Dragonsalt Chapter 6 (Patreon)

Harry Potter

He could feel the hard wood of the mast against his back, his body slumped tiredly against it as he slept on the deck. It probably wasn’t the smartest decision, being safer to sleep below deck or in the main cabin in such dangerous seas, but he needed to be ready to act at all times.

The time to climb up to the deck would’ve simply delayed him, which wasn’t permissible in a place as dangerous as this.

“-y lord.”

Distantly he could feel something touch him, his eyes slowly opening. One of the Unsullied, the commander of the group that accompanied him, stood over his resting form.

“My Lord, you asked that I wake you earlier.” Sandworm repeated.

“I did.” His voice was weak, as Harry forced himself to stand.

They were getting closer. Their ship had sailed for nearly three days through the Smoking Sea, accompanied by steaming waters and a fog that made one’s throat sore. He had learned during the first day that charms and enchantments were a necessity to keep everyone alive and functioning.

The bubble-head and impervius charms were a necessity, the former to keep the men breathing safe air, and the latter to keep the ship intact. Otherwise the sails and rigging would catch fire from the embers sprouted from nearby volcanoes or even the hot burning seas below their hull which occasionally splashed up.

There were other spells he used too, such as conjuring water for everyone to drink, cooling charms, and featherweight charms to make items more accommodating for the crew. That said, the Unsullied never asked for assistance, and only did so because of his orders. Normal men would’ve panicked or fallen to madness by this point, but his ten Unsullied crewmen would stick to their posts till it killed them. Literally.

“Ship sighted!” One of the Unsullied on deck exclaimed suddenly, making Harry sober up as he raced over to the rail.

The fog was thick, as he had to strain his eyes to see what caught the man’s attention. But soon he saw it, the front bow of a sailship pointed straight upwards with the rest of its length buried under the waters.

“A wreck.” Harry noted, their own ship sailing past it leisurely as they continued ever onwards.

It wasn’t the first wrecked ship they had passed by, being one amongst many ships of suicidal adventurers who had sailed to Valyria seeking riches. It was troubling, however, that the closer they got to Valyria, the fewer wrecks they came across.

Soon Harry watched as the wrecked ship vanished into the fog behind them, knowing whoever crewed it didn’t have the same advantages they had. Whether that ship had been wrecked years, or centuries ago, he did not know.

“My Lord?” Sandworm prompted him.

“I’ll redo the bubblehead charms in a minute, they still have some time till they wear off.” Harry answered him, knowing his first mate had woke him up for that purpose. “Just know that we’re getting very close to our destination, I can feel it.”

When he traveled before, he could tell there was something blocking his magic in this world, just not what or where exactly it was. Many months of focus and meditation, and all he could figure out was that the disturbance was to the west, like a subtle pressure he could feel when facing a specific direction.

Now, that pressure was almost overwhelming, like a throb in his skull that pointed directly to whatever was blocking his magic. He felt like their ship was nearly on top of it now, and just a little bit further and they would arrive.

And so Harry recast the bubblehead charms and enchanted the parts of the ship that needed to be reinforced, nearly doubling over by the time he finished with sweat pouring down his brow. This close to the disturbance, and it was somehow even harder than before to cast magic.

“Ruins ahead!” One of the Unsullied called out right as he was just regaining his breath. “It looks important!”

With those words, all of Harry’s exhaustion seemed to vanish, as he raced up to the deck.

Far in front of the ship looked like the remnants of a port, its piers half sunken into the waters and buildings long collapsed. But it wasn’t any of that which got his attention, but rather the sight beyond it.

Massive stone towers, reaching high into the heavens in a way that took his breath away. Some of them looked to be even taller than the muggle skyscrapers in his past life, built thin and majestically in a way that could only be done with mages reinforcing their structure.

In between them ran bridges and grand thoroughfares, with smaller - albeit proportionally still huge - buildings resting on the ground below. However, Harry could easily spot the destruction from far away, witnessing the many towers that had crumbled or simply fallen over in Valyria’s doom centuries ago. Huge parts of the city were simply… gone, as if a sinkhole had opened up and swallowed them deep into the earth, along with parts where flowing magma had coated entire blocks in rock.

In a way, all of that was expected from his readings, as Valyria’s towers were described many times in old texts. But what was not expected were the floating regions of the city, as gravity seemed to forget itself, allowing chunks of earth and old stone structures to float high into the sky. The Doom had clearly caused it, and the magical disturbance likely kept the landscape ruined in such a way that gravity remained unstable.

All of that was noticeable and surprising, but it paled in comparison to the sight that truly drew Harry’s attention. It was the dozens of dragons that he randomly spotted, roaming throughout parts of the abandoned city, and sometimes taking flight to soar between the different towers.

“Wow…”

They’re a lot bigger than Drogon. Daenerys’s dragons were still growing, but these ones were full-sized, intimidating beasts that had remained here all this time.

“My Lord, there is another ship here.”

What? “What?”

The Unsullied who spoke pointed, and Harry followed to see an intimidating galley painted red that was beached on the nearby shore. Indeed, the ship looked rough, but it was clearly newer and not left over from the Doom or some expedition to Valyria years earlier. In fact, he could still see the fresh barnacles on its hull, meaning it had only been out of water for a few days at most.

“We’re not alone.” For some reason, the sight of the beached vessel made his stomach clench uneasily. “We’ll beach our own vessel near them, and disembark from there.”

Coincidentally, the red-colored galley was beached on the only shore that wasn’t rocky or covered in debris. Harry was tempted to try and tie their ship to what was left of the docks, but they looked too damaged to risk sailing close to without hitting a rock.

And so he pointed their ship directly at the shore while the Unsullied each took an oar, getting as much speed as they could as their hull soon buried itself in the shore.

A hundred feet away sat the eerie red galley, its appearance even more disturbing up close. While his crew worked to anchor their ship on the beach, one of the Unsullied wandered off towards the nearby vessel to investigate it. The man walked around it before reaching up with a hand as if to attempt to climb up its side and enter, but that was when Harry realized something.

“Stop!” He yelled, but it was futile, as the Unsullied touched the side of the ship’s red hull.

Immediately, the man’s body jerked, before writhing in agony as his mouth opened in a soundless scream. Smoke poured off his skin as his flesh turned red then melted away, his body dissolving down to the bone as he fell down in a heap.

“Fuck!” Harry swore furiously, realizing that the strange ship wasn’t simply painted red as a stylistic choice, but rather coated purposefully in blood. In this world, blood magic was the most common form of magic, meaning whoever used the vessel chose blood as a medium to form a dark form of protection on their vessel to protect it on the Smoking Sea.

“My Lord?” Sandworm asked, his voice somehow calm despite the horrific sight.

“No one will go near that ship.” He ordered, and for a moment he thought about destroying the cursed vessel before deciding it would be a waste of magic to do so. “We’ll head into the city, as the less we’re here, the better.”

/////

They left three men behind at the ship. Harry instructed them to hide if trouble showed up - such as one of the dragons swooping down for a bite to eat - and only to fight back if they had sufficient numbers to win.

Himself and the six other men went into the city from there, not having a specific route in mind as they simply began walking. It didn’t take long to realize this was a city of death, every step leaving a footprint of ash behind, the air ripe with decay and soot in a way his bubblehead charm failed to hide.

He and the Unsullied were less like powerful warriors in that ruin, but more like rats scrambling and hiding in the shadows. They navigated from one destroyed building to the next, being careful to go unseen and unheard from Valyria’s modern denizens.

Above them, dragons flew and dominated the skies, while creatures moderately less dangerous lived below. Their group had come across massive firewyrms twice - both bigger than the basilisk from Slytherin’s chamber - and somehow managed to run away unscathed both times.

Then there were the other horrors, such as this world’s equivalent of inferi that crawled out from the shadows to attack. As well as strange worms that could bury into one’s skin if they weren’t careful, either hiding in the earth or being blown around by the wind.

Several hours into their expedition, they finally found a place to lay low. It was once a luxury apartment, built into one of the large towers that had a dragon nesting at its peak. Harry had spotted the beast coming and going several hundred feet above them, and silently hoped it wouldn’t notice them and descend down.

In the lowest room of the tower a table had been set for a meal centuries ago, and four skeletons sat at it. They were fused into the chairs by something that had run over them and then cooled to black glass, so that their bones were set in the stone like insects in amber. One of them, the smallest, still had its hand around the hand of the one beside it.

Moving on to the next room, he found a skeleton clutching a half-opened chest that spilled gems of every size and color. He could only guess the man was trying to escape while the Doom was in progress, taking his treasure with him before he died.

“My Lord, shall we take this?” One of the Unsullied, named Salt Beetle, asked.

“We can get it on the way back.” Harry replied, knowing a treasure chest like that would only slow them down.

They couldn’t stop now, not when the sensation of the magical disturbance was no longer a pull, but rather like a blinding pressure that blotted out part of his senses.

They exited the remnants of that tower to cross a large plaza, and it was on the other side of it that he finally saw their destination. Up high in the sky rose a spiraling mess of buildings that led to a gigantic colosseum which had been ripped from the earth due to the unstable gravity. He could feel the way that whatever was in that structure interfered with the world’s magic, and it blinded his senses so much that he didn’t feel the incoming attack before it was too late.

The earth split apart to their group’s side, and Harry only glimpsed a huge maw before a pair of massive jaws clamped around one of the Unsullied. The creature that revealed itself was a firewyrm, landing on the stone plaza with a thud that made the ground shake.

The closest Unsullied to it didn’t hesitate, taking up his spear before thrusting it into the creature’s hide. The firewyrm let out a hiss, as if the blow merely irritated him, before slamming its paw down on the man to turn his body into a red smear on the floor.

“Stop.” The hiss left Harry’s lips before the creature could continue attacking, making it temporarily pause in place. He didn’t stop, talking quickly in parseltongue and hoping it would work. “We are not food. We will leave. Go away now.”

The creature stared at him, its face so close and massive that he could feel the heat from its mouth. But luckily the firewyrm listened, turning away as its hundred foot serpentine length disappeared back into the earth.

“M-My Lord?” For once, Sandworm looked shaken, staring at him without comprehension.

“I speak snake, no time to explain.” Harry said, to which his commander belatedly nodded. “Right now, we need to go up there.”

He pointed at the massive colosseum floating impossibly in the sky, like an arena that had waited centuries for a proper challenger. Whatever awaited them there, he could only guess, and pray that it wouldn’t be a monster.

He thought the climb up to it would take hours - if not days - but the route to it had already been mapped out. There were signs that other people had been here, and he assumed it was the crew from the red ship at the shore, which put Harry on edge.

Ladders were already set up, rubble and debris moved aside intermittently to form a path as their group climbed higher and higher into the sky. The gravity was strange in this part of the city, as one could jump and rise five feet in the air, which certainly helped them move quickly.

Their destination was clear, being the humongous round colosseum that hung above them. It was even more enormous up close, and clearly broken by the Doom. The upper half of its great curved wall had sheared away, and what remained was a crescent of tiered arches that curved up and around the top edge of it, ribbed and weathered and stained black from soot. The underside trailed roots of stone and rubble, showing that it had been torn from the ground forcefully. Dust hung about it in slow drifting veils, which was lit up by strange light.

This is definitely the place.

“Get your weapons ready.” Harry ordered, and was surprised how steady his voice was. “Quietly. I don't know what's inside.”

The spiral of ruins they had ascended led up to a jagged gap in the colosseum’s wall, and Harry with his remaining four Unsullied carefully marched through it with their shields up and spears level.

It was only once they were inside that he saw how massive the broken marble arena was, close to a thousand meters across and likely able to hold hundreds of thousands of attendees. He was sure the Valyrians used this place much like the ancient Romans did in the past, the only difference that dragons likely fought in this very arena.

He could get lost in the grandeur of it all, but Harry didn’t have time to. Instead his gaze was drawn on what laid in the center of the arena, being a large cocoon that floated above the floor and was encased in powerful magic which was visible to the naked eye.

There it is. He immediately knew that thing was what drew him here, and possibilities flashed through his mind as to what it was. For a long moment he thought it was a large dragon’s egg, yet its exterior didn’t have the same hard texture, looking organic with horns sticking out in some parts.

He wanted to get close and examine it, but that would be difficult with the other men standing in their way. Dozens of warriors stood randomly throughout the arena, looking filthy and worse for wear, clearly having struggled to get to this point. And it was the man in the center of them all, standing closest to the magical cocoon who spotted Harry’s group first, almost like he knew they were coming.

He gripped the Elder Wand tightly, his gut giving him a bad feeling. “Who are you?”

“I am Euron Greyjoy, a man some call the Crow’s Eye, but only the stupid ones say it to my face.” The man’s grin was perverse, his arms outstretched in ridiculous grandeur. “I've sailed every sea there is, from Ibben all the way to Asshai. I’m the man who’s raided every shore, visited places where the sun sets in the wrong direction, and places where it doesn't set at all. I've sacked cities whose names you couldn't pronounce, and seeded more women with my cock than years you’ve been alive, boy.”

“So you’re an asshole, I figured as much when I saw your ship’s hull coated in blood.”

“Ah, you didn’t happen to touch it, did you?” Something must have shown on his face, as Euron’s smirk became a tad wider. “A pity then, to whatever cockless wretch of yours died.”

His Unsullied crewmen shifted slightly in anger, and Harry was little better at hiding his own fury.

“Don't look so grave, it’s only a joke.” Euron continued. “I'll tell you a secret, since you've come so far, being that the world is actually quite small. I thought it was larger when I was a boy, thought it went on and on, and that I'd never run out of it, but I have. I've seen every bit of it that anyone would show me, and I have been so bored. But then I heard of this place, a city of gods and monsters, burned and brought to ruin. A power big enough that its fall still can be felt to this day, its remnants unreachable by every sailor and fool who wishes to claim its riches. And so I figured I’d go and impregnate its riches for my own.”

“Greed, then?” Harry raised an unimpressed brow, before his gaze fell to what sat behind Euron, being the cocoon encased by powerful magic. “Any chance you know what that thing is?”

“Why, she’s Valyria’s legacy of course.” Euron’s expression possessed a truly disturbing grin in that moment. “And I’m the one who will claim her.”

The dozens of mute crewmen who fell under Euron’s command suddenly began to move then, steadily advancing on their position.

“Shields.” Harry ordered, as Sandworm and the others formed up, preparing for attack.

The men who attacked were mute, missing their tongues and sometimes their jaws, likely being controlled by Euron’s magic or being conditioned slaves forced to do his bidding. They attacked slowly but madly, wielding axes as the Unsullied slew them methodically.

It was as the fight began that Harry spotted an opening, seeing Euron Greyjoy standing alone as the man watched on with that same, infuriating smirk.

"Confringo!"

His curse tore across the arena in a blur of red and struck Euron square in the chest before he could react. But rather than explode, it dinged off his chestplate, bouncing sideways off his armor and whirling off into the arena wall where it exploded and blew a hole the size of a cart in the stone.

The whole arena seemed to pause at the explosion, as Harry stared with some incredulity, while Euron looked even more smug.

“Valyrian steel.” Euron answered his unasked question as to what his armor was made of. “Found it on the way up here, and it’s already proving its usefulness. Go on then and kill them, and be quick about it.”

Given their orders, Euron’s crewmen doubled their efforts to try and slay Harry and his allies. He could only try and help, knowing it would be harder than he initially thought for him and his four remaining Unsullied to make it out of this alive.

Disclaimer: All Characters are over the Age of 18

A/N: Part 1 of the Valyria expedition arc. I took major inspiration from Farum Azula for the environment