It began as a faint, colorless flame.
Lancel watched the young Red Priest vanish inside it.
Char crept across his skin.
But the man showed no pain.
His eyes burned with fervor, fixed on Lancel.
As if urging him to hurry.
These two Red Priests were not orthodox followers of R’hllor.
They were notorious heretics inside the Great Temple.
R’hllor, the Lord of Light, the Heart of Sacred Flame, the God of Shadow and Fire, the God of Heat and Life.
His faith spread wide across the continent of Essos, through every trading city.
Believers held that the eternal struggle between the great Red God and the evil Cold God decided the fate of the world.
They proclaimed the Lord of Light the one true god and denounced all others as demons and false idols.
But Ben Doro and his young acolyte Malach took issue with that.
Both men came from old Valyrian families before they took the red robes.
They honored the Lord of Light.
They acknowledged His greatness.
But they believed more fiercely in the power of dragons and the majesty of the old Valyrian gods and dragonlords.
When the Valyrian Freehold ruled the lands west of the Bone Mountains, the faith of R’hllor hid among slaves and commoners.
The dragonlords of Valyria saw themselves as gods.
Even the Valyrian pantheon they treated as clay idols.
The faith of slaves and commoners meant even less.
The younger man, Malach, held the more radical view.
He believed R’hllor was nothing but a lie the dragonlords invented to pacify the masses.
He never even noticed his own name shared a root with R’hllor.
Yet his faith was pure.
Purer, perhaps, than the priests in the Great Temple who spoke of nothing but the one true god.
More devout.
Perhaps it was their Valyrian blood.
Both men’s fire magic far outstripped every other acolyte of their generation.
So the Great Temple tolerated their heresy.
They needed that magic to maintain their standing.
They looked the other way.
Until the two accepted Cleorius Valezeth’s invitation to study the mysteries of magic and dragons alongside him.
“Master Ben Doro.
You promised me.” Lancel raised the dagger.
“Malach will not die.”
Ben Doro shook his head.
“My lord, before I came, I saw the Lord of Light’s decree in the flames.
He is pleased to witness your attempt today.
So He asks only a portion of flesh.
Not a life.”
The old Red Priest lowered his head.
“The blood of a dragonlord’s heir.
The flesh of a true believer.
And pure fire.
These can pierce the fog of history and show a lost boy the true road.”
Malach nodded again, as if in encouragement.
He dug the dagger in and carved a large piece of flesh from his chest.
He dropped it into the fire.
The flames roared up.
The faint, colorless fire thickened and solidified.
It coiled around Lancel but did not burn him.
It seemed to hunger for something.
“Father.
I hope this helps me hold my resolve.”
Lancel cut his palm.
Blood laced with a thread of silver slid down the Valyrian steel dagger, picking up a strange black sheen.
The drop fell slowly.
The moment it touched the flame, the fire exhaled with something like pleasure and swept upward.
A sea of fire spread.
In a heartbeat it swallowed the entire laboratory.
Ben Doro gazed into the surging flames with rapture.
He stood in the fire and let it sear his body.
A drowning sensation crashed over Lancel and receded.
He scanned the pitch-black void around him.
Without warning, the darkness shattered into blinding light.
Lancel shut his eyes by reflex.
Then came the music.
Vast and majestic.
It felt like countless hands reaching out from every direction, plucking chords that stretched across every direction at once.
First, a deep and weighty movement.
Lancel groped his way through the great brightness that had reclaimed his vision.
The music swelled.
A sea of grass grew.
Forests rose.
Small green shadows drifted through the endless woods.
Mountains thrust up from the earth.
Then the music quieted.
The omnipresent melody turned soft and slow, like a river at rest.
Enormous turtles sang in the water.
The forest split open.
A great river surged through.
Figures with human shape and ram’s horns built cities on the banks.
They planted seeds.
Lancel frowned.
Is this.
history?
The boy walked to one of the ram-horned figures.
The faceless shadow raised a hammer and brought it down hard.
Sparks flew.
The music turned fierce.
The sound that came from everywhere turned fierce one moment, piercing the next.
Half the world burned.
The other half seemed frozen, locked in endless, silent death.
Lancel quickened his pace.
He felt a vast terror chasing him.
Crowned figures blurred past.
Some had eyes of pearl.
Some had eyes of tourmaline.
Some had eyes of topaz.
Only the last two lingered.
One had eyes of amethyst and looked down at the running boy.
One had eyes of bloodstone and looked up toward the infinite sky.
Stars tore through the endless light.
Flesh seethed and grew.
The stars hung in the sky like eyes, staring fixedly at the boundless earth below.
A man raised a burning sword.
A faint melody rose, then was swallowed by the music that turned fierce and piercing by turns.
The figure with amethyst eyes exploded.
Countless blurred dragons burst from him and climbed on beating wings.
Some flew toward the stars.
Some hurled themselves at the frozen half of the world.
Boom.
A cataclysmic blast erupted behind Lancel.
Dragons fell.
Ruins stretched before him.
Two silver dragons danced above the wreckage.
The boy stood transfixed by their motion.
The larger silver dragon beat its wings and in an instant was beside him.
I’m flying.
Lancel flattened himself by instinct and gripped the ridge in front of him.
West.
He knew the direction at once.
I’m flying west.
He saw endless plains and rolling hills.
Iron swords stood like a forest.
Six dead dragons lay among them.
A young dragon with a severed head sprawled outside the swords.
A half-rotted dragon drifted beside them.
A hunter drew his bow.
A high tower burned.
A rose hid behind the curtain, blooming in secret.
A great wolf howled in the north.
One trout sank, another rose.
On a tall weirwood, ravens pecked at a stag’s eyes.
The sun sank in the west.
A long star pierced it.
An iron gate slammed shut, blocking the last light of dusk.
A green dragon bled in fire.
A falcon was struck from the clouds by lightning.
Dragons climbed into the sky and fell, one after another.
Dragon blood rained down.
Living things and strange plants grew where it landed.
A motley dragon wearing a crown drifted on the sea.
The silver dragon flew on.
Lancel saw a high wall.
And a pair of blue eyes.
His mind blurred.
When he came back to himself, only the dying flames remained.
And a voice only he could hear.
“Go east.
To conquer the east, you must first go west.”
“Go west.
Wait for the final note of the song of ice and fire.”
“Silver dragon and stars.
Fire and ice.
Smoke and salt.
Go.
Wait for the end of fate.”
“Cryptic nonsense.” Lancel held little reverence for prophecies and divine pronouncements.
But at least it proved he was not wrong now.
The flames died.
Lancel did not stop for his clothes.
He threw himself beside Malach’s charred body and, together with Ben Doro, caught the Red Priest who had sacrificed himself willingly.
Ben Doro did not hesitate.
He brought his lips close to the place where Malach’s face, nose, and mouth had become one indistinguishable ruin.
A rush of flame poured over Malach’s whole body.
Malach’s eyes flew open.
The orbs were gone.
“Did it work?” His charred lips split.
What showed through was more charcoal.
His vocal cords had burned away.
The words came out as a shapeless rasp.
Lancel and Ben Doro nodded.
Malach finally relaxed.
Lancel held his hand to Malach’s mouth.
A single drop of blood fell.
Fire reignited inside Malach, visible to the eye.
New flesh began to grow from the char.
“Malach will need time to recover.” Ben Doro closed his disciple’s eyes.
“The Lord of Light’s resurrection spell only shoves the soul back into the body.
Fire is the source of life and the source of destruction.
Without your blood, I would have resurrected nothing but a corpse.”
“So you did deceive me, Master Ben Doro.”
“It was a necessary sacrifice.” Ben Doro looked at his disciple.
“Malach was more than willing to return to the Lord of Light’s side to light your road.
But you have given him a chance at new life.
So I ask you to keep him.
Let this boy replace a worn-out old man and serve as your advisor in matters of magic.”
Lancel nodded.
“Rest assured.
I take care of my own.
But I have one more question.”
“Ask, my lord.”
“What did you see in the flames?” Lancel asked.
As an acolyte of the Lord of Light, reading prophecy in fire was an essential skill.
He would not have seen as much as Lancel at the ritual’s center.
But he must have seen something.
“I saw you board a ship bound for distant shores and draw a sword from fire and shadow.”
“I saw you stand beside red mountains with silver heaped around you like a sea.”
“I saw you don a crown of bronze and attend a throne forged of iron swords.”
So spoke Ben Doro.