Chapter 7: A Symphony of Whispers and Shrieks
The disappearance of the Red Queen sent a tremor of pure chaos through the foundations of the war. On Dragonstone, it was received as an act of unspeakable treachery. Rhaenys and Meleys had not fallen in an honourable battle; they had simply vanished from a sky thick with fog. There was no wreckage, no body, not even a single scarlet scale washed ashore. In the absence of truth, rage provided its own answers. Prince Daemon, his face a mask of cold fury, declared it the work of assassins and dark sorcery, a coward's blow struck by the Greens. The Black council, already simmering with grief over Lucerys, now boiled over with a lust for vengeance. The leash was off.
In King's Landing, the reaction was one of profound and terrified confusion. The trap at Rook's Rest had been laid with meticulous care. Vhagar and Sunfyre had waited, hidden by the clouds, for a battle that never came. Meleys never arrived. Lord Staunton's castle fell, but the grand strategic checkmate had failed. Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King, saw the disappearance not as a victory, but as a terrifying new problem. An unknown power was now at play. Was it the Sea Snake, wielding some forgotten Valyrian magic from the deeps? Was it the doing of a foreign power, a Braavosi Faceless Man? Or was it something else, something older? Aemond Targaryen, his one eye burning with frustration, felt cheated of his glorious battle. He had wanted to prove Vhagar's supremacy, and instead, he was left staring at an empty sky, a phantom victory claimed by a nameless entity.
Krosis-Krif, resting in the abyssal silence of his underwater cavern, was the sole audience to the symphony of chaos he was composing. The memories of Rhaenys Targaryen were a universe within him. He now understood the intricate web of familial love, duty, and resentment that bound the Targaryen dynasty. He could see Rhaenyra not just as a claimant, but as the grieving mother Rhaenys had tried to comfort. He could see Daemon not just as a rogue, but as the ambitious, insecure, and fiercely loyal husband Rhaenys had respected and feared. He possessed a dead queen's wisdom, her political acumen, her intimate knowledge of the Red Keep's secret passages and its even more secret desires. This knowledge transformed his strategic thinking. He was no longer just a predator optimizing his food source; he was a master puppeteer who could see the strings attached to every player on the board.
His human knowledge of the history provided the script. Rhaenys's memories provided the stage directions. And his own monstrous power provided the ability to rewrite any scene he chose.
He knew what came next. Daemon's response to Lucerys's death would not be a battle. It would be an atrocity. An act so vile it would forever stain the honour of both sides and ensure the war descended into utter depravity. "An eye for an eye, a son for a son." The whisper would start on Dragonstone and find its way to the grimiest alleys of King's Landing. Two men would be hired. Their names, lost to the grand histories but burned into Krosis-Krif's memory, were Blood and Cheese. Their target: the Red Keep. Their mission: to murder one of King Aegon II's male heirs in front of his mother, Queen Helaena.
A lesser monster might have tried to stop it. A sentimental fool might have seen it as a line too far. Krosis-Krif saw it as the single greatest opportunity for psychological warfare he could have devised. The act itself was a tool. The true prize was the aftermath: the wave of pure, undiluted terror and grief that would shatter the morale of the Greens' royal family and plunge the capital into a state of panicked lockdown. And in that chaos, there was profit to be made.
He would not be a distant observer this time. This act required proximity. He needed to be there, a silent witness, ready to strike in the immediate wake of the emotional shockwave. He began his journey to King's Landing.
It was the most audacious act of infiltration imaginable. He travelled by sea, his colossal form a moving abyssal trench, indistinguishable from the deep ocean floor. He swam up the Blackwater Rush by night, a silent, scaled leviathan moving against the current, the murky water his cloak. He came to rest in the deepest part of the bay, right before the city, his body nestled in the thick, stinking silt, his head mere fathoms below the keels of the merchant ships and fishing skiffs that crowded the harbour. He was an apocalypse sleeping at the city's doorstep, and no one knew he was there.
From his position, he could feel the dragons in the Dragonpit. It was a faint, pathetic hum compared to the vibrant life signatures of the free dragons. It was the feeling of caged gods, their power sapped, their spirits dimmed. He felt the youthful energy of Shrykos and Morghul, the hatchlings of the royal children. He felt the ancient, sorrowful dreams of Dreamfyre, Helaena's mount, a dragon who had once belonged to Rhaena Targaryen, a world away. Her grief would be his signal.
He waited. He listened to the sounds of the city above: the ringing of bells, the shouts of merchants, the rumble of carts. He felt the psychic energy of the capital, a frantic, nervous buzz of a populace that knew war was upon them. Then, on a moonless night, he felt the intrusion. Two small, sharp, vicious thoughts entering the Red Keep. Blood, the butcher. Cheese, the ratcatcher. He followed their mental trail, guided by Rhaenys's intimate knowledge of the castle's layout. He watched, through a lens of pure psychic perception, as they made their way to the chambers of the Queen.
Krosis-Krif did not relish the horror of what followed. He was a psychopath, but his was a cold, pragmatic cruelty, not the hot, sordid evil of mankind. He observed the event with the detachment of a scientist watching a chemical reaction. He heard Queen Helaena's pleas. He heard her terrible, impossible choice. He heard the brief, sharp cry of the young prince, Jaehaerys. And then he heard the shriek.
It was not a human sound. It was the sound of a soul being torn in two. It came from Queen Helaena, a sound of such profound, mind-shattering agony that it transcended the stone walls of the castle. It was immediately echoed, magnified a thousand times over, by her dragon.
In the Dragonpit, Dreamfyre awoke with a roar that shook the foundations of the great dome. Chains, thick as a man's waist, snapped like thread. A wave of pure, empathic agony and rage exploded from her, a psychic shockwave that washed over the entire city. Krosis-Krif, in the bay, received the full force of it. It was a raw, unfiltered broadcast of a mother dragon feeling the murder of her rider's child. It was the signal he had been waiting for.
The city erupted into chaos. The City Watch was in an uproar, the Red Keep was sealed, and a frantic, city-wide search began for the killers. The Greens' leadership, from Aegon down to the lowest lord, was consumed by a singular, burning desire for revenge. Their focus was internal, on the traitors within and the assassins in their midst. No one was looking at the river.
Now was the time to strike. Not at their army. Not at their family. But at the very foundation of their power: their wealth.
With Rhaenys's memories, Krosis-Krif knew of the Greens' greatest advantage. While the Velaryons controlled the sea, the Greens controlled the vast wealth of the westerlands. House Lannister had opened its coffers to Aegon's cause. But gold in Casterly Rock was useless. It had to be brought to King's Landing to pay for armies, to hire sellswords, to bribe wavering lords. And with the Sea Snake's fleet blockading the sea lanes, the gold had to travel overland, a long and perilous journey. The final, most vulnerable leg of that journey was the Blackwater Rush, where the heavily-laden barges were floated downriver to the capital.
Guided by the knowledge he'd absorbed from the Triarchy captains and reinforced by Rhaenys's high-level understanding of the crown's finances, Krosis-Krif knew a great shipment was due. It was the Greens' war chest. Without it, their ability to prosecute the war would be critically crippled.
He uncoiled his immense form from the silt and began to move upriver, against the current, a silent, rising tide of black death. The water was his shield, the chaos in the city his distraction. He swam for miles, his powerful tail propelling him with terrifying speed, until his senses detected them. A flotilla of ten broad, shallow-draft barges, low in the water, poled by sweating men and guarded by barges of Lannister soldiers in their crimson and gold.
They were less than a day from King's Landing, their journey almost over. The soldiers were relaxed, thinking themselves safe, their minds on the ale and women of the capital. They had no idea that a predator beyond all comprehension was rising from the murky depths beneath them.
The attack was a masterpiece of silent violence. Krosis-Krif did not surface. He simply rose until his colossal, spined back breached the surface beneath the lead barge. The barge, weighing hundreds of tons with its cargo of gold bullion, was lifted from the water as if it were a child's toy. It balanced for a moment on the peak of his back before the strain became too much and it snapped in two, spilling gold, men, and splinters into the churning water.
Panic erupted. The soldiers, seeing a black, scaled island rise from their midst, were too terrified to even string their bows. Krosis-Krif used his tail, a whip of articulated muscle, to smash a second and third barge into kindling. He used his claws to shear through the hulls of others. He wasn't just sinking them; he was atomizing them.
He surfaced fully, his terrifying head rising from the river, the water sluicing off his black scales. He looked at the Lannister men, his golden eyes burning with cold light. He opened his mouth, and this time, he did breathe fire. It was not a wild conflagration, but a controlled, precise stream of liquid plasma that he directed at the barges carrying the soldiers. The wooden ships vanished in a roar of steam and flame, their occupants vaporized before they could even scream.
He reserved a special fate for the gold. He used his fire to melt the wooden chests, exposing the bars of bullion within. Then, with a lower, broader flame, he began to melt the gold itself. He did not need the wealth in its current form. But gold, like all matter, was energy. And the raw, elemental power of a precious metal, superheated and consumed, was a unique delicacy.
He lapped at the molten rivers of gold as they poured from the ruined barges, the superheated liquid metal a pleasant warmth in his throat. It was not like consuming life; it was like consuming a piece of the earth's power, a raw, elemental energy that settled deep in his core, reinforcing his physical form, making his scales harder, his bones denser.
In less than fifteen minutes, the King's war chest was gone. Ten barges, hundreds of soldiers, and a quarter of the Lannister treasury now lined the bottom of the Blackwater Rush or the inside of Krosis-Krif's gullet. He sank back beneath the surface, leaving behind nothing but a few floating splinters, a cloud of steam, and the lingering smell of ozone. The current would wash the evidence away by morning. The Greens would know only that their gold, their hope, had vanished without a trace just miles from its destination.
Krosis-Krif swam back towards the bay, the new power settling within him. He felt the agony still radiating from Dreamfyre in the Dragonpit, a constant, high-pitched scream of grief. He contrasted it with the cold, satisfying weight of the Lannister gold in his belly. Blood and Cheese had planted a seed of emotional poison in the heart of the Green council. He had just ripped out their financial heart. The Blacks had lost a queen. The Greens had lost their treasury. The scales remained perfectly, chaotically balanced.
He settled back into the silt of the bay, a hidden god of destruction, and contemplated his next move. The war was escalating beautifully. The rage and grief were clouding the minds of his enemies, making them predictable, making them weak. They would lash out, they would seek grand battles and heroic victories. They were playing a game of thrones. He was playing a game of extinction. And he was the only player who understood that the real prize wasn't a crown, but the carrion left behind when all the kings were dead.