Yesterday, he spent nearly an hour interrogating me about the practicalities of winter storage—not regarding the quantity of grain we have, but rather the necessity of a centralized authority seizing and redistributing it in the event that the lesser lords are determined to be inefficient in their distribution.
As Ned tugged at his beard, which was starting to turn grey, he rubbed his chin.
He was fully absorbing the enthusiastic remarks made by the maester.
He wondered whether, if he hadn’t asked Luwin about this, if Luwin would have eventually told him.
But alas, that wasn’t the main issue.
Robb being so eccentric and curious regarding the subject was good, but how far would his curiosity and input take him?
Luwin didn’t seem to mind at all, but what was he supposed to do at such a point?
He couldn’t stop his son from learning; he was young; he was supposed to learn, but how much and explicitly what, especially when it turned to more secretive, finer matters?
Robb was his heir, and the best he could achieve for himself was to be the best ruler the North could have, so he’d allow him to be as he was, earlier suspicion aside.
Luwin interrupted his thoughts.
“We can just imagine, perhaps, the fruits of what his latent potential might produce when he gets older.
If he continues to prove himself capable and stays on this path, some of this burden could be lifted from you, and the responsibilities could be placed on him.
Ned let out a quiet breath.
“Maybe,” he muttered as he sank into the ornately carved chair positioned behind his desk.
Still, the word sounded heavy as he spoke it.
Silence stretched between him and Maester Luwin, interrupted only by the faint crackle of the fire.
After a moment, Luwin remarked, speaking more softly, “He shall become a great leader, my lord.”
That we will not disagree on,’ Ned whispered to himself as he nodded in response to the maester.
Elsewhere
What an exquisite vanity it had been to deem himself the sole conduit of the Force upon this wretched, primitive crust of a world.
The weeks spent confined within these stone walls, performing the tedious pantomime of the diligent son, had proved illuminating.
He had been forced to rescind his initial, summary dismissal of this sphere; there were powers here, fountains of flowing force energy.
Those of rivals, perhaps future allies if such a notion could ever be possible, and, of course, the raw, ancient, and unrefined flow that made the planet worth more than a mere footnote in a star chart.
The latter was magic, crude, yet documented in the sparse literature he had uncovered, something different from the magicks the Nightsisters wielded or from what he was familiar with. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
The witches accessed the dark side through rituals and incantations, which allowed them to perform unique feats such as necromancy, teleportation, and illusion casting, setting them apart from Sith or Jedi methods.
In contrast, this realm’s magic was closer to the natural and elemental.
A great, living field that would have bound everything together did not exist; neither did a unifying current.
This power was fragmented and concentrated; it did not originate from the universal will but rather from the subterranean realm, from roots, from the soil, from locations rife with decay and memory.
He gained a better understanding of its movement as he noticed its persistence in things, symbols, and the land itself, as if the planet stored it in dispersed reservoirs instead of letting it flow.
The resource’s precise nature remained a fascinating crossroads, but he no longer saw it as an adversarial power but as a raw material to be mined for future experiments.
Meanwhile, the psychic beacon he had cast into the ether had borne no fruit.
Even a vessel hampered by a Class 5 hyperdrive should have traversed the galaxy’s rim and reached these dregs of space within a standard week.
But this world sat in a blind spot of the cosmic tapestry, a shard of the Unknown Regions akin to the veiled depths of Exegol.
To navigate such a void without an established chronometer or a pre-existing navicomputer chart wasn’t just a challenge; it was suicide, and he realized it in his desire to leave.
If his allies were even now attempting a recovery, they would be forced to calculate a new hyperspace lane through the shifting stellar debris of the Great Void, a labor of years, perhaps decades.
For the first time, he faced the chilling reality of a lifetime spent in provincial exile.
But he was not so silent as to accept such a fate.
No, never; he dived deeper into the dark side, searching the Force for potential outcomes, and he had been rewarded for his faith.
He had seen a vision, a jagged, silver-lined promise of departure one day, and it wasn’t far nor was it near, but he would wait.
Time, after all, was the ultimate weapon of the patient, and he would endure.
Yet he would no longer remain a passive observer of this medieval theater.
His priorities had undergone a fundamental shift, pivoting from mere survival to systematic conquest.
There was a continent to bring to heel and a list of enemies to dismantle.
At the summit of that list sat the fat king, that bloated, wine-sodden monument of gluttony and sloth.
The mere notion that such a decrepit creature, more swine than sovereign, should presume to claim dominion over him was an affront that curdled the blood.
Eddard Stark also represented a different species of irritation, stiff, tethered by an archaic sense of honor, and hopelessly narrow in his worldview, but Robert Baratheon was a direct insult to the very architecture of power. Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
To a man who had commanded the vast currents of the galaxy, the King was a grotesque parody of leadership, a hollow shell occupying a throne he lacked the intellect to truly possess.
These strategic imperatives, coupled with the nascent designs he had begun to weave for this world and the simple, undeniable reality that his will was the only law worth manifesting, dictated that this continent would eventually bow to him.
He had contemplated terminating the elder Stark prior, a few times actually, with the last being the most tempting.
Then and there, a swift, silent choking in the lightless depths of the crypts.
Yet, he held his hand.
To liquidate the Warden prematurely would trigger a collapse of the Northern hierarchy before he was positioned to inherit what was left.
He was, in this biological cycle, a mere child of nine.
It was a persistent flaw of the human psyche to equate physical stature with authority, a subconscious bias that would prevent the other Great Houses of the north from fully acknowledging a boy-sovereign.
That was Politics 101.
It was another note to state that Eddard Stark was force-sensitive, and mind tricks couldn’t work on him as they worked on the mother.
The man’s mind was a fortress of iron, a density of will that resisted the subtle mental intrusions Palpatine had once used to bend the weak-willed puppets of the Galactic Senate and others.
The mother, Catelyn, had been a trivial conquest since the hour of his awakening; her psyche was a frantic creature of duty and anxiety, easily folded by a redirected impulse.
But Ned was different
And he was not alone.
Palpatine had scanned the spiritual branches of the Stark household; he found not a family but a cache of unrefined ore.
The siblings, Sansa, Arya, and even the toddler brandon, were dormant embers of force sensitivity, walking through their lives like blind men in a gallery of masterpieces.
What a wretched, staggering waste.
Under his previous regime, they would have been seized, broken down, and reforged into the service of the Inquisitorius.
Here, in this backward feudal bog, they were merely children playing in the mud and with dolls.
He concluded it was prudent to let them remain oblivious; plus, he already had a sublime candidate he could teach the ways of the force stronger than them all, so he would broker no more rivals than necessary, especially given the entities that had revealed themselves days prior.