A Bitter Gift
Elsewhere Elsewhen
You dream, but the dream is not your own, not the past, not the future, not the gates of power opening to you, but a grey void of smoke and ash where fire is but a dream. Looking down you see that you are yourself floating amid the emptiness. The crown of Aegon rests upon your brow and the Weirwood staff is in your hands, but though it feels you are dream-walking, you have no power to shape the place you have found yourself in.
A figure approaches, a young girl with hair of unbound silver garbed in simple crimson robes. You know her face though you have never seen her in the flesh. She is Daenys the Dreamer, and yet
not. Behind her eyes dwell the sorrows of a broken age, the will of a Lost Goddess. Syrax speaks: "Mighty have you grown, my descendant, and lesser am I than when Valyria stood, but still there is a gift I would give you as I did all of your line."
"What gift do you speak of, Elder One?" you ask cautiously. Even bound as she is from causing harm you are not fully certain you can trust one of the Fourteen, or perhaps it is simply that you resent being brought here powerless before her as a supplicant.
"The gift that has been ever a seer's to grant—knowledge," she replies, sounding almost regretful. "You divine your foes with every move in the game, you listen to the voices in the stone and you have seen the face of your sire's magic, but you do not see clearly the workings of your own hand, the dreams of your own mind, and that is a peril I cannot allow to endure a moment more..."
"How
generous of you." The quip falls flat, a niggling fear awakening at the back of your mind.
"Call it a matter of self-preservation, then," she shrugs, the gesture vastly weary, giving the youthful form she wears an almost alien presence. "My fate is bound to yours, and you are imperiled by this blindness as you have not been by any other foe you might fight sword in hand. Should one less kindly disposed than I pierce the veils you have erected and confront you with these truths I fear you would break even as the deva you faced so brief a time ago, and for you there is no Greater Power, no Fount of Wisdom to hide behind, only emptiness above. So I offer the only aid I can, a mirror from which you cannot turn your gaze aside."
A shiver runs down your spine at these words as your mind begins to race, considering what she could mean. You find
far more possibilities than you had expected, though each comes with a string of caveats, explanations, and excuses like hooks upon a steel line. "I..." you begin, not wholly sure what you should say. That you understand, that you will look into the matter yourself? You would not be here if either of those things were true.
"So you have not swallowed your own tail and made a circle of yourself," the Goddess notes. "Good, I do not have the leverage to untangle you if you were that far gone. Look..."
And so you see.
***
An old woman, a slave crying under careless beatings of the overseer who sees any work she may do as insignificant besides 'encouraging others'. At last all her hopes and faith has been ground to dust until there is nothing and she wishes to show that to the world entire. The same woman staring into a smoky flame, chanting half understood words of ruin, calling on the powers of Abaddon to reap the world, debasing herself before darkness that she may at last have one more sweet taste of vengeance before oblivion. At least the Daemons offer that to one who had never thought herself of worth. There is commotion outside, inquisitors in raven masks who burst in and lash her hands behind her. One arm snaps.
"She's going to the tree anyway, she won't need arms for that," one says, not caring if she can hear him.
So she does, so she perishes upon Dark Sister's edge, her death counted more valuable than her life, one of scores, hundreds. You do not even remember the number.
What use a painless death before an eternity of suffering?
She was a cultist, the thought raises immediately to your mind.
"So certain are you that even the voices of angels could not reach her that you would rather they spent their times on thugs and cutpurses?" Syrax' voice is sharp as dragonsteel. "You used her because it was convenient, because your people hate her kind and would love you for wielding the blade."
"She consorted with fiends..." The defense is feeble, the counter obvious.
An image of Mereth rises from the mists, then curiously the sight of four bottles carefully labeled in the midst of an otherwise empty chamber, the devils you had chosen to spare, some because you might have use for them in the Flesh Forge, others because you wished to attempt recruitment, because you found their talents
valuable.
As though summoned by the word Valyrian steel flashes, devils perish... their very souls consumed in part in the forging.
Just devils? A painful laugh tears its way from your throat. Dark may they be and bound to fel lords, but these are not the likes of Tor and Varys whom you consigned to oblivion because you feared they would return from mere death. You
called them here to have their souls consumed in agony and is Hell any weaker for it? No, you had not been exacting justice no matter how many evils they had committed, you had been using them in a manner their own lords would not find so foreign, no more and no less.
Was it worth it?
"I would say yes, but then I do not stand in your place. You are not the boy who flew into Torturer's Deep with dread in his heart, King Viserys. You do not spill the blood of petty fiends and the fools who would call them for safety or for justice, but because it serves your purposes. Accept it or let it go, do not hide behind the image of yourself in the eyes of others." The words are like stones tied to your ankles, but before you can answer you feel a finger pressed to your lips.
"Not yet, not by far, I must show you all and this is difficult as I am now..."There is a thread of sympathy in her rasping voice, but no trace of judgement. For Syrax who has ruled over Valyria in the days of its dark glory it is not the deeds themselves that are troubling, but your refusal to face them. The choice is yours.
***
The dream shifts, the vision changes....
Lannisport, the sun shines bright over carved wooden roofs, children are playing in the streets, the hum and bustle of the city just the same as you remember it. A crack rings out through the streets... then another and another. The unseen spores do their work well, Tens... hundreds of thousands of gold dragons in damages, but the living cost is far higher... oh here are as few direct deaths as you anticipated, hardly more than a handful, most people trying to shore up the damages against the inevitable, but many do not have the coin to repair. Merchants do not have the cold to cover the loss of warehouses full of lumber, clerks, longshoreman, carpenters, and more.
Misery spreads, and spreads like cracks in pottery, some are left homeless and others forced to subsist on less than before, whose families are driven into the streets... all are afraid. A mob gathers before the Guildhall of the Golden Shields. First come the curses, then the stones, the the Redcloacks move. They only strike with the butt of their spears... it is enough, eleven bodies like broken upon the cobbles, one of them a girl who cannot be any older than fifteen.
Tywin Lannister had ordered her death, but you had sown the seeds of the despair that lead her to this... her and hundreds upon hundreds of others that even a godless' mind cannot fully encapsulate the scope of it. Was it worth it, you wonder, and at once two answers rise in your mind—yes because it weakens the Lannisters, hastens your rise to power when you can fix all of this... and no, because some things cannot truly be mended as they were.
***
The Goddess moves her hand... the image shifts again—fields of wheat, perfect, bountiful, deadly, grain-filled burning with black smoke, smallfolk driven from their lands with sword some resist... or try to.
They die. Others take up brigandage, inflicting yet more death and ruin before they find their deaths, never knowing who had been the first architect of their woes. They take the aid given to them by the crown and smile as they thank the gods.
And you had thought being named Azor Ahai unjustly was ill fitting. How much worse to be called savior when you had concocted their woes?
Cold fingers reach around your shoulder like hands of iron.
"Look. Choose. If you falter we all die."
***
You have seen these bloody fields before, a stage upon which you acted out a horrid play, a demonstration in which soldiers died under your banners and those of the foe to prove the Legion's power, to quash rebellion ere it could arise you reasoned then, and the logic is no less compelling now that it had been in the moment, yet the truth remains that you brought the foe to fight your own men, the foe who killed some among their number to them... and they had trusted you with their lives and their honor.
Former slaves by the thousands lay dead now, yet their bodies would not be buried nor would they rest upon a pyre, but rise as Darkenbeasts to harry and slay your foes with poison and with the fire that had been denied them, boiled in an alchemist's cauldron... you see it done upon some distant battle ground, the faces of the foe constantly changing, now Ghiscari, Norvoshi , or Qohorik, then Westerosi, or even the strange arms of Yi Ti.
They all scream the same when the fire descends.
How many times have you stilled your hand against using fire against your foes?
Was it all a lie? All just because you did not wish to see the deed done before your very eyes?
Yes, a comforting lie. You are not certain if it was you who spoke or Syrax, nor does it matter. Those feelings lay forgotten when you signed papers with a king's hand, perhaps they
should be forgotten. Perhaps you should forget the screams and think of the ultimate purpose, of peace and safety for the world, or else you should renounce them against any but the foes of all life, keep them to light the fires in the Long Night and not before.
***
You see men and woman in the colors of the Legion walking into the Fungus Forge to take their augmentations to fight unimaginable horrors for no other reason than 'the King wills it', because they do not value their own lives as much as they do your words. This... this at least you can fix, you think desperately like a drowning man reaching for a line. You can have to impose some sort of mental testing to ensure they understand the risks, the changes, that they are truly willing
You look down at your hands in horror.
How could you have been so blind for so long?
"And so you begin to understand..." the Goddess' voice is faint as she strains to reach further along the threads of time to show the workings of your hands and mind.
"More...?" You do not recognize your own voice.
"Subtler dangers," she sighs.
In the depths of the forge the corpse of Mammon rests not yet set into its place, in the planned fount of darkness. It would be safe as you can make it, it would be effective, but still it would be a timeless desecration.
Would it truly be safe enough? Could anything justify such an act?
***
The vision frays...
A thousand intrigues play out, a thousand betrayals large and small play out, words whispered to an inquisitorial agent, the intrigues of Myr and Lys... heads roll by another's hand though by your will. This time you cannot sigh and move on, there is nowhere to move on to only the ashen dream of Syrax. Were those betrayed worse than Baelor with whom you were just commiserating? Perhaps some but certainly not all, you know too much of men to think so.
Yet for all you knew of others how much you had failed to acknowledge about yourself, leaving naught but hollow sighs by the wayside. When was the last time principles had stayed your hand... Myrcella... she had presented an obvious choice, a simple one at least in hindsight, but with these others, weapons and tools of kingship nothing is clear, for to lay each aside would be a sacrifice, to limit them would be to limit yourself, your dreams.
What do you do?
[] Accept that which you had become and leave the sighs to others
[] Change something of what you had seen, the past is dead but the future is yet open?
-[] Limit the power of the inquisition to spy on your own citizenry (Write in)
-[] Further limit what you can use as sacrifice (Write in)
-[] Limit the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (Write in)
-[] Put precautions in place in the case of human experimentation/flesh-forging (Write in)
-[] Do not Create the Mammon Machine
-[] Try to limit the grain crises you had set up (Write in)
-[] Be more careful in your intrigues about causing avoidable deaths (Write in)
OOC: I'll be honest, this should have been 2-3 update, but I do not think the thread could take morality discussions for that long.
