Prologue: The Brewing Storm

AN: The time in the story is slightly different since in my story Robert's Rebellion started and ended a year earlier and therefore every character in the generation born after the Rebellion is one year older. The exception is Daenerys, in her case the Targaryen loyalists hold Dragonstone for one more year, so she's still born in the same storm.

That time is going to be very important later. You can split that year wherever you want into canon between the tourney of Harrenhall, Lyanna's 'kidnapping' and the start and length of the Rebellion.

Yes, I know that a pregnancy lasts nine months but please, just go with it. It'll make sense later, it's an important detail and most certainly NOT a plothole.

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Cersei Lannister hated her husband. The drunkard had not only killed her silver prince, Rhaegar, and usurped his throne, but he also had the gall to keep her brother as Kingsguard! Oh, poor Jamie, he didn't deserve that fate. He should have been free, in a position in the Small Council near her but not as Kingsguard! And now she was giving birth to the child of that fat son of a bitch!

She knew that it was Robert's child. It should have been Jamie's, but the timing just didn't fit. She had lied with the king only once, after their wedding and no more, she always just swallowed his seed to please him- that is, when he wasn't out with whores in some brothel.

No, as desirable it would have been for the child to be Jamie's, she couldn't find the time to lay with him until two months after her wedding, his morals had held up for that long, as seductive as she was. It couldn't have happened earlier either since Jamie had been at the Mad King's side for months when the Sacking of King's Landing happened. She was giving birth to Robert's child.

No matter, she had a plan in place for the little monster. Unfortunately, Robert's firstborn would be stillborn.

This plan was the reason why Cersei was giving birth in the presence of only two people, the midwife (Mary something), and Maester Pycelle, both of them loyal to the Lannisters and, more specifically, her. The woman was chosen for being both a midwife and a wet nurse so that she could take care of Robert's spawn for the time needed to get Cersei's plan executed.

Cersei cried out as a sharp pain wracked through her abdomen. The midwife tried to soothe her but it helped little. Yes, that little thing deserved to be dealt with.

Cersei gave a last great push and the cries of a baby filled the air. 'I'm lucky that my drunkard of a husband has decided to drink away the treasury instead of being here.' She thought. "Otherwise, it wouldn't be so simple to get rid of this abhorrence."

"Congratulations, Your Grace." Said the midwife. "It's a healthy boy." She then gave Cersei her son. As soon as she took hold of him, the boy stopped crying.

The child had Robert's black hair and her green eyes. Cersei was shocked to see both of his emerald green eyes already open and staring at her. She felt like those eyes were staring directly at her soul. They seemed to glow with a soft, green light.

Cersei tore her eyes away from her son's and addressed Pycelle. "Do you have what I asked for?" The old man made a small noise of fear but still answered. "Yes, Your Grace, the child's body is at your disposal." The Maester meekly said, not looking at her. Pathetic.

"Well then, you know what you have to do for your money I take it." She said to the midwife. The woman nodded and recited her commands. "Take the child and the money, leave Westeros, make sure the child is disposed of, never come back."

Cersei gave her a cold smile. "Right you are, my dear." She gently patted the woman's face and handed her a silver badge with the Lannister coat of arms on it. "Now go, there's a small group of Lannister soldiers waiting for you at the Iron Gate, show them this badge, and they will escort you to the ship waiting for you. They will then escort you to Pentos and they will keep you company until you finish your mission. You'll get your money from them in exchange for the badge the mission is finished."

Mary got up and turned to leave but she looked back once more to ask a question. "Excuse me, Your Grace, but I'll have to call him some name or another. What should it be?"

Cersei thought about having the woman punished but suddenly got an idea. "I think the best name would be Harold since it means 'army leader'. Quite ironic, seeing as that is what he would have been had he been born to the right person."

Mary nodded and swiftly slipped through the door and out of the house before the Queen could rethink her decisions and decide to punish her. She reached the Iron Gate and, after finding the Lannister soldiers and showing the badge to their leader, she began the journey to Pentos.

Mary looked down on the peacefully sleeping child in her arms. She didn't understand why the Queen would want to get rid of her child but she daren't do anything other than what she was paid to do. She knew that if she did, the Queen would get wind of it sooner or later and she would send her men after the woman who dared to go against her will. No, it would be better for everyone if Mary just got rid of the child and forgot about it.

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Mary was in the crowded port looking for the person responsible for the thing she hoped to use to get rid of the child, accomplishing her mission. It was the only thing she could think of that sounded like certain death to the people of Westeros but was known to have a one-in-fifty survival rate in Pentos.

The woman had been looking for such a thing for the last ten months, which had been, shockingly, enough for Harold to start eating solid foods and start walking, though he did so on unsteady legs. She had been making sure that her 'escorts' didn't find out her deception since her life depended on it, quite literally. Still, she didn't want to send Harold to a certain death like throwing him into the ocean would have been. She could have easily done that during the six-week-long voyage.

She had already asked around to see if there was any way she could have made the boy disappear while making sure that the Queen's men didn't realize her tricks. All of the people she asked had pointed her to this man. He was a person Mary would've normally avoided interacting with because of his profession.

He was the captain of the 'Grey Widow', the ship that took the people infected with greyscale from the city to the ruins of Valyria once every two years. Mary knew that this would be almost sure death to Harold, but the chances of survival were still better than what he would have if she took any other route of action.

As she was weaving her way through the crowd, looking for the Widow's captain, she was suddenly grabbed from behind and dragged into an empty merchant's tent on the side of the street. She almost screamed when her captor put his hand over her mouth and whispered into her ear.

"I heard you wanted to talk to me, Westerosi. What about?" The man asked. Mary took a second to compose herself and take a good look at him. He was about 6'1, he had dark hair and eyes and a scar across his left cheek. He was dressed in hardened leather armour and had a bastard sword on his hip as well as a dagger in his belt. Mary was sure that he had at least one more hidden somewhere.

She finally pulled her thoughts together and addressed the man. "I take it you're the captain of the Grey Widow. Am I right in that assumption?" The man nodded and gestured for her to continue, so she did. "Yes, I have been looking for you since I require your services. You see, my nephew is terminally ill, but his illness would only take him after a long suffering. We, his parents and I, couldn't bring ourselves to kill him or hire someone to do so. I think you know what I ask you to do. Your services would be rewarded, of course." Mary lied smoothly. She had gone over this small speech and decided on a story of illness and some gold to ensure the man's collaboration.

Sure enough, if the glint in the man's eye was an indicator, she had already won him over. Now all she had to do was wait until the man began his next journey to Valyria in a year and then she would make sure that Harold was on the ship so she could finally relax and live her life peacefully, without the Lannister soldiers breathing down her neck. Hopefully, the reward she would get from the Queen would last until the end of her life.

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Gerald Copper was a hard man. He had to be since a softer man would have given in to the pleas of the innocent men, women, and children who he dropped off at the coast of the Ruins of Valyria to die.

The current cargo, however, included a small boy who was a little more than a year old and had no signs of greyscale. The boy's aunt (if she was even that) had told Gerald that the boy had some kind of slow-acting illness that would take his life before he reached his fifth nameday. While he didn't like leaving an obviously healthy child to his death, he was paid enough that his conscience was repressed by his greed. Hell, he would've killed half a dozen babies with his bare hands for a thousand golden dragons and the woman was giving him that much for a single one and he wouldn't even have to dirty his hands with the boy to get the money!

Still, for some reason, this boy's presence unnerved him. The closer the ship got to the Ruins of Valyria, the less calm he became. At least he could hide it through sheer willpower, not like his crew. He had seen most of them nervously look around like they were looking for any possible source of danger. When they were about a hundred feet from the shores of Valyria, one of the sailors cried out and attacked another, seemingly in a frenzied rage. On any other ship, this would have caused a fight to break out but not on the Grey Widow, the ship being most famous for riots. The man was quickly cut down and the man he had stabbed in the neck was put out of his misery. The bodies were placed in the storerooms to be taken back to Pentos and given to their respective families.

Unnerved by the incident, the crew was eager to just get rid of the cargo and go home and therefore the unloading went faster than normal if a little rougher. While it was happening, Gerald did his usual scan of the crowd to see to it that there weren't neither more nor less people than they should have been. This time, however, something caught his eye. At first, he had thought it to be some kind of emerald jewellery one of the women snuck onto the ship. On second look he realized that it was, in fact, a child's eye that he had seen.

The boy couldn't have been more than two years old but didn't have to be carried off from the ship, he walked by himself, if a little unsteadily. His brilliant green eyes held an intelligence and understanding he had only rarely seen in old, experienced men and never in small children. Still, the boy had that look in his eyes and was staring right into Gerald's eyes. It suddenly hit him that it must have been the 'terminally ill' child from Westeros.

As he was staring into the boy's eyes, he started feeling uneasy. It didn't take him long to realize that this was the same feeling he had felt on the way here. As soon as that thought occurred to the captain, the feeling suddenly intensified and he felt like someone was mentally beating him with a war hammer. Then the feeling stopped as soon as it came and when Gerald composed himself to look at the child, he found that the boy wasn't looking at him. 'It must have been an illusion.' He thought.

Still, the captain was glad when the unloading was finally done and the sick desperate enough to attack his crew were slain. He ordered one last check around to make sure that everything was in place gave the order to pull up the anchor and turn around.

As the Grey Widow was sailing back towards Pentos, Gerald was thinking about the thousand golden dragons and how lucky he was to have gotten this opportunity. Maybe now he could finally afford a night in one of Lys' famous pleasure houses.

Lost in their thoughts, neither he nor his men noticed the fog around the shores of Valyria thickening.

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In the following seven years, the crew of the Grey Widow noticed that every time they went to Valyria it became harder and harder to find their way through the fog and find a spot to unload the sick from the ship. They also noticed that the fog became a lot less hard to breathe and it also became a lot thicker, to the point that they couldn't see farther than a dozen feet. Furthermore, they reported occasional flashes of green light they saw through the fog.

Almost exactly seven years after the strange reports' beginning, a large storm formed above the middle of the Ruins of Valyria. The people weren't wary of it the first time, but it didn't seem to shrink, nor did it disappear for a long time. On the contrary, it grew bigger and fiercer every day. By the time it reached its first 'birthday', the sounds of thunder were constantly heard from even a mile away. After a while, the people started calling it the 'Storm of Valyria'.

Still, the Storm was not a bother to anyone other than the crew of the Grey Widow. That all changed when, almost two years after its first appearance, it suddenly descended into the fog. This was unlike the previous times when the Storm simply ceased to exist just to come back with equal fury. No, people knew that this was different and that was confirmed by Evan Sand, a merchant whose way took him near Valyria at that time. He would tell everyone who would listen to him (which was a lot of people) that there were almost inhuman screams coming from the fog together with sounds of thunder and, at the very end, a completely inhuman screech. If he had to describe it, he would shudder at the memory before saying that it sounded like anything gave the sound was celebrating its triumph.

Not long after that occurrence, the Grey Widow set sail again to deliver its annual cargo of greyscale- infected people. To their surprise, however, they found their path blocked by a rather unusual sight. There was the wreck of a large battleship blocking their path. The shock came when they took a closer look at it.

The board of the ship was littered with corpses in different states of destruction. Some of them were cut open, one as much as from their right collarbone to their left hip. Some others seemed to have a crushed skull or other important bone such as the spine or ribs. Most of the corpses, however, were massacred in such a fashion that more than one of the crew of the Grey Widow had to vomit. The bodies seemed like they had been fried from both inside and out with explosions of heat, almost like lightning. Some had molten eyes, others' teeth had exploded, and again, some others had the misfortune to avoid dying quickly and died from their insides turning into some gooey mess.

After a long search, one of the crew members of the Grey Widow had found a mostly- intact flag and showed to the captain who immediately recognized it and it only made it more terrifying. It was a traditional banner of the Westerosi House of Greyjoy, excluding a minor change. The golden kraken had a third eye. This had been Euron Greyjoy's ship, the Silence. During the search, it was discovered that the ship had been stripped of all its valuables, including all of the books from the captain's collection (if the empty bookshelves and Greyjoy's burned body in front of them was any indication). Gerald decided there and then that that would be the last cargo he would deliver. There had to be less dangerous jobs- or at least ones that didn't promise an insanely painful death. Unknown to him, most of his crew was thinking the same thing.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions of their lives since the next time the Grey Widow set sail, it didn't come back. Its wreck was found by a fleet of merchant ships from the Slavers' Bay and the state of the corpses was said to be even worse than those from the Silence as most of the crew members were brutally fried and dismembered.

It was like anything it was that did it to them, it had a personal dislike against the crew members of the Grey Widow. The ship itself was broken beyond repair with the deck boards blackened from what happened to the crew, the mast broken and large holes in both sides of the ship. Strangely, there were no dead infected to be found. Also, just like the Silence's, the Grey Widow's crew had been relieved of their valuables.

After that, things calmed down a little. The Storm was rarely in its place above Valyria, only occasionally appearing and it was now followed by a frightening screeching sound and a soft, almost unnoticeable shifting of the air.

That calmness broke half a year later, almost twelve years after the first sighting of the Storm. It, however, didn't simply break. It shattered into tiny pieces which were pulverized and then thrown out of the imaginary window. This happened when the Storm ascended above the Ruins of Valyria once more but, instead of staying just above the fog as it used to do, it rose higher and higher, then started moving towards the Slaver's Bay.

At that point, a small fleet of three ships was making its way from Mereen towards Astapor with a small cargo of slaves when suddenly a large shadow descended upon them. The next day, the looted wrecks of the ships were found with all the slavers dead on board, having died in a similar way to the previous victims. There was no trace of the slaves, dead or otherwise.

From then on, that occurrence became almost ordinary. A small fleet of five or fewer ships would begin its journey from either a free city or a city from the Slaver's Bay, the Storm would descend upon it and, in the morning, the wrecks would be found with all valuables gone and the crew dead in more-or-less but always extremely painful ways. The Storm, however, didn't attack single ships owned by travelling merchants while it destroyed pirate ships. When the cities got wind of that, they started sending single ships with short time gaps between their departures. When the first few got through, they started reducing the time gap. By the time the first ship that had been sent alone began its second journey, it had been reduced to less than half of the original and that was when the Storm came.

It destroyed fifty vessels, leaving only three of the ships that had been on the waters at that time intact.

There had only been two more attempts to transport slaves across the Bay. The first one had been paying merchants to use their own ships to transport the slaves from one city to another. The first ship had sailed through without harm. The second hadn't been so lucky. It had been only on the way for a few days when the Storm descended upon it. Its wreck was found in the same way the others had been except for the merchant who had visibility been tortured before his death. This didn't only make sure that no merchants would agree to do the same as the others had but it also scared most of them away from the Bay altogether.

The second attempt hadn't been nearly as smart as the first, it had been rather rash and reckless. The slavers had decided to transport all of their yearly goods at once with a large fleet of merchant ships together with several warships to provide protection. It hadn't helped as all the ships in the fleet were destroyed, leaving Astapor with half as much Unsullied and only twenty merchant ships. Yunkai with forty ships and Meereen with a hundred ships, only eight of which were warships. After that, the slavers had decided to admit defeat and transport their goods on land, as slow as it would be. Their hopes had been crushed when the first caravan of wagons had been destroyed by the Storm.

After that, the slavers had tried to make a living by simply keeping their trade inside their cities but it had been of no use. Although it worked for a short while, it had quickly become apparent that the cities had been relying on the other two to send specially trained slaves for everything and therefore when they had been left with only their own, their economy had simply collapsed from the lack of balance in the training of the slaves.

When, thirteen years after the first appearance of the Storm, the three cities' slaves had revolted at once, the people of the Free Cities could only watch from afar as the Storm had started moving once again but, to their horror, this time the fog of Valyria had moved with it. In less than a month, the entire Slaver's Bay had been entirely covered in it.

After a few adventurous people had sailed into the Fog only to either return as corpses or not at all, soon nobody tried going that way anymore. By the time a month had passed, the people of Essos had accepted: The Storm of Valyria had conquered the Slaver's Bay.

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It was late at night, near midnight. The moon illuminated the city of Meereen, shining down upon it with a silver light. On first look, no one could tell that there had been a takeover of the city only a month before. Still, there were no blood or corpses on the streets, nor damage in the walls and buildings. Everything was silent and peaceful. On top of the largest Great Pyramid, a shadow could be seen from afar.

A closer look would have revealed it to be a man. He was tall, taller than 6'2, lithe and, quite frankly, unusually beautiful. He had a well-built figure, not a hulking mass of muscle but still a warrior's body. He had smooth, shoulder-length hair the colour of the night and, his most striking feature, bright green eyes. His clothes would have shocked the outside observer, as all his clothing seemed to be made of the same material and it looked like all pieces of it moulded together, there was no separation at his ankles nor at his hip to be seen. The most prominent thing he wore, however, was a crown with a single large and a few smaller pieces of obsidian in it.

He scanned his surroundings and smiled. His plans had gone off without a hitch and now his Empire had devoured the Slaver's Bay, ending their disgusting practice forever. Now the had-been-slaves were the only inhabitants of the cities, having slain their masters during the revolution. They were his people and they were all very grateful to him for having weakened the slavers enough so that they could overthrow them, also for helping in the revolution.

Now, that his plans were finished and the people had settled in, it was time to collect the people he had marked as trustworthy and important. He waved his hand and his eyes followed the brightest of the four golden lines coming out of his palm, connecting him with someone. He smiled and jumped off of the pyramid, only to be replaced with a 12 feet tall and 20 feet long creature with a 42 feet wingspan. 'Fury', as he had been dubbed by the citizens of the Empire, shot upwards and summoned his power.

There was a crash of thunder and the Storm appeared, only to rush off into the distance. Not one of the inhabitants of the city woke up as they had already gotten used to their Emperor's flashy departures. When they would wake up, they would continue their peaceful life without any interruptions, while in Pentos, a thirteen-year-old girl's life was going to change drastically in the following few days.

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AN: That one year I messed with was solely for Harry's birth to take place without me making him Joffrey's twin.