King's Landing. The Red Keep. 284 AC.
Axel Arryn / The Witch-king of Angmar.
All through my childhood people told me of King's Landing's greatness. They said the city stretched to the horizon, that half a million people lived within it, that its craftsmen's quarters were the size of a city unto themselves, and much else besides.
To me, King's Landing looked like a city of contradictions. Palaces in groves, granaries, brick warehouses, timber inns, merchants' houses, taverns, cemeteries, and brothels, all heaped on top of one another. Wide, tree-lined roads divided the buildings, from which crooked lanes branched off, and the alleys between them were so narrow that two people could barely pass. On the far side of the city, on Rhaenys's Hill, the blackened walls of the Dragonpit rose against the sky. The Street of Sisters, straight as an arrow, connected the hills. In the distance stood the city walls, high and solid on one side, nearly crumbling on the other. The smell was appalling. That cacophony of filth, piss, char, and fish was doing its best to kill me. Even the Orc settlements of Mordor and the Misty Mountains had not been this foul. Those places smelled of dirt and death, not of rot and decay, as the capital of the Seven Kingdoms did. But what irritated me still more than the smell was that someone had tried to kill me in my own home.
...
Before the battle at the Trident, where the forces of the rebellion and the Crown clashed, some assassin had found his way into the Eyrie. He came for me in the night, intending to take me.
When someone crept into my chambers, the way he moved told me at once that his intentions were not good. Fortunately I always kept a knife under my pillow. I tried a surprise attack, counting on him to be off his guard, but managed only to graze him. Having failed, and being no fool, I screamed.
That made the bastard quicken his pace. He came straight at me. In the scramble he managed to take the knife from my hand and press it to my throat. I felt no fear, only frustration. At ten years old I could spar with grown knights on even terms and sometimes beat them, yet I could not handle one contemptible assassin. To settle me down, he drew a shallow cut across my cheekbone. It worked. Not wanting to provoke my captor any further, I stopped struggling. He walked me to the lift used for hauling supplies up into the castle, where three more men were waiting. The thunder of house guard boots could be heard in the corridors, converging on us. The three accomplices drew their swords and went to hold the knights back, spending their lives to buy time. I kept still even as they walked me to the lift, telling myself that Father would simply pay a ransom and it would end there: such things happened often enough in this world. But the reality turned out to be crueler than that. They meant to throw me from the castle window so I would break on the rocks below. I still do not understand why they did not simply cut my throat.
It no longer mattered. My life was in genuine danger, and I was forced to do the one thing I had sworn I would never do again: use magic. Focusing the spell through my right eye, I made the bastard freeze solid with terror. It is the same working as the Scream of the Shadow World, known in common tongue as the Nazgûl's Shriek, but concentrated on one person or a few. That vile sorcery was Sauron's own creation for his slaves, and only a man of strong will could withstand it. My assassin was not such a man, and he died of a stopped heart. The outcome left me briefly at a loss, since I had meant to hand him to the headsman to learn who had sent him. To avoid any awkward questions, I put my knife into his heart a couple of times. I had not expected to miss the sound of steel entering flesh. Piercing the living is more interesting, but even this held a certain satisfaction. The moment the spell was released, nausea swept over me.
The guard arrived an instant later. They did not know what to do with themselves, having found a blood-streaked boy sitting astride a corpse with a pleasant smile and half-lidded eyes. The sight plainly unnerved them. Ser Creighton pushed through the crowd, went straight to the young lord, and began checking him for wounds while ordering someone to fetch the maester.
Bart arrived remarkably quickly for a man of his years, his bag full of remedies. When he saw the cut on my cheekbone he reached for a vial and then stopped and set it aside. The old maester had looked at the boy's eyes. The right one, the blue one, was perfectly fine. But the left, the ailing one, had black veins swollen around it. He began pouring antidotes into me one after another, unwilling to risk missing whatever poison might be at work. At a certain point I started refusing to drink. Ser Creighton decided this was no time for persuasion, that my life was at stake, and simply pinned me down and got the remedies into me by force.
When they were finally done, I lost consciousness from exhaustion. I was confined to my chambers for a week, made to drink medicines, forbidden to walk or exert myself in any way. Trusted servants were with me day and night without interruption. Maester Bart determined that the poison had, in the end, blinded my left eye. What followed were investigations and executions, since assassins had broken into the Eyrie, the most impregnable castle in the Seven Kingdoms, and had very nearly made off with the heir of the Vale. When all was said and done, Ser Creighton sent eight men through the Moon Door and flogged thirteen more.
...
After the attempt on my life it became clear that something in my head was not quite right. Why had I not called for help, not twisted free, not struck at the weak points every man has: the groin, the eyes, the throat? I had simply surrendered and done nothing. Then it struck me: I had done nothing because I felt no fear of death. Though, when I thought about it, that made a certain sense for someone like me. At the beginning of my human life I had been terrified of dying. Then, as a Nazgûl, I had longed for it. Now it provoked nothing in me at all. Fortunately, it was only my own death that left me unmoved. I still worried for the people I cared about.
The second matter of importance was the magic. After using the Scream of the Shadow World, one thing became plain: magic in any significant quantity was completely incompatible with my continued existence. Because of it my eye had become partly anchored to the Shadow World and gone blind in the ordinary sense. The left one now sees the world through the Wraith-world. This has given me a great many possibilities, but the price is not a small one. It will only ever see darkness and grey.
If someone had asked me in my first human life: "Would you trade an eye for the ability to see the Wraith-world?" the answer would have been yes without hesitation. It is not bound by the limitations of flesh. With it one can see for miles. No living soul can run from you or hide from you. The soul moves ahead of the body and the mind, so one can read an enemy's movements before they make them. That eye alone raises even a clumsy swordsman to a height that would otherwise take a lifetime to reach.
But there are always costs. The greatest of them is this: while the sun shines, you are as blind as a mole. That single drawback nearly cancels out every advantage combined.
The realization that this world has an Wraith-world, and that I could become a wraith and wander it endlessly and without purpose, filled me with a primordial dread. I do not fear death. But existence as a wraith frightens me. And the more powerful the magic used, the faster my body will become wraith-like. I cast a powerful spell using the eye as the point of focus, and now it exists partly in the Shadow World and partly in the material one. The same will happen to any part of the body through which magic is channeled. Spells worked through the hands: increased strength, lost feeling. If so much as half my body crosses over into the Wraith-world, it will not be long before I am a wraith entirely.
Why does this happen? The magic Sauron taught me was built for the subjugation of the Shadow World, and men were never capable of using its full potential. This craft is the most powerful that exists outside the authority of the Valar, but nothing comes without a price. The more one uses it, the more deeply the Wraith-world absorbs you, until you and it are one thing, until you become its slave.
But Sauron needed slaves of his own. And so he made nine rings of power, whose chief purpose was to prevent or slow the fading and the decay, to preserve what the wearer most desired and loved. But the rings twisted those desires into something corrupt. We men had always envied the long lives of the other races and hungered for the same span. The rings gave us longevity, but in a perverted form. They served as a chain, holding us in the material world and preventing us from dissolving into the Shadow World. That was why we Nazgûl could use Sauron's magic without being consumed by it.
But Sauron is gone from this world, and the rings with him. I have no anchor to keep the Shadow World from swallowing me. Which means no weather-working, no mass raising of the dead, no undead armies, no catastrophic spells.