Snowing_Melody

Chapter 31: Shackles of Gold

Daenerys looked at the broken man before her and felt a strange, detached pity. Jorah Mormont’s story was a tragedy, yes, but she was no stranger to tragedy. Her own life, the life of the girl whose body she inhabited, had been a litany of loss. She had no time to dwell on the sorrows of the past; the present was too demanding.

"Lynesse is a Hightower, is she not?" Dany recalled. "The captain of my ancestor’s Kingsguard, the legendary 'White Bull,' Ser Gerold Hightower… he was of ...

Chapter 30: The Price of Love

"Freeriders are sellswords, nothing more," Jorah explained, his voice a low rumble. "Men with a horse and some skill with a blade. Knights are another matter entirely." He seemed to settle into the role of teacher, the pain of his own memories momentarily forgotten.

"A boy who wishes to be a knight is sent to serve as a page around the age of seven. He learns his courtesies, and a sword master teaches him his foundations. At twelve or thirteen, he becomes a squire. He learns the use of ...

Chapter 29: The Queen of Love and Beauty

Jorah should be ashamed, Daenerys thought. In his whole story, he had not once spoken his first wife's name. It was as if she had been a ghost in his life even before she was a ghost in the ground.

The knight’s voice was a low, melancholy rumble as he continued. "Not long after she passed, my father took the black and went to the Wall. I became Lord of Bear Island in his stead. Suitors came, and I was considering my choices, but then the ironborn rebelled. Balon Greyjoy declared himse...

Chapter 28: The Story of a Bear

"And how do you think I should choose?" Daenerys asked, turning the question back on him. She held the black dragon in her arms, feeling its warmth against her skin. With the only three dragons in the world, her future was a thing of unimaginable potential. But for now, that potential was fragile, and she was a queen with no kingdom. Lying low and building her strength was the only path.

Jorah thought for a moment. "There is not enough food here," he said, his gaze fixed on the small cr...

Chapter 27: Seeds of a Kingdom

At dawn the next day, after Daenerys had walked the length and breadth of White Cloud City, she began to bitterly regret having slaughtered all the sheep. The resources here were richer than she could have ever dreamed, enough to sustain them for a lifetime.

Nearly every street and courtyard had at least one stone-lined well, and the water within was cool, clear, and seemingly endless. Between the cracks in the stone, clumps of the same tough devil-grass that had sustained their horses ...

Chapter 26: The Lord of White Cloud City

The Dothraki loved to say, "everyone knows." It was not a statement of fact, but an invocation of ancient, hard-won tradition. And Dany had learned that their traditions, born from millennia of survival on a harsh continent, were often wise. Their fear of dead cities was no exception.

Why does a city die? she thought. Plague or war. A plague, of course, was to be avoided at all costs. And a city destroyed by war would be filled with rotting corpses, which would also br...

Chapter 25: The White City

Daenerys’s bond with her dragons was a strange and unpredictable magic. The original Daenerys, the girl whose life she now lived, had been more a vessel for this power than its master. She had loved her children, but she had also feared them, and in trying to be a good queen, she had neglected her instincts as a dragon’s mother, nearly severing the bond between them.

This Daenerys would not make that mistake. She embraced the magic, nurtured it, and explored its limits in her own wa...

Chapter 24: The First Flight

Daenerys had misunderstood. Old Watson, in his final moments, had not burdened her with a lecher's handbook. He had given her a key.

Later that night, unable to contain her curiosity, she had secretly opened the thick, parchment-bound book. She had been prepared for the worst, but instead of the "twelve arts of spring's cry," she found page after page of dense data, charts, and intricate, hand-drawn maps. The twelve explicit sketches that had so horrified her were a mere dozen pages in ...

Chapter 23: The Old Man's Gift

Jorah was right, and the cold logic of his words was undeniable. To follow Dany’s plan, the strong would suffer immensely to prolong the lives of the weak. Their rest time would be cut in half, their work under the scorching sun doubled.

"This is my khalasar," Dany insisted, her voice quiet but unyielding. "Whether they are old, weak, sick, or crippled, they are my people. I have a duty to protect every one of them."

"But what of your soldiers? They could die of exhaustion in th...

Chapter 22: The Weeping Star

"He was not a pure horseman, you see," old Avanti continued, his voice a dry rasp. "Blue-Eyed Haggo had the strength of any great Khal, but he lacked their courage. He was tainted by his father's blood, and like those who live in stone houses, he was accustomed to using poison and shameless tricks."

The old man shook his head, his face a mask of disgust. "To send men to sneak into another's camp and steal a Khal's son… such a thing had never been done in a thousand years on the Great ...

Chapter 21: The Twelfth Art

Her dragons, when they had first been born, were like nothing she had ever imagined. They were impossibly fragile, like malnourished kittens, seemingly all neck, tail, and wings with no torso to speak of. She could hold one in her palm and feel almost no weight. But when they spread their wings, it was another matter. The wingspan was three times their body length, each a delicate, colorful, translucent membrane stretched taut between long, thin bones.

The girl whose body she now inhabi...

Chapter 46: A Different Kind of Shield

Harry and Ron stared at the unlocked door, their minds still struggling to process the sheer, casual efficiency with which Hermione had just broken through three legendary magical trials.

“Hurry up,” she called back, her voice echoing from the next chamber, laced with an impatient weariness. “The Dark Lord is waiting. Let’s get this over with so I can go to bed. I’m sleepy.”

The two boys scrambled after her, entering a vast, dark chamber with a floor made of a colossal...

Chapter 45: An Exercise in Efficiency

The Mirror of Erised.

The name floated up from the depths of her past life's memory. Hermione stared at the magnificent, ornate mirror, a silent sentinel in the dusty, forgotten chamber. She knew what it was, and she knew what it was destined for. Dumbledore was going to use this very mirror as the final, ingenious hiding place for the Philosopher's Stone.

She traced the cryptic inscription at the top of the frame with her eyes, the strange, archaic words that, when read backward,...

Chapter 20: Water and Fire

A leader cannot show doubt. A leader must be a rock of confidence for her people. It was a lesson Daenerys had learned not in a throne room, but in an operating theater: a surgeon must never, ever show fear to a patient before the first incision is made.

"The horses will not drink from the pools?" she asked Avanti, though she knew the answer.

"No, Khaleesi," the old man said, trembling slightly. "That is poison water. Water that the beasts will not drink is water cursed by demons....

Chapter 19: Purgatory Wasteland

The Dothraki respected strength and despised weakness. Life was cheap, whether it was their enemy’s or their own. With no other entertainment, fighting was their pastime, and they would draw a blade over the smallest of insults.

"In Westeros," Dany asked Jorah, watching the two warriors circle each other, "how do your knights compete?"

"We have armor, Your Grace," he said. "Even in a great melee, deaths are rare. And when training squires, we give them leather armor and blunted ...

Chapter 18: Commanders of Ten

Daenerys stared at the blank, uncomprehending faces of her new bloodriders. The Dothraki, it seemed, were baffled by any number greater than ten, and completely lost when faced with a "complicated" system of command. She raised an eyebrow. Drogo's mighty khalasar had been made of dozens of individual khas, each led by a ko. The hierarchy was brutally simple: Khal, Ko, and warrior. And a Khal was just the strongest Ko, who was in turn the strongest warrior. It was a flat, pri...

Chapter 17: My Khalasar

When the last of the ash had cooled and the sun was high in the sky, Daenerys gathered her people. She had been washed clean, and now she sat astride her silver filly, a dragonling cradled in her arms, another perched on each shoulder. The horse walked slowly through the crowd as she looked down at the faces of the outcasts and survivors who were now her entire world.

"From this moment," she shouted, her voice ringing with a power she hadn't known she possessed, "my khas is a <...

Chapter 16: Fire and Blood

"Aaaaiiiiieeeeeeeee!"

The Lhazareen priestess wailed in the heart of the flames, her voice a high, piercing shriek of pure agony. She was not, in the end, as strong as she had pretended to be.

Daenerys, sitting cross-legged beside Drogo, had thrown the torch into the pyre herself.

Whoosh.

Small blue flames, like swift snakes, darted across the pyre, following the wet trails of oil. They ignited the dry grass and twigs first, and then, seconds later, the great ...

Chapter 15: The Priestess and the Blood Witch

As the last light of the sun vanished and the sky bruised to a deep purple, Daenerys turned to Aggo. "Take Odo's men into custody. Give the goat-slaves what food we can spare and let them go."

Aggo glanced at the shivering Lhazareen. "Khaleesi," he said, his voice low and troubled, "they hate us. Once free, they will tell their people where we are and how few we are. They are cowardly, but not stupid. They will not pass up such an opportunity."

The boy was young, but his mind was ...