ofseastone

[ofseastone]

drownedkrcken‌:

THE SMELL OF THE shit in the streets of King’s Landing made it impossible to catch a breath of salt air, even so close to the streets, and imposing silhouette of the Sept rising out of the mess of the city from all angles made Aeron’s stomach twist in hatred. This was the dwelling place of false gods, and nonbelievers - it was no place for a man so pious as Aeron the Damphair. The Drowned God’s concerns were the Iron Island’s concerns, and thus he deigned to endure this place in order to scope out the kind of foes they were going to have to face. 

This dragon king, first and foremost, seemed to pose a problem, if he were as mad as they said in whispers, was Aeron’s concern - especially now that his brother and his niece had made the rightful decision to oppose him. The larger problem, however, entered the keep’s letter quarters, as Aeron was scrawling a hasty letter to Balon, notifying him of his findings in this terrible, terrible place. A chill fell over him as Euron spoke, and it was like he was a child again, small and ever in fear of his brother who had always been unhinged and forged from the roughest of iron. If they had been children again, and Aeron had felt brave, he might have made some haughty joke about how his older brother was an illiterate fool, but as a man grown he knew better, and had been soured by life’s experiences. “You don’t fool me, brother.” He said, leaving the letter hovering between them as eyes that matched Euron’s held his gaze in challenge. “I have no time for your tricks.” 

—             “MY TRICKS, BROTHER”, Euron began, and his tone was leveled with the dark between them, “are time itself.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. This pretense at busyness that Aeron insisted to entertain, years after dreary years, while Pyke rotted and was picked apart like carrion by the inlanders, galled on him. It was always Aeron with his head bowed, terribly assured he was working his way towards (or against) some divinity or other. Long before he became Damphair, the younger man had been consumed with this need to appear busy, useful, worthy. He had only been to weak to take it for himself. A God had had to step in, and not even one of the big ones, at that. 

              “What about the way of the world, Damphair? You crack letters and I crack skulls? You read, translate, intermingle, while I state my claim?” Euron leaned over the row of stooped desks that separated the two of them, his jerkin brushing aside papers and inkwells. He could hear the gulls scratching on the palisades out in the port, the crummy, decaying wood softening under men’s footsteps. He thought he could hear the very filth that ate away at King’s Landing, much as it had, in their own days, at the Iron Islands. The corsair pondered that maybe every city is doomed to fall - he flipped this thought in between his fingertips, turned it aside as he would a woman’s hairlock. If all cities crumble, then what empire did he truly want to build? His eyes seized back on his brother. “Would you deny this sacred order, this agreement of ours on how things are supposed to work? Read it. Out loud.”

[ofseastone]

saildfaraway‌:

It was easy to pretend that she was never taught the slightest bit of etiquette in her entire life. Her refusal to wear a glittering dress on any occasions other than ones in the presence of the King himself already drew disapproving looks everywhere she turned. Even her lord captain had given up convincing her to at least attempt to not distance herself from the crowd completely. Bitterness overruled her within the wall of the capital city. Painful memories of how attempts to fits in and do as asked only got paid in blood. - She found a surprising comfort in the castle’s letter quarters, where she had been send to retrieve maps and data a few times before since the fleet’s arrival. Though the scribes were all lifeless, eyes hollowed as if they were drained of any life that had been left within them and skin like the paper they wrote on, they at least did not seem to mind her presence. Did as they were asked, rather than questioning her every word simply for the sake of annoyance. The others who dared to venture below ground to visit them seemed less mindful of their surroundings, or at the very least cared not for whom they shared a room with. 

An different aura could be spotted within a split second in the room where most appeared more dead than alive, and when a tall man dressed in various shades of grey came in the air changed. The pirate’s curious hazel hues followed his every move. After all, there was very little entertaining about watching the scribes scribble down their notes on yellowed paper. That got tiresome within seconds.

“By all means, continue to keep waving that scroll in front of his nose for minutes but I can assure you it will bring you no futher. Your keen senses picked out a man who speaks little common tongue.” she spoke up after moments of silence, before pushing herself up from a creaking old chair in a further corner of the room. Making the eyes of the foreign man shift from the scroll in her direction. “So unless you brushed up on your bastard Valyrian recently, it may be wise to pick another victim.”

—           HIS EYES GRAZED OVER THE WOMAN’S FEATURES. Leniently, he dismissed the points he was not interested in: the stone-chipped bones, the lips soft and pliant, the sharp posture of her neck. Euron contented he’ll have enough time to indulge in that once the crown is closer to him - or at least down on the ground. His purpose here varied so greatly from whatever he’d done before, whatever victories he had strung on his chain. This was not about captured flags and warrior-rings. This, now, his return to Westeros unheeded, his entrance to King’s Landing with no one of his sister’s Ironborn paying attention, was everything. It was the careful dismantling of an empire. So, instead, he latched on the woman’s words. He did not let a moment pass between her remark and a mock-wounded grimace.

             “Victim?” Euron’s brows hitched up, inquisitive and dark. “You insult me so lightly, for a time as festive as this. I’d say yer breaking at least several grounds of etiquette.” He huffed, somewhere between amusement and self-deprecation, and those single acts were so well perfected that they fully reached his eyes, alighting them from within. The corsair strolled closer to her corner of the room. “To think a man might just want some conversation.”

[ofseastone]

——            WITH DEFT FINGERS, the corsair plucked a vellum scroll from the slab. It spun in his wrist, rotating as if he’d meant it to draw an arc in the air, and reached towards the other person. King’s Landing’s letter quarters, neatly positioned though they were, reminded him of a dove cote from which all life had fled. Dust piled in corners and mixed with a musky scent that vaguely resembled his ship’s hull after a week in port. The iron-barrelled windows allowed only a dim light to peer through. There were no crows to carry the missives, no familiar rats in the corners, nothing but back-bent scribes poring over their papers like broken puppets. It seemed arseways; all this empty space, and no vermin to make use of it. He didn’t much like it, but the paper was good, miles better than whatever he’d gotten his hands on in his tradings. It was also a useful way to watch the coming and going of servants, learned men, and the nobles who had no time or coin to summon a scribe to their chamber. It was precisely this kind of figure he’d cornered across the table.

                 “Could you please read this out for me?” A plaintive shrug, shoulders hitching almost apologetically. From all the ways to come at an inlander, Euron had found that the easiest trick was to feign grit and ignorance. Ruggedness overall, in fact, served him better than gold. Summon the pretense of as much as you could muster, have it filling your hands to the brim, and you hardly needed to rally anything else to your side. Rough edges men thought they might cut themselves onto. And underneath them, the sleekness that really drew out the blood. His eyes etched, unblinking, on the way his request would be received.

[ofseastone]

ariannenymerosmartell‌:

“Who knows more of gods than I? Horse gods and fire gods, gods made of gold with gemstone eyes, gods carved of cedar wood, gods chiseled into mountains, gods of empty air… I know them all. I have seen their peoples garland them with flowers, and shed the blood of goats and bulls and children in their names. And I have heard the prayers, in half a hundred tongues. Cure my withered leg, make the maiden love me, grant me a healthy son. Save me, succor me, make me wealthy… protect me! Protect me from mine enemies, protect me from the darkness, protect me from the crabs inside my belly, from the horselords, from the slavers, from the sellswords at my door. Protect me from the Silence.” He laughed. “Godless? Why, Aeron, I am the godliest man ever to raise sail! You serve one god, Damphair, but I have served ten thousand. From Ib to Asshai, when men see my sails, they pray.”   –   Euron Greyjoy

[ofseastone]

—                WHERE THE SEA WAS QUIET, the world of men bustled, nigh on spilling over. Whispers and pent up conflicts mingled together like tendrils, oily things which the corsair couldn’t wait but push his knife through. Family feuds no one save the descendants recalled, and even them on a best day; legends which slithered back and forth from the ignorance that spawned them; myth and fear and all over, idiocy prevailing, reigning queen. That was King’s Landing, and that Maegor’s Keep most of all. He had it pegged down the minute he lowered his sails and docked the Silence on its trash-ridden port.

                  To be just, Euron Greyjoy had his fair share of myths about him, too. And his fair share of ancient blood debts. But he carried no other man’s battle than his own, and in no other name than that which will, in the end, crown him King. He knew as much; and so did the folk  sworn to him. These pronouncements he made to no one else, not yet - he hovered about the tide of events, mist-thick, waiting to see what moment is fortuitous. The ship lord had arrived late, almost so late as to count it a mortal insult (but then what did the Dragon milksop not count as one?) and settled in with the smaller dukelings. This hardly slighted him. He came not as a Greyjoy, but as a leader of men, though immeasurably richer than all them roosted up within the Keep’s walls, hens in a kernel. His pride lay elsewhere, and no unsuitable lodgings or disbelieving murmurs could sway it. At his back, the men and women he had built his fortune with waited for him to make his claim. And it seemed everyone else waited, too. But for the moment he kept apart from Asha, and would only have dealings with the Ironborn that have long relinquished their stake at power.

                 His cast-off nephew would be one of them. Euron had cornered the boy on a roundabout alley, where no steps marred the red stones which stretched like dried blood at their feet. His eyes seized on the smaller silhouette and a derisory glint played in them. “Have you broken from your name as much as that, then?” His hands spread apart at his chest, as if to say far be it from me to judge, as if to disavow his impact. “Choosing to fight with the Starks?” Dark circles cast out from his cheeks, granite carvings intensifying the light.                 //           @icekraken​