INTERLUDE: Before the Burning of Dragonstone...

Money.

Riches.

How lustfully greedy the people of Westeros were. Collecting great hordes of gold and grain and stacking them on the backs of commoners. Castles built with foundations of bone, sealed with mortar made with blood and sweat.

Women.

Steel.

Spice and music and silk and pussy. A drowning, rampaging tide of hedonism overflowed from the castles of the Seven Kingdoms. Smallfolk watched from the hills, from the fields, with dirt-brown faces and cracked feet and bleeding fingertips. Somewhere, in some lord’s lands, a woman was being raped by her master. A boy was being taught how to kill others. An old man sat in his hut, coughing his life out, too rotted by senility to remember his name and the youthful dreams it carried.

Quellon Greyjoy knew all of this. He knew this was the natural state of affairs in Westeros.

Upon a throne made of melted swords sat kings who could not see beyond their own families. Even the imagined just monarchs were fools. Too much incest raddled their minds. The seven gods they believed in muddled their wits.

Victory defeated House Targaryen. Peace made them weak.

Sitting on the oily black stone of his cabin’s chair, Quellon fumed. His anger smoldered inside of him. An anxiety spread poisonous tendrils through his muscles and into his organs. He was a puppet on the strings of his father. The dance would not end. Even with the puppeteer dead, the dance would not end.

If his first wife had still been alive, Quellon could have found peace in the south. If his second wife had still been alive, he could have died a man satisfied. But neither woman was alive now. Quellon was a twice widower. There would be no more intimacy in his life. Love was a vapid idea, forever outside his reach, turning dreams to nightmares and memories into tortures.

What would his son had been like, had he known his mother? Or his daughters—would the twins be what they were now, spoiled and afraid? Sasa would have stopped Quellon’s father from doing what he tried to do. She an arrow fired from a goldenwood bow; none of his brothers, no Ironborn at all could have stood up to her. And Bathi would have become Queen of the Iron Islands in a fortnight. She was a tiger, not a woman. Mystic in every way, and unknowable in ways unknown.

So much potential, lost. So many memories that only Quellon had now.

Every member of that old crew was crippled, dead, or gone. Only Quellon and a few others had returned to the Iron Islands. And now, only he held those memories—the stories of the Panther of the Sea. The summer nights spent in hammock, making love to women experienced in magic and sex and love. The knowledge that you were strong and beautiful, and that someone loved you, and that you had a child on the way. The idea that no matter how hard the Storm God raged, you were forever safe.

Quellon took in a deep breath. His exhale was low and slow.

At the wake, they saw him as a monster. Nearly seven feet of rapist and murderer. In his good eye, the lords of Westeros only peeped a threat. In their minds, they named him a sickness.

It was hard not to hate the world when you were Lord Reaver of Pyke. The culture that you grew up in, that even you hated, was denied you. It was used as a weapon to keep you away, to keep you in check. No one cared what happened to Pyke and her sisters. Kingsmoots and Ironborn were stories told to lull children to sleep. If the Greenlanders had it their way, the entirety of the islands would have been scoured and Quellon’s people killed or thrown to the Wall.

When he was younger, when his brothers beat him and his father molested him, Quellon wondered how he could love the world. He wondered if there was a way to keep hate out of his heart, to be happy and free and satisfied.

His daughters were happy and free and satisfied now. Robyn and Lucy were allowed to do as they wished, sail where they would. When they first left, Quellon cried the entire night, locked away in his study. He knew that if they came home, they too would be different. He knew if they came home, it was because they had not found the freedom Quellon wanted them to find.

But home they had not returned too. The men he’d sent to find them said they were now in Braavos. That was good. Essos was the true home of the Greyjoys, away from the Seastone Chair and the bones of Nagga and the history of squishers and reaving. Essos was a place of vast waters and clashing cultures. To those born to the sea, there was no place better.

And Dalton…by Westeros’ decree, he was doomed to rule the Iron Islands. But that boy was Quellon in his youth, though without hatred staining his heart. Yes, that was a good lad. He was why Quellon did what he did now.

He was why so many people would die—because that was the Iron Price needed to ensure his freedom.

No longer would the Ironborn be forced to wither underneath the rule of Dragonlords. There were no more Dragonlords. The pretenders to the throne were hollow shades of a year long past. None of them had a right to rule others. They had not displayed strength, wisdom, or cunning. Even Alysanne had yet to prove herself a worthy queen.

Rallying men that a father or ancestor had won was pointless. The blood of kings had power, but once deluded a new king could rise up and make themselves the focal point of majesty and magic in Westeros. At least, what little of it was left.

At the Kingsmoot, called in secret a decade ago, Quellon had been named the King of Salt and Rock of the Iron Islands. His people had decided that his experience, strength, and what he had to offer was fitting for them. They drowned him in the holy bay of their god and he emerged the savior of his people.

They all knew that it meant their death.

Targaryens, false though they were, were ready to kill anyone who challenged their sovereignty. Allied with them were those too afraid or too complacent to change the world. Swords were already being sharpened—Quellon would not have to wait long for his enemies to find his heart. And so many Ironborn would die before then.

But it was their desire.

They are a people born to a place where nothing grows. Quarantined to a set of dead islands, the Ironborn had no choice but to take what they could. Denying them that right, forcing them to live off of a meager trade…it was as if the King’s Justice had sentenced them to an oblivion three hundred years in the making.

No, there was no future for the Iron Islands.

When the king died, Quellon began his plan.

By the end of the next year, a third of the entire population of the Iron Islands would have left. Some would be refugees to the Greenlands, while others headed to Essos. A great migration was underway and one of the Seven Kingdoms had decided to leave. To just say “Fuck you, Westeros, and all of your racist, torturous bullshit.”

Essos, of course, would be hard for people of this generation. But in fifteen, maybe twenty years, the Ironborn would either be pirates, slaves, or free men sailing the Summer Sea and beyond.

To ensure that his people could be free, Quellon had to finish what he started.

He had to kill them. He had to kill them all. He had to fill the waters of Westeros with blood so that the bastard sitting the Iron Throne could never try to chain his people again.

A full naval campaign. Something never before seen since the days of Valyria. A battle of a thousand fleets, each one drowned by Quellon’s own hand.

Live or die, Quellon Greyjoy would break the wheel of Westeros’s history. His people would be free.

His children would be free.

INTERLUDE END