The Faith of the Seven was an interesting religion.
I leaned back in my heavy oak chair, flipping through the thick, yellowed parchment pages of their holy book, The Seven-Pointed Star.
My thumb and forefinger rubbed at my chin in deep thought as I scanned the illuminated script inked in gold and indigo.
Normally, I would not waste a single second reading the ramblings of religious zealots, but when you are trying to conquer and hold a realm, it is always a good idea to study the doctrines of your future enemies.
Know thy enemy, know their bullshit, and all that crap.
The core philosophy of the Faith was simple enough on the surface: God is One Divine Being with Seven Faces.
Humanity was allegedly forged in that divine image, which meant that every living soul in Westeros, from a highborn king sitting on a throne of melted swords down to a filthy pig farmer knee-deep in mud, contained a tiny spark of all Seven aspects.
According to the septons, to abuse or mistreat a commoner was to deface a living temple of the Seven.
That was an interesting little piece of theological rhetoric.
It was clearly designed to uplift the miserable masses, give the smallfolk a sense of spiritual dignity, and keep the regional warlords from slaughtering their peasant labor force on a whim.
Naturally, it did absolutely nothing for me.
Anything that gave the smallfolk big ideas about human rights or encouraged them to become literate was a direct threat to my absolute, royal reign.
A literate peasant is a peasant who starts asking questions about taxes, land ownership, and why a five-year-old kid gets to ride a massive fire-breathing dragon while they eat turnip soup.
The book went on to proclaim that the Faith believed in the ultimate equality of all souls beneath the heavens.
For this noble reason, the Seven That Are One had bestowed upon mankind their Seven Divine Amendments, a set of holy laws meant to be carved into the heart of every true believer.
I cleared my throat, leaning over the heavy leather-bound tome to read the formal passages inked upon the sheepskin: The First Amendment: The Law of Scales.
Power is a sacred duty, not a birthright of blood; justice that favors the highborn lord over the lowborn beggar is an abomination in the sight of the heavens.
The Father sits in judgment above all earthly thrones, holding the golden scales of equity, and those who wield authority with cruelty shall find their own crowns weighed and found wanting.
The Second Amendment: The Law of the Open Hearth.
No child of the realm shall starve while a lord’s granary sits full.
The Mother spreads her loving arms over the weak, the orphan, and the destitute; to hoard the fruits of the earth while thy neighbor perishes in the winter snow is to invite the blight upon thy fields and the rot upon thy bone.
The Third Amendment: The Law of the Anvil.
Honest labor is holy in the eyes of God; to deny a worker their fair wages or to grind the faces of the poor into the dust is to spit upon the altar of the Smith.
Every hammer stroke, every plowed furrow, and every stitched seam is a prayer uttered in iron and earth.
The Fourth Amendment: The Law of the Shield.
A sword drawn against the defenseless is an instrument of treason against heaven.
The Warrior lends his strength to the weak, not the tyrant; he who uses his steel to oppress the widow or slay the innocent shall find his blade shattered and his shield turned to ash when the battle comes.
The Fifth Amendment: The Law of the Unlit Candle.
Wisdom belongs to all the children of the earth; knowledge kept in darkness rots the soul.
The Crone lifts her glowing lantern to guide the lost through the shadow, and those who hide the truth or burn the scrolls of knowledge shall wander forever in blind darkness.
The Sixth Amendment: The Law of the Unblemished Flower.
Every individual possesses absolute sovereignty over their own flesh; no consent, no union.
The Maiden protects the purity of the heart and the sanctity of the body; any act of violence, forced marriage, or unwanted touch is a grave sin that stains the soul with ink that cannot be washed clean.
The Seventh Amendment: The Law of the Black Cloak.
In the quiet darkness of the grave, the king’s golden crown and the beggar’s ragged tunic rot together in the same cold mud.
The Stranger claims all men in their appointed hour, holding no favor for wealth, bloodline, or title; before the final threshold, all mortals stand equal and bare.
I ignored the rest of the archaic jargon, flipping rapidly through the remaining pages filled with flowery hymns and dramatic illustrations.
Honestly, it was all surprisingly respectable shit that you would expect from a mainstream medieval religion.
It was a brilliantly designed social construct made to appease, control, and protect the masses while giving them a basic moral framework so they wouldn’t murder each other in the streets every night.
On top of the main amendments, there were hundreds of lesser edicts and moral decrees.
Do not commit murder, do not bear false witness against your neighbor, respect your elders, give alms to the poor, and never commit the foul sin of incest.
Follow all these rules dutifully, and the septons promised you entry into the Seven Sections of Heaven.
There, your immortal soul would spend eternity resting in crystal palaces, drinking sweet arbor wine, and reuniting with your loved ones in a paradise where disease, winter, famine, and unhappiness did not exist.
Naturally, each of the seven sections was grander than the last, and your placement depended entirely on the total amount of good deeds you logged during your earthly life.
It appealed to the human sense of materialism and the desperate hope for something better after death with absolute perfection.
And of course, if you were a bad boy, there were the Seven Layers of Hell.
Break the holy laws, and your soul would be dragged down into pits of howling wildfire, icy wastes, or swarms of biting maggots, burning for ten thousand years depending on the exact severity of your earthly sins.
Now, now, I could sit here and go on and on about the hypocrisy of religion like a fourteen-year-old asshole kid who had just discovered edgy internet atheism, but I’d rather not waste my breath.
I was never a person who cared too much for high-minded moral debates or spiritual philosophy.
You see, in my opinion, this religion was actually pretty great.
It had the absolute perfect mix of existential suffering, tangible rewards, divine punishment, and psychological control to keep the unwashed masses in line and force them to act somewhat civilized.
It was practically tailor-made for a grim, violent, medieval shithole like Westeros.
Had my personal circumstances been different, I might have even become its biggest advocate, funding new septs and handing out copies of The Seven-Pointed Star to every peasant in the Crownlands.
But I won’t do that.
You wanna know why?
It comes down to one very simple, non-negotiable detail at the end of the day.
This religion won’t let me fuck my sisters, my nieces, my aunts, or my mother.
A completely valid and reasonable dealbreaker in my opinion.
As a proper Valyrian dragon-prince, keeping the bloodline pure and preserving the dragon-riding genetics was top priority.
And anything that stood in direct opposition to this core value of mine, well, it was going to need to be utterly dismantled and destroyed when I came of age.
Overall, though, the Faith of the Seven was kind of a goofy, obsessive religion in its own special way, mostly because of how their holy logic functioned.
Literally everything you could think of, from grand religious festivals and sacred holy days down to formal ceremonies, vows, and legal edicts, either contained the number seven or was strictly divisible by seven.
Seven altars, seven holy oils, seven colors of the rainbow prism, seven hells, seven heavens, seven vows.
I don’t know why, but the thought of some ancient, bearded septon sitting in a dark, cold stone cell in Oldtown spending hundreds of hours sweating over a scroll just to make sure every single holy rule fit perfectly into the number seven was hilariously absurd to me.
Letting out a wide, exhausted yawn, I slammed the heavy, leather-bound book shut with a loud, echoey that rattled the wooden table, stretching my broad five-year-old arms high above my head.
“…and so, my young princes, we must remember that the customs and sacred practices of the Seven are the very glue holding the realm together,” the old Septon stammered, his raspy voice cutting off as his bushy grey eyebrows furrowed in utter shock.
He stared at me as I casually stood up from my chair and began rolling my shoulders to stretch my tight muscles.
“Prince Maegor?” the old man blinked, his sagging cheeks quivering with indignation.
“Where are you going?
The lecture has not ended yet!
We still have three hours of scripture to cover!” “It has been an immensely fascinating lecture, truly, Septon, but I have now become thoroughly bored,” I said, letting out another theatrical yawn as I cast a sideways glance at my brother Aenys.
My older brother was sitting at the adjacent wooden desk, holding a quill in his skinny, pale hand, looking between me and the Septon with absolute, sweating anxiety painted across his delicate face.
Aenys looked like he was about to have a panic attack on my behalf, terrified that the gods were going to strike me down with lightning right then and there.
“B-But my prince!” the old Septon sputtered, his frail hands trembling as he clutched a crystal hanging from his neck.
“This is your very first official lecture on the holy texts!” I casually waved the old man off with a flick of my wrist, taking a slow step toward the heavy oak door of the solar.
“You know,” I mused aloud, turning my head to throw him a bright, mischievous grin, “if the Starry Sept of Oldtown actually cares about retaining the attention of young dragon-princes, they really should send someone far prettier than you.” Without waiting for his horrified response, I pulled the heavy door open, stepped out into the quiet stone corridor, and shut the oak door firmly behind me, leaving the Septon gasping for air and poor Aenys sweating bullets in the solar.
That had indeed been my very first, and almost certainly my last, formal lecture with a septon.
My mother, Queen Visenya, had strictly forbidden the maesters of the Citadel and the holy men of the Faith from meddling in my education.
She was fiercely paranoid that those grey sheep and religious zealots would try to poison my mind with weak, anti-Valyrian propaganda, which suited me just fine.
I had only tagged along today out of pure, bored curiosity, joining Aenys in his daily religious studies to see what all the fuss was about.
Turns out it was mostly dry babble, though reading their holy book myself had been a somewhat enlightening exercise in geopolitical analysis.
Besides, anyone with half a modern brain knows that if you want to successfully brainwash or manipulate a highborn royal heir, you send a young, gorgeous honey-trap, not a decrepit, eighty-year-old man who looks like he is constructed entirely out of sagging skin and dry bones.
If the Faith of R’hllor had sent Melisandre to King’s Landing instead of a drunk Thoros of Myr, Bobby B would have converted the entire Seven Kingdoms from the Faith of the Seven to the Lord of Light within a single fortnight.
The people of this medieval world were truly terrible at basic royal espionage and political seduction.
My boots clicked softly against the cold flagstones as I wandered aimlessly through the winding, torch-lit hallways of the Aegonfort.
Eventually, my feet led me toward a small, secluded open-air courtyard tucked away in the eastern wing of the fortress.
It was a quiet, breathtaking little garden, far prettier and more tranquil than one would ever expect to find inside a wooden and stone military stronghold.
If my historical memory served me correctly, King Aegon had originally ordered this garden built for his younger sister-wife, Queen Rhaenys, who loved sweet flowers, music, and poetry.
But Rhaenys was dead now, her dragon Meraxes shot down over the sands of Hellholt in Dorne years ago, and barely anyone visited this lonely corner of the fort anymore.
Yet, despite his deep, silent grief, my father had made sure the garden never fell into neglect or disrepair.
The stone paths were swept clean, the hedges were neatly trimmed, and the vibrant flower beds were flourishing under the pale moonlight.
Red roses, night-blooming jasmine, and sweet winter lilies scented the cool sea breeze blowing off the bay, their colorful petals glowing under the silvery night sky.
I walked slowly down the gravel path, admiring the quiet beauty of the place, when I suddenly froze mid-step.
Lying in the dark, cool shadow beneath a sculpted stone bench was a shape.
It was a cat.
Not just any cat, mind you, but an absolute unit of a black tomcat.
A vast, spherical void of fur resting peacefully on the smooth grass, its belly rising and falling in rhythmic sleep.
A slow, devious grin spread across my face in the moonlight.
You know exactly what time it is.
Hehehe.
Dropping into a low, stealthy crouch, I initiated tactical crawl mode.
I crept forward inch by inch across the dew-kissed grass, making sure not to snap a single twig or rustle a single leaf, carefully closing the distance until my broad five-year-old hands were within striking range of the sleeping beast.
With a sudden, decisive burst of speed, I lunged forward and scooped the massive black cat right off the turf, pinning him securely against my chest.
To my complete surprise, the cat did not scratch my eyes out, hiss, or panic.
It simply opened one lazy, golden eye, looked at my silver hair, let out a tiny, unbothered squeak, and went right back to relaxing in my arms.
Damn.
What an absolute, unbothered fat bastard.
This guy truly did not have a single care in the entire world.
I sat down right there in the damp grass, resting the massive black unit across my lap, and began aggressively scratching him right under the chin and behind his folded ears.
The moment my fingers touched his neck, the cat started his engine.
A loud, rumbling, continuous purr vibrated through his thick fur, sounding like a tiny diesel engine running on full throttle inside his belly.
How in the world could a street cat even get this amazingly fat in a medieval setting?
I would have thought such a creature was a biological impossibility in this era, considering that even wealthy highborn lords rarely grew fat until they reached middle age and spent decades drinking heavy arbor gold.
This magnificent void must have been living like a king, feasting on discarded scraps of roasted duck and fat river rats from the royal kitchens every single night.
As I scratched his belly, a funny thought struck my modern mind.
Weren’t there famous rumors recorded by Citadel historians in the future claiming that young Prince Maegor was a cruel, bloodthirsty sadist who spent his childhood torturing small animals and skinning nursery cats?
I chuckled softly to myself, watching the fat tomcat roll over onto his back in complete, blissful submission, stretching his paws into the air as I rubbed his soft tummy.
Maybe this was how those absurd historical rumors originally got started.
A bitter maester probably saw me holding a cat in the shadows and decided to write down that I was eating it raw.
Then again, the original child Maegor probably wasn’t a cartoonishly evil monster either, just a tough, quiet kid who grew up under the heavy shadow of his legendary father and a ruthless mother.
If those exaggerated propaganda rumors managed to stick to my reputation in this lifetime as well, I doubted I would care very much.
Fear was an exceptionally useful tool for a ruler, after all.
I froze in the damp grass, my hand resting on his soft black belly.
The faint, rhythmic crunch of boots stepping onto the gravel path echoed softly through the quiet night air.
Someone was walking toward me in the shadows.
…
Word Count: 2782.