Immortal in the Force. Chapter 21. The Fire That Remembers. (Patreon)

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.

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There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.

There is no fear; there is power.

I am the Heart of the Force.

I am the revealing fire of Light.

I am the mystery of Darkness

In balance with Chaos and Harmony,

Immortal in the Force.

Je’daii Order Code

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Essos, Qohor, The Forge District

Year 299 AC (After Aegon Conquest)

Raevan

The forge district of Qohor did not look like a place of miracles.

It looked like a place of work.

The streets here were wider than in the rest of the city, built to accommodate the constant traffic of raw ore, charcoal, and water. The buildings were lower, squatter, their walls darkened to a permanent deep grey by decades of soot that no rain had ever fully scoured away. The air tasted of hot metal and sulfur, and the rhythmic clang of hammers, muted now, uncertain, the sound of men who did not know if their new master would let them live  was the only noise in streets that were otherwise unnaturally quiet.

His soldiers had cleared the district of armed resistance four hours ago. The craftsmen themselves had not fought. Craftsmen rarely did. The knowledge in their hands was too valuable for them to risk it on pride, and they had understood this before any sword was drawn.

Raevan walked through the district with Morven at his left side, his left side, he noted with cold precision, because Morven had learned in the last three hours to always position himself there, and two dozen of his most trusted soldiers following at a respectful distance.

He had wound a clean length of dark cloth around the stump of his left wrist. It was tight, professional, and drew exactly the attention he intended it to: none. If his soldiers had opinions about it, they kept them. If his officers had concerns, they had not voiced them. He had given them enough to process without adding sentiment to the list.

The forge master’s workshop was at the district’s center. He had been given its exact location by a terrified junior smith who had met them at the district’s entrance and whose hands had been shaking so badly that the man had struggled to point in the correct direction.

He did not knock.

The door was unlocked. He opened it and stepped inside.

The workshop was large and hot and immaculately organized in the way that only a man who had worked in the same space for decades could organize it, not for aesthetics, but for the absolute minimization of unnecessary motion. Every tool was within two steps of where it would be needed. Every surface was clear of everything that did not serve an immediate purpose.

The forge master stood at the back of the workshop, next to the cooling racks, with his arms folded and his expression set into the particular blankness of a man who had already made his peace with whatever was about to happen to him.

He was older than Raevan had expected. Perhaps sixty, with the build of a man who had spent his entire life doing heavy physical work, and the hands to prove it, massive, calloused, scarred in a dozen places by old burns that had healed badly. His hair was white and cropped short, and his eyes were a calm, steady grey.

“My lord prince,” the man said. Not a question. Not a greeting. Simply an acknowledgment of what was standing in front of him.

“Forge Master.” Raevan looked around the workshop without hurry, taking in the tools, the cooling racks, the two assistants in the corner who were trying very hard to be invisible. “Your name?”

“Harren. Harren of the Black Blade, though no one has called me the second part in thirty years.” A pause. “You are younger than the stories say.”

“The stories are six months old.” Raevan moved toward the central workbench, studying the piece currently on the rack, a half-finished blade, darkened steel with the distinctive ripple-pattern of Valyrian steel still being drawn out. He looked at it for a long moment. “You were working during the battle.”

“Until the sounds got too close to ignore.”

“And then you stopped. But you didn’t run.” Raevan looked at him. “Why?”

Harren unfolded his arms, and in the motion Raevan saw that his hands were absolutely still. No tremor. Whatever fear the man felt, he had buried it somewhere deep and practical. “Where would I go? This forge has been in my family for four generations. My great-grandfather brought the method here from the smoking ruins of a Valyrian outpost east of the Rhoyne. This is everything I am.” A brief pause. “If you intended to kill me, you would have sent soldiers. Not come yourself.”

Perceptive. Raevan said nothing, continuing to study the blade.

“I want to understand the process,” he said finally. “Not hear it described. Understand it. I want to watch it from the beginning, and I will ask questions as we go. You will answer them honestly.”

Harren’s eyes moved to the stump of his left wrist for the first time. A brief look, quickly controlled. “Is that an order?”

“It is.”

The old man was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to his assistants. “Bring the medium billet. The one from yesterday’s delivery.” He looked back at Raevan. “I’ve been doing this for forty years. I will show you everything I know about working the steel itself. The technique, the temperatures, the timing. All of it.” His tone did not change. “But I need to tell you something first, and you need to hear it before you watch.”

“Then tell me.”

Harren walked to a side shelf and took down a small clay vessel, sealed with wax, and set it on the workbench between them. “The technique is only half. The other half is what makes it work. What we call the God’s Blessing. Without it, you can have the perfect temperature, the perfect hand, the correct timing, and the blade will still crack, or dull, or fail to take the pattern. Without the Blessing, we are making very expensive ordinary steel.”

Raevan picked up the clay vessel with his right hand and turned it. It was light. Almost empty. “Blood.”

“From the sacrifice. Yes.” No apology in the man’s voice. Pure fact. “I don’t know why it works. I know that it does. My great-grandfather knew it worked. His father knew. None of us have ever understood the mechanism, only the result.”

Raevan set the vessel down.

He reached out with the Force and let his awareness settle into the clay, into the residue of the liquid inside. Even through the sealed wax, he could feel it, faint but unmistakable. A small, dark resonance. The concentrated fear and pain of a living being’s final moments had left something behind in the blood. An echo of Dark Side energy, tiny but real, like the heat that lingers in a stone long after the fire has gone cold.

He understood it immediately.

The Black Goat’s priests had not known what they were doing. They had performed a religious ritual that happened, as a side effect, to suffuse sacrificial blood with concentrated Dark Side Force energy. That energy, when the blood was applied during the heating and folding process, was absorbed into the steel and altered its properties at a fundamental level, deeper than any standard metallurgical technique could reach.

It was accidental Force alchemy. Performed by men who had no idea what they were doing, refined across generations into a precise method built around a mechanism they could feel but never explain.

He could replicate it. He could provide the energy component directly, deliberately, without any sacrifice at all.

“Continue,” he said. “Show me the beginning.”

The next three hours were the most genuinely interesting he had spent since arriving in this world.

Harren worked with the economy of motion of a man who had performed the same process several thousand times and stripped away every unnecessary action. He talked as he worked, precisely, in the clipped language of someone accustomed to instructing apprentices in a loud environment, even though the forge was quiet now, the habits of forty years persisted.

Temperature. Timing. The rhythm of the hammering, which was not arbitrary but calibrated to maintain an even compression of the steel’s internal structure as it cooled from the optimal working heat.

The specific angle of each blow at each stage, which determined how the layers folded and how the eventual ripple-pattern would distribute itself through the finished blade. The exact moment in the cooling process where the blood was introduced, not at the hottest phase, which would incinerate it, but during the intermediate cooling, when the steel was still reactive but had begun to settle.

Raevan asked questions throughout. The answers were sometimes illuminating and sometimes simply confirmed what he had already reasoned out. He did not stop asking either kind.

The process was, he realized, extraordinarily precise. The casual observer would see a blacksmith striking hot metal with a hammer, a universal image so ancient it had become invisible. What was actually happening was a carefully calibrated sequence of controlled stress, heat, and molecular alignment, refined across four generations to the point where every variable had been accounted for and every deviation understood. Harren did not need to think about what he was doing. The knowledge lived in his hands.

It was not unlike what he did with the Force. The years of training that had made reaching and compressing and redirecting second nature, that had moved the skills from the conscious mind to somewhere deeper and faster. He had never thought to compare himself to a blacksmith before. He found, now, that the comparison was not an insult.

When Harren reached the point where he would normally introduce the blood, he paused and looked at Raevan.

Raevan was already reaching.

He drew from the Dark Side, not the vast, consuming current he had wielded against the Great Other’s avatar, but a thin, precise filament, controlled the way a surgeon controls a blade. He directed it into the half-formed blade with his right hand, pressing the Force energy into the steel with the same careful, thorough attention that Harren used with his hammer. Evenly. Completely. Layer by layer.

The steel responded.

He felt it in the Force, a subtle shift, a realignment at the molecular level as the energy was absorbed and integrated. Harren felt it too. The old man’s hands stilled above the work, and for a moment his composure cracked just enough to show something underneath that looked very much like awe.

When Raevan withdrew, the blade lay on the rack with the distinctive dark and pale ripple-pattern of Valyrian steel already beginning to emerge in its unfinished surface.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

“You don’t need the gods,” Harren said. His voice was very quiet. “You never did.”

“No,” Raevan agreed. “The gods was a useful framework for a mechanism you could not see. What the sacrifice actually provides is a specific form of energy, and I can provide it directly.” He looked at the blade. “This will change your output considerably.”

Harren looked at the blade, then at Raevan, with the expression of a man rebuilding his understanding of something he had spent his life practicing. “The Black Goat demanded we sacrifice children on holy days,” the old man said. “Children of good families. We did it because the work demanded it. Because without the God’s favor, the steel failed, and the work is everything we have.” His jaw tightened briefly. “If you can give the work the same property. Without the children.”

“I can,” Raevan said. “And I intend to. I will send you three people, Force-sensitive, trainable. Between you and them, this district will produce Valyrian steel at a rate Qohor has never managed.” He paused. “In return, you will give me everything your family’s records contain about the original Valyrian method. Not the Qohorik adaptation. The original process, before the Doom.”

“Those records are incomplete. Much was lost.”

“Show me what remains. I will determine what can be reconstructed.”

The old man nodded slowly. His eyes moved briefly to Raevan’s left wrist, and this time he did not look away quickly. “Should you want it, I also know a man in the lower city. Works in brass and bronze, small mechanisms. Clockwork things.” He let the implication settle without making it explicit. “He is the finest fine-work smith I have ever seen.”

Raevan looked at him for a moment. A craftsman’s practical consideration, offered without pity and without drama. He found he did not object to it.

“Give me his name,” he said.

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Westeros, King’s Landing

Year 299 AC (After Aegon Conquest)

Shiera Seastar

The glass candle had been burning for three hours.

Shiera sat across the small table from it with her hands folded in her lap and her face arranged into the expression she wore when she did not wish people to read her, a studied neutrality that, over the course of a century, had become nearly effortless.

The flame burned deep green, wavering slightly, the way it always looked when the connection between candles was strained by distance. The room was small and windowless, one of the dozen private chambers Raevan had arranged for her use in the lower levels of Maegor’s Holdfast, specifically chosen for their distance from the main corridors and anyone who might casually notice a woman sitting in front of a flame that burned the wrong color.

The message had been brief. It always was, through the candle, maintaining the connection across the Narrow Sea and half of Essos was demanding enough that neither of them wasted words.

Qohor taken. Forge district secured. She had known about the Great Other from three days earlier, when the connection had flickered with something she could not read clearly, a confused impression, not a report, but enough to understand that something significant and terrible had happened in the plaza. Raevan did not elaborate on terrible things through the candle. He saved that for written letters.

The last line had been: Lost left hand. Not healable. Still functional. Don’t concern yourself.

She had been sitting with that for three hours.

Don’t concern yourself.

She was aware, analytically, that the instruction was not dismissive. It was the kind of thing a person said when they wanted to spare someone the discomfort of worrying about something already resolved and impossible to change. It was, in its way, considerate. Raevan was occasionally considerate in ways that arrived entirely without announcement, like finding a cloak laid across a cold chair that had not been there the night before.

She was also aware that three hours had passed since she read it, and she was still in the same chair.

She reached out and cancelled the connection, and the green faded back to the unremarkable orange of an ordinary candle. Then she sat in the dim room and permitted herself to think about it clearly, without the discipline she maintained when others might observe her.

She had been alone for fifty years before finding Raevan. Fifty years of running, hiding, performing exactly the right degree of submission to avoid being noticed by Andeddu’s people, consuming her considerable abilities entirely in the small and careful task of staying alive. She had arrived in King’s Landing expecting to make a transaction, her information for his protection, and had found, to her considerable inconvenience, something she had stopped expecting.

A person she could not predict.

She had known powerful people. Her father had been powerful, in the limited, arbitrary way of kings. Her teachers in Asshai had been powerful in the cold, measured way of people who treated power as a tool rather than a trait. Raevan was the first person she had met whose power felt like a natural phenomenon, not something he possessed, but something he simply was, the way a storm was wind and water and pressure without any separate existence from those things.

She was aware that this was not a rational basis for the attachment she had developed. She was also aware, being over a hundred years old and not a fool, that rational bases for attachment were considerably rarer than the poets suggested.

He had lost his left hand. He had told her it was not healable, and she believed him, he would not admit a limitation unless it was absolute. Whatever the Great Other had done to that hand, the Force could not restore it. Which meant there was something in this world that could permanently diminish a Force user’s capabilities without killing them, and that Raevan had survived contact with that thing and was currently in a forge district extracting metallurgical secrets.

Don’t concern yourself.

She stood, smoothed her dress, and went to find Rhaenys.

She found the princess on the terrace of the eastern tower, leaning on the balustrade and looking out at the city with the expression she wore when she was thinking about things she had not yet decided how to feel. The girl’s awareness through the Force had grown considerably in the months Shiera had been teaching her. Small things still, impressions, the emotional weight of a room, the direction of a person’s attention. But growing steadily.

“You look like you received bad news,” Rhaenys said, without turning.

“I did. Qohor fell. Your brother won.”

Rhaenys turned to look at her. “Then why do you look like that?”

Shiera considered how to answer, old habits of rationing information pushing against something that had, she noticed, grown somewhat louder in recent months. “He was injured in the process. Permanently.”

The princess’s face shifted. Not dramatically, Rhaenys had been raised in a court and had more control than that. But the stillness around her eyes and the sudden quieting of her hands were enough.

“How badly?”

“His left hand.”

A silence. Then Rhaenys said, very quietly, “He won’t like that.” Not a question. A statement of fact from someone who understood the person she was talking about.

“No,” Shiera agreed. “He won’t.”

They stood together for a moment looking out over the city. King’s Landing in the late afternoon had a particular quality of light, gold and grey and the distant smell of the sea, that Shiera had come to recognize as different from any other city she had lived in during her long life.

“He’ll adapt,” Rhaenys said. The certainty in her voice was the uncomplicated certainty of someone who had never had reason to doubt the person she was describing. “Whatever happened, he’ll be angrier about what it means than about the hand itself.”

“Yes,” Shiera said. That was precisely right.

Rhaenys looked at her then, with the directness she had always had and that Force training had only made more accurate. “You’re not just concerned.”

“I received a report,” Shiera said, not unkindly. “And I’m processing it. That’s all.”

The princess held her gaze for a moment. Then, with the restraint of someone who had chosen to leave a question alone rather than push it, she looked back at the city.

“Will you tell him I’m glad he’s alive? When you write.”

“I will,” Shiera said.

She stayed another few minutes, then excused herself. She had work to do. She always had work to do, and it was, she had found, the most reliable way to stop thinking about things she had not yet decided how to feel.

Her next stop was Rhaegar’s solar. She had two reports from her own network that she had been holding for the right moment, and the right moment had arrived.

The king was at his desk when she entered, surrounded by the organized clutter of a man managing a war from a distance, supply estimates, correspondence from Gulltown, a letter she recognized as being from Aemon’s hand. He looked up at her arrival with the careful attentiveness he had developed for her reports. Rhaegar Targaryen was not a man who pretended to understand things he did not. It made him considerably easier to brief than most people she had worked with over her long life.

“Qohor fell,” she said, sitting across from him without waiting to be invited. He had stopped asking her to wait months ago.

“I know.” He paused. “And my son’s hand?”

She looked at him steadily. “You’ve already heard.”

“Yes, but shortly.” Rhaegar set down his pen. “How concerned should I be?”

“About his hand, or about the thing that took it?”

The king’s expression made it clear he had meant the latter.

“His hand is a permanent loss and he will adapt to it,” Shiera said. “The entity is a more significant concern. It is real, it can manifest a physical form given sufficient sacrifice, and your son’s Force abilities were, in direct combat against it, largely ineffective. He won by finding a method that worked, and the entity withdrew.” She let that settle. “But it did not withdraw because it was defeated. It withdrew because it had learned what it wanted to learn.”

Rhaegar was quiet for a moment. “And what does that mean for us?”

“It means that Raevan now understands his limitations more accurately than he did before. Which, in practice, means he will prepare more effectively.” She paused. “I have two reports on a different matter that you need to hear.”

She told him about the ship from Lannisport. The unusual cargo, the northern destination, the route that made no sense for a merchant vessel and considerable sense for a courier moving something valuable and quiet. And then the pattern from Tywin’s remaining agents in the city, the waiting-for-a-signal behavior, the shift from active intelligence-gathering to passive preparation that she had observed across the last four weeks.

Rhaegar listened without interrupting. When she finished, he was still for a moment, fingers resting on the desk.

“You think he’s moving something north,” the king said. “Toward the Neck. Or beyond.”

“I think he is placing something in reserve,” Shiera said. “Something he does not want found if the war goes badly for him. Gold, perhaps. Or correspondence that would incriminate him. Or something else entirely.” She met his eyes. “Tywin Lannister is not a man who surrenders, and he is not a man who panics. But he is a man who prepares for every outcome, including the ones he does not intend to allow.”

“You think he has a last move.”

“I think he is positioning one,” Shiera said. “I don’t yet know what it is. I intend to find out.”

Rhaegar nodded. “Tell me when you do.” He picked up his pen, then set it back down. “Shiera. My son. Will he be all right?”

She stood to leave. It was the kind of question that deserved a careful answer, and she had learned that with careful answers, she was better on her feet than sitting still.

“He lost a hand, Your Majesty,” she said. “Not his mind, not his judgment, and not what makes him dangerous. He will be all right.”

She left before he could ask how she was so certain, because the honest answer was more personal than she intended to share with anyone.

She returned to her chambers, sat at the small writing desk, and looked at a blank piece of parchment for a while.

The problem with writing to someone who read everything with the same attention he applied to tactical maps was that you could not be careless with what you left out. He would notice the absence as readily as the presence. Every measured, professional sentence would be read for what it had not said.

She knew this because she did exactly the same thing when she read his letters.

She picked up the pen and began, choosing each word with the care of someone composing something that had to read as precisely one thing while meaning, quietly and without evidence, something else entirely. She discarded the first two attempts. The third was honest enough to send and controlled enough to survive the journey without embarrassing her.

She sealed it, set it aside for the morning courier, and went to bed.

She did not sleep well. But that was not unusual.