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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 74: The Sleeping God
"I am going alone."
The words hung in the warm, stale air of the antechamber.
The Hound stared at him as if he had gone mad, and the Dothraki exchanged uneasy glances, their dark eyes flickering between Joffrey and the dark opening in the statue's base.
"You cannot be serious," the Hound said, his scarred face twisted with disbelief.
"I am." Joffrey turned from the dark opening, his green eyes steady, unblinking. "The creature below is not like the undead or the stone guardians. It is something else entirely. Its presence alone may be harmful to those without magical protection."
"You think there is treasure down there?" The Hound's voice was rough, skeptical.
"No. I do not expect to find any gold." Joffrey's gaze drifted to the dark stairs, to the heat that shimmered in the air above them. "But there are things more valuable than gold."
The Hound looked at the stairs, at the darkness that seemed to breathe, at the waves of heat that rose like the exhalation of some great beast. "What if you do not return?"
"Wait for one day. If I have not come back by then, you will sail back to Asshai and inform Daenerys of what happened." Joffrey paused, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. "But I intend to return."
He did not wait for a response. He turned and began to descend, his light sphere floating above him, pushing back the darkness with its pale, steady glow.
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The stairs were ancient...beyond ancient, older than the fused black stone of the city above, older perhaps than the mountains themselves.
They had not been made with magic, not conjured from nothing like the seamless towers of Stygai. These stairs had been carved by hand, by primitive tools, by hands that had bled and sweated and prayed with every strike of stone against stone.
The edges were worn smooth by countless feet, but the steps themselves were uneven, rough, as if the builders had been learning their craft as they worked.
The heat grew more intense with each step. The energy emanating from the creature below was unlike anything he had felt before...it was nothing like the structured magic of wands and incantations, not the wild magic he felt at Winterfell.
No magical creature in his old world had felt like this. This energy was so different...older, stranger, almost alien.
His protective charms held, but he could feel them straining, testing, bending under the weight of the creature's presence.
If they were to fail, there was no telling what would happen to his body.
He did not think it would kill him. After all, humans had obviously come into contact with this creature before and survived, but they had also been changed by it and transformed into something that was no longer entirely human.
'The first sorcerers,' he thought. 'The ones who built this city. They knelt before this creature, and it gave them power. But what did it take in return?'
The stairs continued for what felt like hours. The smell of sulfur and ash grew more intense with every second, burning in his nostrils, coating his tongue.
The heat became oppressive, suffocating, and the light sphere above him seemed to dim, as if the darkness itself was pushing back.
But eventually, he reached the bottom.
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The chamber he saw was vast beyond his wildest expectations. It was a natural cavern, but it had been shaped and expanded by something supernatural... by magic that was not magic, by a will that had been bending the world to its purpose for longer than the memory of men.
The ceiling was so high that the light sphere could not reach it, and the walls had been smoothed to a mirror finish, polished by centuries of heat and pressure until Joffrey could almost see his own reflection in the stone.
But this was not what held his attention.
The creature lay at the center of the chamber, coiled in a nest of black stone that seemed to have grown around it, fused to it, become part of it.
Its body was immense...so large that Joffrey could not see its head from where he stood. It was a mountain of obsidian, crisscrossed with fissures that glowed with a deep, inner fire.
Great ribbons of pure red flame arced from its shoulders, wings of fire that had not dimmed in millennia, that had been burning since before the first men learned to walk.
The black stone that formed most of its body was the same as the stone used to create the city above.
Joffrey's theory was confirmed: the creature had passed its knowledge on to the humans, had taught them to conjure this magical stone from nothing, had given them the tools to build their civilization.
'But why?' he wondered. 'What did it gain from their worship? What did it need from them?'
Joffrey had the feeling that this creature had once been composed only of fire...some kind of primordial flame, pure and untamed. But at some point, it had learned to create this black stone, to cover its body with it like a shell, perhaps in an attempt to have a physical form it could use to interact with the world around it.
The cracks in the shell revealed something beneath...a slow-moving plasma that pulsed like blood in a vein, liquid fire that had not cooled in eons.
The creature was clearly still sleeping. Its body rose and fell in a slow, regular rhythm, and the sound it produced was like the grinding of massive rocks.
Joffrey crept closer, his light sphere bobbing above him, and got a better look at it. Its head was massive and composed of jagged edges that seemed as sharp as broken glass.
It rested on one of its hands...a hand that could have crushed an entire castle, that could have scooped up a lake, that could have torn a mountain from its foundations.
Its eyes were closed, and its maw was slightly open, revealing nothing but fire inside.
He stood at the edge of the chamber and stared at this magnificent creature for a long time.
He had lived for centuries. He had seen all kinds of things...marvelous and terrifying, beautiful and grotesque. He had walked through the ruins of. But nothing in his long existence had prepared him for this.
This was neither a magical creature nor a god...at least not in the traditional sense. This was something older than both...a primordial force of the universe, perhaps a lost fragment produced during the creation of the cosmos itself, that had somehow ended up here, on this world, in this cave.
It was a relic of a time before time, a remnant of a war that had been fought before the first star ignited.
The energy emanating from it was unlike anything he had encountered. It was primal, raw, ancient beyond measure. It felt like standing at the edge of the universe, watching the first stars ignite, feeling the heat of their birth on his face.
'This must be what Lyssara saw in the fire,' he thought. 'No wonder she was so shaken.'
But this was not the creature the glass candle had shown him. That one had been made of ice and shadow, of cold and darkness. Which could only mean...
The Other One.
The carvings had depicted two primordial beings. One made of fire. One made of ice.
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"Hmm?"
Joffrey felt something touch his mind.
His eyes moved immediately to the creature before him. It had not moved an inch, not physically, at least, but it had definitely noticed his presence.
Something was stirring beneath its ancient slumber, a vast and ancient awareness that pressed against the edges of his consciousness like a hand against a window.
His mental defenses, centuries of Occlumency, of discipline, of practice, held against the intrusion. But he knew they would not last long. The creature's mind was not subtle. It did not probe, test, or search for weaknesses. It simply pressed against his mind with a wave of immense force that threatened to wash over him like a tsunami.
Joffrey pushed a finger against his temple. "What are you—urgg!"
A sudden, sharp pain lanced through his skull, and he fell to one knee. His vision blurred, his ears rang, and for a moment, he could not breathe.
He had never experienced a mental intrusion like this one. It was not focused or precise like the Legilimency of a skilled wizard. It was a tide, vast and inexorable, a force of nature rather than an act of will.
His Occlumency had acted by instinct, centuries of discipline rising to protect him. But the tide broke through his defenses as if they were paper, as if they had never existed at all.
Images flooded his mind.
Memories...echoes of a distant past, things that had been buried for millennia, preserved in the creature's ancient consciousness.
He saw the creature's arrival in this world in the form of a falling star of fire that cracked the earth and boiled the seas.
He saw the Other One as well. The ice creature. A fractal of absolute zero that had landed before the fire creature.
For what he could understand, the fire creature had been chasing the ice creature across the cosmos, locked in an eternal struggle that had no beginning and no end. They were opposites, fire against ice, creation against destruction, light against darkness. And they had clashed across the face of the young world, shattering continents and reshaping the very fabric of reality.
And then came the final battle.
Joffrey saw it as if from above...two impossibilities colliding, their forms too vast to comprehend. The fire creature's wings of plasma lashed out, and the ice creature's fractal limbs responded.
Mountains were ground to dust. Oceans boiled away. The very sky cracked and bled. The world broke beneath them, and when it was over, both were gravely wounded.
The fire creature had come here, to the Shadow Lands, to rest and heal. It had made a nest in the heart of the mountain and curled into sleep. And in its slumber, it had dreamed. Its dreams had given birth to dragons, to the first sorcerers, to the magic that now filled the world. It had poured its essence into the world, and the world had flourished in response.
The visions shifted. Joffrey saw the ice creature, resting beneath layers of ancient frost, in a land of eternal winter, far to the north. Its body was cracked and damaged, but not as severely as its counterpart. It was healing. And as it healed, it stirred.
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The wave receded.
Joffrey stood in the chamber, his breath coming in short gasps. Sweat dripped from his brow, and his hands trembled.
The creature had not moved. But he could feel its attention on him.
He was about to open his mouth to speak when something stirred in the creature.
Joffrey took several steps back, his hand raised, his magic gathering in response to a potential aggression.
He was prepared to escape if this fire creature suddenly opened its eyes, if it decided that he was a threat rather than a curiosity.
But then he saw it...a small object emerging from the creature's back, piercing through the black stone scales. It flew up into the vastness of the chamber, rising high above him, before descending slowly, gracefully, to hover before his face.
Joffrey was on full alert as he watched the object descend. It was a small red sphere, no larger than his fist, pulsating with an inner light that seemed to beat in time with his own heart.
It slowed to a stop right before him, hovering in the air.
"What is this?" His green eyes moved between the spherical object and the creature.
There was no response.
Joffrey gave the object a closer inspection. The little sphere resembled the plasma that formed the creature's inner body...the liquid fire that pulsed beneath its cracked shell. But he could not feel any heat coming from it, as if it had been contained inside a translucent shell, a prison of solidified light.
Even without a single diagnostic spell, Joffrey could sense the power within. This small thing was emitting more energy than one of those nuclear devices created by the muggles of his old world.
The thought sent a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold.
Suddenly, he felt another intrusion in his mind...gentler this time, almost cautious. The creature was trying to communicate with him.
Joffrey lowered his damaged mental defenses and allowed the information to flow. He did not sense any hostility from the creature, only a vast, ancient weariness, a hope that had faded to ash, and a desperate need.
Images formed in his mind. He saw humans coming into this chamber in the distant past, prostrating themselves before the fire creature. He saw tiny sparks of light emerging from the creature's body and entering the humans. He saw the humans change...growing larger, stronger, their eyes beginning to glow. They had gained magic. They had gained power.
This was the creature's gift. It had bestowed upon them a fraction of its own essence.
Joffrey's consciousness returned, and now he understood what the creature was trying to tell him.
This sphere was a gift for him, just as the sparks had been gifts for those primitive people. But this one was much more potent. The little sphere before him contained the most pure essence of the creature...a spark of its fire, a piece of its soul.
He was convinced that this little thing held so much power that if he were to consume it right now, his body would explode into a million pieces. But he could find ways to use it, to harness it, to integrate it slowly over time.
This could be the very thing he had been searching for across two lifetimes.
But something bothered him.
His eyes moved to the creature. "I do not believe in free things. You are giving me this because... You need my help."
The creature did not answer in words, but he felt something emanating from it...a sense of agreement and of desperation.
"You want me to take care of that ice creature. The one you have been fighting for... who knows how long."
An image formed in his mind. A place far to the north. A massive chasm surrounded by ice, by darkness, by things that should not exist.
Joffrey shook his head and sighed. "You are dying, are you not? That is why you need my help."
The creature did not answer. It did not need to. The truth was written in its cracked shell, and in its dimming light
It had given everything it had to give. And now, at the end of its long existence, it was asking for help.
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