1st bonus chapter: 120 powerstones
2nd bonus chapter: 200 powerstones
3rd bonus chapter: 250 powerstones
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Long before they reached Mantarys, the army passed beneath a sky that did not behave properly. The clouds did not roll with ordinary weather. It brooded. Dark clouds formed without reason and dissolved just as quickly. The air felt tight, metallic, as though the vault of the heavens strained against something unseen. Even on clear days there was a pressure overhead; a low, simmering tension that made banners snap harder and horses toss their heads.
Then the plateau came into view. From afar it looked like land ravaged by war with blackened earth split by radiant scars stretching for miles in branching patterns. The surface shimmered strangely, reflecting light in sharp, fractured angles.
From a distance, it seemed destroyed. From closer inspection, it looked struck. Again and again. That was because this was the colony of old Valyria, Thalryx. The Lightning City.
It had been an experimental colony city in the vein of Mantarys, Tolos, and Elyria. A place where dragonlords pushed beyond tradition. But while others twisted flesh or shadow, Thalryx pursued something new.
Here this colony was founded to study a brand new magic, Lightning magic. This magic had not been ancient. It had been a revolutionary discovery. However some contended the Stormland in Westeros used to practice such magics. But the Dragonlords barely interacted with such distant people until one branch landed on those shores near the end of their time.
Unlike fire magic which was inherited by the dragonlords, lightning magic was a new field that was developed, that was studied, cultivated carefully, and newly engineered. Just that feat alone made Valyria a great civilization in cracking open a new sort of magic.
The dragonlords of Thalryx believed thunder to be purer than flame. Flame consumed. Lightning judged. They discovered that storm energy could be drawn down, captured, and redirected through conductive arrays forged from rare alloys mixed with volcanic glass and star-metal.
Through experimentation and refinement, they built a system that allowed the sky itself to be harvested. This was new magic that they slowly developed over time which was not blood-bound or draconic but atmospheric.
Thalryx rose across a broad plateau. Every structure bore tall lightning rods, forked spires, and metal-capped towers that pierced upward into the clouds. Primary mage towers stood in formation across the city, each capped with immense forked spires that pierced the clouds.
At the center stood the Fulminarion. A colossal tower of black basalt banded in spiraling metallic rings. It was not decorative. It was a focusing engine. Storms rolling in from the sea would be pulled toward it. Clouds gathered unnaturally above the plateau even on otherwise clear days.
Lightning would strike. The city would catch it. Channels carved into the earth carried raw skyfire into subterranean chambers where it was refined and stored within massive arcane capacitors with crystalline cores reinforced by dragonforged casing.
The Freehold had not been content to ride dragons, they wished to command the heavens as well.
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When the Doom erupted, the lightning lattice that collected thunderbolts destabilized. The sky over Thalryx did not burn. It shattered. Witness accounts passed down through fragmented records claim that the final storm condensed into a single catastrophic discharge that struck the city repeatedly, collapsing its inner channels and fusing its upper half into glass.
Around it lie the remains of dragonlord estates blackened into hollow shells. Many bodies were not burned. They were vitrified. Turned to glass statues mid-motion by uncontrolled skyfire.
Even now, the sky above Thalryx behaves differently. Storm clouds gather faster than they should. Metal hums faintly. Hair rises on skin. Occasionally, lightning strikes without thunder. The plateau still bore branching scars of vitrified stone, frozen lightning paths etched permanently into the earth. The city was silent but the air remained charged.
With the fall of the great city and everything being lost, Volantis still stretched its borders far to the east, stretching itself thin just to claim the lightning city. The Old Bloods did their best to collect whatever remained from the city, preserving whatever knowledge they could from the newly developed field of magic which had been lost just as soon.
The army did not linger there long not because monsters roamed it but because the sky felt too aware. Occasionally, arcs of blue-white energy still race along exposed towers built on the plateau, still very reactive.
Some soldiers swore their spear tips sparked faintly when they passed too near. The Old Blood sorcerers warned that parts of the city's lightning lattice might still function, unanchored and unstable. Thalryx was not dead. It was dormant, waiting for a storm large enough to wake it fully.
Jon took in the devastation in silence. Entire districts had been blasted flat, reduced to fields of blackened glass and fractured basalt. Towers lay split cleanly down their cores, as if something had driven lightning through them repeatedly until the stone surrendered.
Long branching veins of vitrified stone stretched for miles outside the city, each drawing down lightning from the heavens which created a very deadly zone just around the city.
Wildlife in the surrounding highlands had adapted in disturbing ways. Small creatures near the plateau moved with twitching, erratic motion. Their fur stood perpetually on end. Some glowed faintly at night, blue sparks tracing along their spines.
In the skies above, he swore he saw faint apparitions, shapes sometimes formed in the lingering static of the air distortions that flickered at the edge of sight. When storms gathered overhead, pale outlines could be seen moving between broken towers. His master mentioned when so many people died all at once something still lingered.
Worse of all was the the heart of Thalryx, there lay a massive fissure where the Fulminarion's base had partially collapsed.
It descended deep into darkness. Occasionally, faint blue light pulsed upward from within constant and rhythmic like the slow beat of a heart. As though something below still gathered charge.
The army marched on. Behind them, the Lightning City remained beneath its brooding sky. Silent. Charged. And waiting.
…
Before the army reached the warped territories of Mantarys, they came upon another great former colony of the Freeholds. The sky no longer brooded. It shimmered.
At first it appeared as a distortion on the horizon, a wavering brightness rising from the earth like a mirage. Sunlight fractured strangely, bending into pale halos. Even at distance, the air above the ruins seemed clearer, sharper, almost painfully bright.
Then the shapes resolved. Towers. Spines of all sorts of crystals. A city half-buried and gleaming through the dust. Aeltherion. The Crystal City.
Unlike Thalryx, which had clawed at the sky in violence, Aeltherion stood in perfect harmonic silence.
It lay nearer to Mantarys than to Volantis, abandoned and unclaimed. No banner flew above it. No garrison watched its edges. Mantarys did not assert dominion over it, and even Tolos' shadowbinders avoided it.
Most of the city had been swallowed by the earth. What remained rose like a broken crown from a field of pale crystal shards and collapsed terraces. Entire districts had sunk into the ground as if the land itself had softened and pulled them downward during the Doom. Only upper towers and outer spires still pierced the air.
Yet even ruined, it gleamed.
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Aeltherion had been another experimental colony of old Valyria. But where Thalryx had pursued thunder, this city pursued crystal.
Crystal magic had not originated in Valyria. It had come from the far east, from lands beyond the Jade Sea all the way from Yi Ti and even older traditions that shaped memory and energy through harmonic stone.
The dragonlords, always acquisitive, imported more than goods. They imported knowledge and scholars. They studied eastern crystalcraft and adapted it to Valyrian ambition and as always they tried to improve it. Aeltherion was their masterpiece in the end.
Crystal magic was subtle. It did not roar like flame or split the heavens like lightning. It amplified. It preserved. It refined. The dragonlords fell in love with this more peaceful magic compared to the more darker, sinister, and destructive magics they practiced.
The dragonlords of Aeltherion discovered that crystalline matrices could store knowledge and memories without decay. Along with magical charge and being able to encode spell structures into harmonic resonance. They could refract volatile forces into stable patterns. And much more.
Over time, they learned to grow crystals rather than mine it. Entire districts of Aeltherion had been cultivated through controlled growth. Towers spiraled upward not from quarried stone, but from seeded alchemical foundations, grown like immense mineral trees shaped through heat, geomantic pressure and arcane might. The city was less constructed than cultivated.
At its height, Aeltherion had been a marvel. Sunlight refracted across its surfaces, casting rainbow lattices over its plazas. Bridges of translucent crystal connected upper tiers. By day, the city was radiant. By night, it multiplied the stars.
Every structure served a refractive purpose. Sunlight was channeled into interior chambers. Lunar light was focused through central conduits. Energy flowed through translucent corridors that glowed faintly even centuries later. This was not architecture. It was arcane circuitry at urban scale.
The central spire known in fragmented records as the Prism Apex had once been a repository of encoded magical knowledge stored in harmonic crystal resonance. In short, Aeltherion had acted as one of the Freehold's knowledge vaults where it was not stored in scrolls or books but crystals.
When the Doom came, Aeltherion suffered the most damage of them all. Most of the city had shattered outright. It did not suffer from fire or lighting but the magical shockwave which was the worst thing for it.
The vibrations passed through the crystal lattice and broke it apart from within. Whole districts cracked and broke apart. Towers split along internal stress lines and fell down. The very foundations carefully grown had destabilized and burst apart.
Then as if that was not enough, the rest sunk to the ground where many sectors softened and gave way as stabilizing arrays failed. Whole plazas now lay half-buried, their upper columns protruding like broken teeth from pale soil. Some towers leaned but did not fall, their inner structures still faintly luminous at dusk.
It should have ended there and the city might have recovered somewhat but it did not. The true catastrophe was not structural. It was optical. The crystals all reacted catastrophically from the doom. The terrible doom which was felt everywhere in all corners of the world multiplied and spread in unpredictable ways in the city.
Refraction angles shifted. Internal harmonics twisted. Energy ricocheted endlessly through the crystal network before settling into something… altered. Some sections of Aeltherion remain almost intact but they are wrong.
Light bends in ways no natural geometry should allow. Shadows stretch toward impossible directions. Sound behaves unnaturally. Even distance felt unreliable. At certain hours, entire streets appear doubled, tripled, and infinite like a ghosted image overlaid on reality.
The most dangerous distortion lay deeper with any who are foolish enough to venture that deep never to be seen again.
Just walking near Aeltherion caused them many issues, soldiers swore they saw multiple versions of themselves walking beside them. Compasses spun uselessly. Sharp sounds would spike from the city rendering nearly everyone comatose with how strange it was.
Everyone wanted to get as far away from this place as they could. It became clear to Jon why no one claimed this place. Rumors persisted of entire caravans vanishing near its perimeter. Whole armies who tried to conquer this place had disappeared before.
There was some talk of travelers from Yi Ti coming westward to study its ruins. Scholars, mages, merchants, theorists risked the long journey to observe what Valyria had accomplished with their own crystalcraft.
Most just left those sages to pick and prod at this ruin since it was not worth it angering the great empire.
Jon watched the last sunset fall over the city, the remaining spires catching light and scattering it across the horizon in fractured bands of color. For a moment, the ruin appears beautiful almost whole. Then the sun shifts. The angles change. And the illusion breaks.
Aeltherion stands silent, half-swallowed by the earth, its crystal heart fractured but not extinguished. It does not rage like Thalryx. It distorts and absorbs all that enters it. And that quiet warping of reality is what makes it feared.
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Mantarys was almost near at hand, everyone was relieved the journey was almost coming to a close even though the war was now just ahead of them. The demon incursions tapered off with them near civilizations. The Demon Road no longer felt endless. The horizon no longer seemed empty and unknowable.
The journey that should have taken a month or two on land took them months. Even with how pristine and massive the roads were, this was a great army on the move. It was a lumbering beast at the best of times at the worst one biting and clawing at itself.
As the host advanced, Jon began to understand the scale of what had once been lost. It was not just dragons or powerful magics but an empire. A civilization that was at the apex and brought great wonders upon the world.
Marching on and with this host that called itself the heir of Valyria, Jon could see how further from the truth that was. Passing under these great structures the First Daughter could not even replicated a tiny fraction of it.
Jon wondered if anyone could even reach the same heights as the Dragonlords. Or was it all lost to the times of history.
The ruins were becoming less and less now as new peoples made their homes here. They used to be part of the Freeholds but with them gone now they formed their own new identities.
Where the lands revealed shattered estates or watchtowers, now there were newer structures of rough stone farmsteads, timber palisades, smoke rising from hearths built in the shadow of older foundations. They had not restored Valyria, they just occupied it.
Villages stood where dragonlord barracks once housed disciplined cohorts. Markets gathered beside collapsed aqueducts. Children played atop broken mosaic floors that once depicted winged conquerors.
These people were not Valyrian or not wholly. Their features bore traces of silver hair dulled to ash-brown, violet eyes faded to gray. But their banners were new. Their dialects altered. Their loyalties local.
They had once been subjects of the Freehold. Now they were something else. Small principalities. Tribal confederations. Merchant enclaves. They paid tribute to their new masters, Mantarys. The touch of the dragonlords were long gone.
And now with their army here, they took part in the time honored tradition of raiding and looting their enemy's territory. Mantarys did not seem to want to meet them on the field to prevent them from doing many unspeakable things to their lands and people.
Their army outnumbered them many times over as the former colony could only field 15,000 soldiers at most. Thus they hide behind their city's walls.
The army was hungry after the long trip. Fifty thousand mouths consumed quickly. Elephants devoured grain by the cartload. Horses required steady fodder. Mercenaries demanded meat. Even with disciplined rationing and organized supply trains, the strain showed.
So the order was given. Foraging parties rode out to get their hands on whatever they could. The countryside felt the weight of the marching great city. The army was like locusts, stripping down everything and seizing each person and livestock they found.
Jon observed much of it from the rear of organized detachments, Ghost at his side and his Red Protector never far. He did not ride with the foragers but he saw the effects as wagons returned heavy with sacks of grain or gold, and bleating animals and new slaves.
Smoke rising from distant fields. Families watching from doorways with hollow eyes. Villages half-emptied by fear. It was not glorious. It was not perfect but this was war.
As days passed, the countryside grew tighter. Fields became more organized. Outlying watchfires flared at night, signaling inward. Abandoned villages increased the closer they drew. Mantarys was pulling its people behind its walls, consolidating strength.
The army's outer patrols clashed occasionally with scouts and mounted skirmishers. It was quick exchanges of arrows and pursuit across dry plains. Mantaryan outriders did not commit to open battle. They observed, harassed, and withdrew.
The message was clear. Come if you dared. They were ready to face them.
Then one evening, as the sun bled red across the horizon, Mantarys finally rose into full view. It did not gleam like Aeltherion. It did not brood like Thalryx. It loomed.
From the outside, the city looked crowded within its walls. The skyline was uneven, cluttered with structures of varying height and design. Buildings rose squat and defensive rather than elegant. Some towers leaned slightly forward, their upper tiers swollen and layered with reinforced buttresses that resembled ribs.
Smoke curled upward from within in uneven streams but it did not carry the scent of simple hearthfires. It carried something sharper. Medicinal. Metallic.
The battlements were not clean and geometric like Valyrian works elsewhere. They curved and bulged as if they contained something. The city looked less constructed than assembled. And it was clear its design was inspired by anatomy. This was the City of Flesh.
The gates were massive slabs of dark material banded in iron. Their surface bore faint patterns that might have once been decorative, but now looked disturbingly like muscle fibers striated beneath stone.
Above the main gate stood statues not serene dragonlords with wings, but twisted figures frozen mid-transformation. Some bore many limbs, eyes or mouths. Others had bestial features carved into them.
As the army drew closer, figures became visible along the walls. They were human. Mostly. Elongated limbs that moved with unsettling grace. Faces marked by mismatched eyes. Patches of scaled skin catching the light. Some bore faint horn nubs along their temples. Others had widened jaws or unnatural pallor that made them appear almost luminous in shadow. They did not hide their alterations. They stood openly.
Mantarys' soldiers did not wave or shout defiance. They watched. And that silence was more unnerving than any taunt.
The banners atop its walls were not dragon motif but of monsters in the throes of many transformations. This was not a city claiming to be the Freehold reborn. It was a city that had survived the Freehold's fall.
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The host slowed, formations tightening instinctively as the reality of war settled across it. Behind them stretched stripped fields and quiet villages. Ahead stood stone and defiance. The Demon Road had carried them through the bones of an empire.
Now it ended at a living bastion ready to test their might. One that had inherited the darkest parts of the dragonlords legacy.
Mantarys awaited watching them from behind walls that looked almost alive. And at last, the march was over.