Bloodflame 3

Aegon released his left hand, letting blood run down his vambrace.

It was no mere dripping, but an uncontrolled torrent.

The warm wellspring of life spread swiftly across the cold obsidian floor, gathering into an ever-expanding, sticky lake of dark red.

The weakness and chill of blood loss swept through his limbs like a rising tide, nearly buckling his already trembling body.

At the same time, however, another, more terrifying sensation bred and gathered furiously from every direction-from beneath his feet, from the air, even from his flowing blood itself.

It was malice.

Thick, cold, pure, directed at all living things-a towering malice that had settled here for hundreds of years!

That malice seemed to have weight, pressing down until breathing became impossible, yet it also seemed to become a tangible cold that pierced his Valyrian steel armor and stabbed straight into his marrow.

Aegon raised his head and peered through the visor slit stained red with his own blood, looking at Crow's Eye, who had paused several steps away in startled uncertainty.

He bared his teeth in a cold smile mingling pain and weakness with utter exhilaration and madness.

"Think... I've gone mad? Cough..." He coughed up another mouthful of bloody froth, his voice hoarse yet carrying a strange, proclamatory force.

"Crow's Eye... do you know where those thousands upon thousands of captives in the murals... ended up?"

Euron Greyjoy's lone eye remained fixed on him. He had not lowered his dagger, but his body had instinctively tensed, wary of this scene that defied all reason.

Aegon needed no answer. He continued slowly, in a tone almost like the chanting of a death poem, "They... were all 'digested' here. Right beneath our feet. Every inch of this land... is soaked with their blood, their souls, their... hatred that could find no rest in death."

He panted, pointing around him with his bleeding right arm, trembling but resolute.

"Can you feel it? This cold... this sickening resentment? These are hundreds of thousands... perhaps even more... souls of those sacrificed and slaughtered..."

"Their resentment..." Aegon's voice suddenly rose, carrying a heart-stopping tremor. "Long ago became one with this land, turning into the most vicious curse! They never dispersed. They've only been sleeping... waiting!"

"Waiting for what?" For the first time, Crow's Eye's voice lost its air of absolute control, taking on a barely perceptible dryness.

He felt it-a deeper tremor coming from the ground beneath his feet, something other than an earthquake.

Aegon smiled, his expression especially savage amid the blood and shadows.

"Waiting... for a 'key.'" He raised his blood-drenched wrist. "Waiting for a trace of... a familiar, 'noble' presence to wake them from their eternal nightmare!"

"You think a dragonlord bloodline means glory here? No..." He panted, an almost martyr-like light burning in his violet eyes. "Here, it is proof of guilt! The horn that wakes the vengeful dead! The sacrifice they... will devour before all others!"

He paused, as though to give Crow's Eye-and the bewildered Ironborn beginning to retreat uneasily-one final, clear understanding.

"Allow me to introduce myself again." Aegon's voice suddenly became extraordinarily calm, yet held a resolve more terrifying than any roar. "My name is Aegon Targaryen!"

"Likewise descended from the dragonlords... of ancient Valyria."

The instant those words fell-

Whoosh-!

It was not the sound of wind, but of some invisible presence being utterly ignited!

Without warning, the pool of Aegon's own blood beneath his feet burst into flame!

But those flames were unlike any light in the mortal world.

Black and red intertwined, like clotted blood smoldering in the dark.

They brought not a trace of warmth, instead radiating a bitter cold more piercing than ice ten thousand years old!

The flames swayed and swelled soundlessly, spreading in an instant along the winding trails of blood on the floor.

They ignited more blood-soaked flagstones, ignited the piled corpses, ignited the malice so dense in the air that it could not dissipate!

In moments, the entire surviving underground chamber, half buried beneath the ruins, was engulfed in that eerie, bone-chilling, black-and-red bloodflame!

What the flames illuminated was no longer objects, but countless churning shadows filled with the utmost resentment and hatred.

"Ghosts! Ghosts!" an Ironborn screamed as he broke down, trying to beat out a wisp of bloodflame clinging to his trouser leg. The flame had no heat, yet it made him feel as though his soul were freezing solid and being torn apart.

In the wavering, cold light of the bloodflame, light and shadow began to distort, stretch, and coalesce.

A blurred figure of a woman, curled up around something in her arms, flashed through the flames to Crow's Eye's left, her eyes holding nothing but hollow despair.

The outline of a small, thin child, reaching out as though trying to grasp something, appeared on the wall behind Aegon, only to be swallowed by the flames an instant later.

Then came more, and more...

Soldiers clutching rusted weapons, madness in their eyes;

Old people in tattered clothes, thin as sticks, muttering curses;

Utterly terrified common folk, huddled against one another...

Face after face, figure after figure, flickered in and out of the cold bloodflame, overlapping in layers, filling every gap in their field of vision.

They had no physical substance, yet were more horrifying than anything corporeal.

Hundreds of thousands, millions of gazes filled with pure malice pierced the flames and fixed relentlessly upon every living being present-

The air froze, and even their breaths seemed laden with shards of ice.

The dead had not yet lunged out, but their gathered hatred, enough to freeze a soul, had already become a tangible pressure.

"Urgh..." Aegon gave a muffled groan of pain. The combined assault of blood loss and cold darkened his vision.

But he gritted his teeth and, with the last of his strength, pressed his left hand into a pool of his own warm blood beside him that had not yet fully caught fire!

Hiss-!

Like cold water poured into boiling oil, the pool of blood seethed violently, then erupted into still fiercer black-and-red bloodflame that surged back up his left arm!

Drawing on the strange support of those cold flames, as though they were burning his life itself, Aegon trembled as he drove his bloodstained longsword into the ground for a crutch and, inch by inch, with agonizing difficulty... stood once more!

His Valyrian steel armor reflected a savage gleam in the light of the bloodflame.

He was drenched in blood, cold bloodflame wound around his left hand, and blood still welled from the wound in his right wrist, but he stood straight.

He raised his left hand, wreathed in black-and-red bloodflame, and grasped at the air-the spreading cold flames seemed to answer his pull, sending a wisp to coil around the longsword braced against the ground.

Ordinary steel could not withstand such power and groaned beneath the strain.

Countless fine cracks spread across the blade, but from those cracks burst denser, colder black-and-red bloodflame, as though the sword itself had become an extension of that resentment.

Aegon gripped the crumbling longsword, burning with "cold fire," in both hands. Its point trembled, yet remained unwaveringly aimed at Euron Greyjoy, whose pupil contracted as horror finally appeared on his face for the first time.

He opened his mouth, blood spilling ceaselessly between his teeth, but every word mingled with the wails of the dead and the cold of the bloodflame, tolling like the bells of final judgment within this cursed tomb of ruins:

"Blood... debts..."

Blood still dripped from his wrist, and the bloodflame at his sword's point hissed, an illusory sound like souls burning.

"Must be..."

In the surrounding flames, countless faces of the dead let out silent shrieks at once, their cold malice rising to its peak!

"Paid in blood!!!"

Those final words seemed to merge with the venomous roars the countless dead had stored up for centuries, becoming a cry that tore through all silence and reason-

"Awaken-!!!!!"

Boom!!!!!!!

The black-and-red bloodflame devoured everything.