book and the glass candle were properly secured inside his bag, wrapped in oilcloth and pressed against his chest beneath his cloak.
Joffrey stepped through the rippling black stone of the tower's wall and emerged into a world that had grown darker while he was busy reading.
The fog had thickened. It swallowed the distant ruins, the sky, the water, and everything but the immediate circle of grey that surrounded him. The air was colder now, and the smell of sulfur was stronger. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the waters of the Smoking Sea lapping against broken stone.
He reapplied the air bubble charm before continuing, feeling the cool seal settle over his mouth and nose. The fumes here were dangerous...not immediately lethal, perhaps, but enough to cloud the mind and slow the limbs. He could not afford either.
"I need to be quick," he muttered, checking his bearings. "Return to the Storm Dancer before they leave me for dead."
He estimated he had less than two hours. The row back would take at least an hour, maybe more if the currents had shifted. That left him perhaps sixty minutes to navigate the ruins and reach the cliffs where his boat waited.
He looked around, trying to pierce the fog with his sight. The black tower had vanished behind him as soon as he stepped away, swallowed by the grey. But ahead, he spotted a broken building...a collapsed dome, its ribs reaching toward the sky like the bones of a dead beast. He remembered passing it on his way here.
"That way, then." He began to walk, his boots stepping through the muddy ground, his hand resting on his sword hilt.
He had walked for perhaps two minutes when he stopped.
Something was wrong.
His magical senses, honed by centuries of practice, prickled with warning. There were presences in the fog...not one, not two, but many. They moved slowly, their auras so faint that he almost missed them.
Too weak, he thought, his hand tightening on his sword. Too weak for living men. Unless they are already half dead.
He pulled his sword from its sheath and waited.
The first stone man emerged from the fog ten feet ahead.
He had been a sailor once, perhaps, or a merchant. His clothes were rags now, rotted away to nothing, hanging from a body that was no longer flesh. His skin was grey and cracked, like old stone that had been left too long in the rain. Patches of it had flaked away, revealing something black and wet beneath. His eyes were white, filmed over, sightless...but they turned toward Joffrey as if they could see him anyway.
The stone man's mouth opened. Something between a growl and the grinding of stones. It was the sound of a thing that had once been human and was now something else entirely.
Behind it, more shapes emerged from the fog. A woman in torn silks, her face a mask of cracked grey, one arm hanging at a wrong angle. A child, no older than ten, its skin already hardening, its fingers already curling into claws. A man in armor, rusted and broken, the grey stone spreading up his neck to cover his jaw.
A dozen of them. Maybe more. They moved slowly, but they moved with purpose, and they were spreading out, forming a loose semicircle that cut off Joffrey's path to the boat.
This was fine. He had no intention of running away.
Running would mean turning his back. Turning his back would mean exposing himself to their grasping hands, their stone fingers, the touch that would turn his own flesh to grey. He had read about the greyscale, had learned that it spread through contact. A single scratch, a single brush of those cracked fingers against his skin, and he would be infected.
There was no cure. At least, no one had found one. The maesters had collected much information about the disease, but their methods were passive...observation, documentation, speculation. Not a single true experiment had been performed on an infected subject.
They seemed content to let the stone men rot in their ruins, forgotten and afraid.
But Joffrey was different. And now that he had these stone men so close to him, he could say with absolute certainty that this was no common illness.
He could feel the traces of magic on these people. It clung to them like cobwebs, old and faint, but unmistakable. The greyscale was not a disease. It was a curse. The origins and purpose of the curse were unknown to him, but the fact itself was interesting.
He wondered if it was a side effect of whatever had befell Valyria, or something else, something that the Valyrians had brought upon themselves. It could be the product of a failed experiment or the work of an enemy.
The stone men were not going to give him much time to ponder.
One of them lunged, reaching for his shoulders with stone fingers.
Joffrey sidestepped, his blade singing as it cut a horizontal arc. He had applied a cutting charm to the edge before leaving the tower, and the steel sword hummed with power. It sliced through the stone man's neck as easily as through flesh.
The head flew, struck the ground, and rolled to a stop. The body stood for a moment longer with its arms still reaching. Then it crumpled, collapsing into a pile of grey dust and cracked stone.
Beneath the stone skin, these creatures were still human. Not zombies, not wights, not any kind of undead. They were living men and women, cursed and transformed, but still alive. And alive meant vulnerable. A cut to the throat killed them. A blow to the head crushed their brains. They were not hard to kill...if you could get past their stone-hard skin.
The others were coming.
Joffrey moved, his feet splashing through the mud, his blade singing. He struck left, then right, then left again, each blow aimed at a head, a neck, a spine. The stone men were slow, clumsy, but there were so many of them, and they did not feel pain, and they did not stop unless you killed them.
A hand grasped his cloak. He spun, his blade coming up, and severed the fingers before they could close and kicked the creature in the chest, sending it tumbling backward into its companions.
After dispatching perhaps ten of them, he saw an opening.
His initial estimate of a dozen had been severely short. There were many more...dozens, maybe hundreds, emerging from the ruins like ants from a disturbed nest.
There is no end to them, he thought. And I have no more time to waste.
He took the opening and ran.
The stone men gave chase, their stone feet pounding against the broken ground, their stone hands reaching for him. But he was faster than any of them.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
He reached a familiar spot. The fog was thinner here, and he could see the cliff where he had left his boat. He could make out its shape below...still tied to the broken column, still waiting for him.
But the stone men were still behind him, and some had gotten ahead, cutting off his path. They emerged from the ruins in waves...from collapsed buildings, from crumbling archways, from the water itself. They pulled themselves up from the depths with their stone fingers.
Joffrey reached into his magic.
"Depulso."
The spell erupted from him like a wave of invisible force. It struck the nearest stone men and sent them flying...tumbling through the air, crashing into the ruins, shattering against the walls. The wave spread outward, clearing a path to the cliff, pushing the fog back, revealing the grey sky above.
Joffrey ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped.
"Arresto Momentum!"
The feather-fall charm slowed his descent, turning what should have been a bone-shattering fall into a gentle drift. The boat was below him, right where he had left it.
But half a dozen stone men were already in the water, moving toward it.
"Glacius!"
He cast the spell while still in the air, aiming at the water between the stone men and his boat. A wave of freezing cold erupted from his hand, and the water turned to ice in an instant.
The stone men froze in place, trapped in a block of grey-white ice, their stone fingers still reaching, their white eyes still staring.
Joffrey landed in the boat. The impact rocked it, but he kept his balance. He cut the rope with a single stroke of his blade and threw himself into the stern. The oars were already in place; he had left them ready, anticipating a quick escape, and he seized them now, driving the blades into the water with all his strength.
The boat shot forward.
He thought he had made it. He thought he was safe.
Then he felt something beneath him.
Stone fingers grasped the front of the boat. A figure emerged from the water...a stone man, larger than the others, its white eyes fixed on Joffrey's face. It pulled itself up, its stone body dripping with grey water.
Joffrey's sword was too far away. He had thrown it aside after cutting the rope, too focused on escape to think about defense.
The stone man climbed into the boat, its stone fingers reaching for his throat.
Joffrey kicked it in the chest. The creature staggered but did not fall. It reached for him again, and Joffrey freed one hand from the oar, slashing the air with his fingers.
"Diffindo!"
The cutting charm produced a translucent blade of force that sliced through the stone man's arm and head.
Joffrey kicked the body. It toppled over the side and sank into the grey water.
He grabbed the oars and rowed.
Behind him, the stone men waded to the edge of the water and stopped. They did not follow him into the open sea. They stood at the boundary between the ruins and the sea, their sightless eyes fixed on his retreating boat, their stone hands reaching for something they would never hold.
He did not look back again and kept rowing until his arms screamed and his lungs burned.
The fog eventually thinned, and he could finally see the Storm Dancer waiting in the distance, her sails furled, her deck crowded with men who had been watching for his return.
"He's back!"
"The Prince is back!"
"It's really him!"
The crew had gathered at the railing, their faces a mixture of shock and disbelief. They had not expected him to return. He could see it in their eyes, in the way they stared at him as if he were a ghost.
Joffrey grabbed the rope and was about to pull himself up when he noticed something at the bottom of the boat.
The stone hand. The one he had cut from the creature. It lay there, grey and cracked, the fingers still curled as if reaching for something. The forearm was still attached, cleanly severed by his spell. There was barely any blood.
For a moment, he thought of tossing it overboard. It was disgusting, a relic of the cursed creatures that had hunted him through the ruins. But the magical nature of the greyscale had piqued his interest. He had never seen anything like it.
The maesters had studied the disease from a distance, observing the afflicted, documenting their decline. But they had never performed experiments. They had never tried to understand.
Joffrey raised his hand and focused his magic. Conjuration was a branch of magic he had not yet used in this world...the ability to create matter from nothing.
The creations were temporary, their duration dependent on the caster's skill. But for his purposes, a few hours would be enough until he could provide a more permanent container.
A glass jar appeared in his hand, clear and cold. He levitated the stone hand into it, sealed the lid, and tucked the jar under his arm.
"Prince!"
A rope landed in front of him.
"Grab on! We'll pull you up!"
Joffrey took the rope, tucked the jar and his sword under his arm, and let the sailors haul him aboard.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
The deck of the Storm Dancer was crowded with men, all of them staring at him as if they had seen a ghost. The captain stood at the front of the crowd, his dark eyes wide, his mouth hanging open.
The Hound was behind him, his scarred face unreadable. Lord Varys stood to one side, his pale eyes calculating. And Saera was there too, her golden hair bright against the grey sky, her face pale with relief.
"You made it back." Captain Xho's voice was hoarse. "You actually went there, to the cursed land...and you made it back."
Joffrey smiled. He reached into his cloak and pulled out the glass jar, holding it up for the captain to see.
"You can look at this, if you have any doubts."
The captain took the jar, his hands trembling. He stared at the stone hand inside, at the grey cracked skin, at the fingers still curled as if reaching for something.
"This is... this is from a stone man." His voice was barely a whisper. "You brought back a piece of a stone man."
"Careful with that," Joffrey said. "Tell one of the men to bring it to my room. I plan to study it."
He looked around at the crew, at their wide eyes and open mouths, at the fear and wonder and disbelief written on their faces.
"We can discuss my little adventure later," he said, his voice carrying across the deck. "First, let us put some distance between us and this place. Set the sails and get us moving."
The captain hesitated for a moment, still staring at the jar in his hands. Then he nodded, tucked the jar under his arm, and began shouting orders.
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