Chapter 222: The Shadowbinder
"Lord Darry, I had a dream last night," Daenerys said, cutting a slice of ham without looking up.
They were taking breakfast in the rooftop garden of the pyramid. The Ghiscari of Slaver's Bay considered pork and beef unclean — dog meat was the preference, a cultural habit Ian had adopted without much complaint in the interest of local goodwill. Daenerys hadn't made the same concession. Her plate looked considerably more familiar.
A dragon dream? Ian kept the thought off his face.
Daenerys didn't bring her dreams to breakfast often. The fact that she was mentioning this one meant it had stayed with her.
"Did Your Grace dream of me?" Ian asked lightly.
"I dreamed of a woman I've never seen before. She said something strange." Daenerys paused before continuing. "She wore a carved wooden mask — dark red, like lacquered mahogany."
Ian set his fork down slowly.
A Shadowbinder.
Of all the complications he didn't need right now, a Shadowbinder ranked near the top of the list. Ian currently held a meaningful advantage over every other player in terms of raw capability — physical stats, resources, military position. The one category of threat that his advantages didn't automatically answer was the supernatural kind. The mysterious, the prophetic, the things that operated outside the normal rules of the world.
The Shadowbinders of Asshai were arguably the least understood force in the entire known world. Nobody could say with certainty who they served. Nobody knew their goals. Their few documented appearances in the original story had all involved prophecy, and their prophecies had all come true with a precision that suggested either genuine foresight or something even more unsettling.
"What did she say?" Ian asked, keeping his voice even.
Daenerys recited it from memory — it had clearly embedded itself in her mind with unusual clarity, the way vivid dreams sometimes did.
"To go north, you must go south. To reach the light, you must pass through shadow. To move forward, you must first go back. To find what you seek in the west, you must first travel east."
Ian recognized it immediately. Word for word, it matched what appeared in the original story — the same prophecy, delivered to Daenerys by the same masked figure.
Which raised an uncomfortable question. Was the Shadowbinder's gift so powerful that it could perceive the future regardless of how players had altered the present? Or had Ian's changes so far been too small to bend a prophecy this fundamental?
On the surface the prophecy seemed to be pointing Daenerys toward Asshai — the ancient shadow city at the edge of the known world, where the Shadowbinders made their home. In the source material, when Daenerys had pressed the masked woman on what she would find there, the answer had been a single word: truth.
Whether that destination was literal or metaphorical had been debated endlessly. Some read it as Daenerys's actual geographical journey — heading east to Slaver's Bay before going west to Westeros, going south to Dorne before moving north against the Lannisters. Others took the shadow reference as something more specific. Ian had never fully settled on an interpretation.
What he did know was that his presence in this story had, if anything, made the journey-to-Asshai possibility more likely rather than less. He and Daenerys were already in Essos. He was already planning to move east.
"Ian?" Daenerys was watching him. She'd used his name without the title, which she only did when something had genuinely concerned her. "You've gone pale."
"I'm fine, Your Grace." He shook his head and reached for his cup. "Just thinking."
"Do you know what it means?" She relaxed slightly once he seemed himself again. "I know that's a strange question — there's no reason you'd know what a woman in my dream was saying."
"Hah." Ian managed something close to a smile. "You give me too much credit."
"I really don't," Daenerys said, with a brief laugh. "You always seem to know things you shouldn't."
Ian let that pass. "What I'm more interested in," he said carefully, "is whether you're certain it was a dream."
Daenerys looked at him.
"What else would it be?"
"Your room is high up. Four Unsullied at the door." Ian kept his tone measured. "I'm simply asking whether you're certain."
He watched the moment it landed.
Daenerys's expression shifted — the comfortable assumption of of course it was a dream colliding with something else. "The setting," she said slowly. "In the dream. It was my room. She was standing by the window." A pause. "She was there and then she wasn't. I assumed that was how I knew it was a dream."
"When did she disappear?"
"The moment she finished speaking." Daenerys looked genuinely unsettled now. "Do you think someone was actually in my room?"
Ian ran through what he knew. In the original story, the masked Shadowbinder had first encountered Daenerys in person — a real, physical meeting. The second time had been more ambiguous, appearing and vanishing in a way that could have been either dream or magic. Shadowbinders were capable of extraordinary things. Melisandre, the most powerful Red Priestess in the known world, had used a shadow working to kill Renly Baratheon — but that had required a tremendous sacrifice and represented the absolute outer limit of what a human being could channel through the flames.
If lesser Shadowbinders could simply walk through warded doors and vanish at will, then the threat landscape looked considerably more dangerous than Ian had been accounting for. A sufficiently advanced mage — whether NPC or player — could theoretically reach him in a room he believed was secure.
That was a serious problem.
"It was a dream," Ian said.
He said it with enough calm that Daenerys accepted it, the tension in her shoulders easing. Whatever the Shadowbinder's allegiances turned out to be, she hadn't moved against Daenerys at any point in the original story. That was the most useful fact available, and Ian was going to operate on it until he had a reason not to.
The other question — what it meant for player threats — he kept entirely to himself.
He finished breakfast, excused himself, and walked back to his chambers.
Alone, Ian worked through his available resources and made a decision he'd been putting off.
He used one of his Basic Skill Selection Scrolls to acquire the fundamentals of Red Priest training — the theological and practical groundwork that R'hllor's clergy built their abilities on. Then he upgraded both that skill and his Greensight ability to the next tier.
His updated profile:
Ian — Strength: 35, Agility: 31, Spirit: 34Skills: Basic Etiquette, Common Tongue (Basic), High Valyrian (Basic), Sword Mastery, Horsemanship (Advanced), Lance (Intermediate), Shapeshifter (Advanced), Greensight (Apprentice), Red Priest (Apprentice)Attribute Points: 0 | Skill Points: 1 | Points: 349Items: Basic Skill Selection Scroll ×1, Skill Upgrade Scroll ×2
The apprentice-level magical skills weren't going to make him a practitioner in any meaningful sense. That wasn't the point. What they gave him was a working understanding of how both systems operated — the underlying logic, the cost structure, the categories of things each discipline could and couldn't do.
If a player was developing along a magical path — Red Priest, Shadowbinder, Greenseer, Warlock of Qarth — Ian needed to be able to recognize what he was looking at before it was pointed at him. Surprise was the danger. Understanding what the threat was and how it functioned was the first step toward not being caught flat-footed when it arrived.
He closed the system interface and sat for a moment in the quiet of his chambers, listening to the sounds of the city below.
The Shadowbinder had found Daenerys. Which meant she knew where they were, and she'd been watching long enough to choose her moment.
Ian added Asshai to the list of things he needed to think more carefully about.
(End of Chapter)
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