"Crow's Eye! You said you knew the Smoking Sea better than a whore's bed!"
"Then tell me what the hell is happening!" A middle-aged man with strands of silver in his brown hair roared aboard the Silence.
"Do you know I spent nearly all my savings recruiting those Mercenaries? And now an entire shipload has gone down before we've even glimpsed the ruins!" The brown-and-silver-haired man clawed at his hair, screaming wildly.
"What if there aren't enough sacrifices? Should I use your soldiers to make up the numbers?!" He paced frantically through the cabin, then returned to the long table in the center, pounding it as he roared at the man on the other side.
The man wore a worn black leather patch over one eye. His lips were an unnatural blue-purple, his crossed legs rested on the table, and his gaunt fingers toyed with a curved sword.
At the middle-aged man's furious shouting, he gave a dismissive chuckle.
"A man raised in saltwater, afraid of a wave knocking over a barrel of ale?" He lowered his legs and sat upright.
"As for that shipload of Mercenaries, I'll just capture a shipload of slaves for you!" He gently lifted a piece of black bread from the table with his curved sword.
Those words only enraged the middle-aged man further.
"Crow's Eye! I'll say it again. I need warriors' blood. Warriors' blood!"
"Not filthy slave blood! The great Torregar ancestors disdain the blood of filthy cowards. No number of those lowborn slaves will do!"
With a bang, the curved sword plunged into the table, pinning the black bread beneath it.
Euron Greyjoy stood, looking down at the still-quivering hilt. His blue-dyed nails scraped across the tabletop as he tore off a piece of bread, dragged it along the table's edge, and approached the middle-aged man.
The man stared at the sword embedded in the table and swallowed with difficulty. He had forgotten that the man before him was a lawless pirate captain. Angering him would do him no good.
"If slave blood is filthy, how about a shipload of Ironborn blood? Let your honored ancestors taste how salty a warrior is."
Euron Greyjoy came up to the middle-aged man and, as he spoke, forcibly stuffed the bread into his mouth.
The middle-aged man stood rigid and motionless. Euron Greyjoy sneered, patted his face, then turned and left the cabin with his Ironborn.
Only after a long while, when the footsteps had faded completely, did the middle-aged man slowly turn.
Yet he did not spit out the bread, despite its taste of rust. Instead, he chewed it carefully, as though savoring his humiliation.
Still chewing, he walked over to a shelf piled with assorted clutter. Among it, one statue stood out.
It was a statue of a dragon.
He cradled it in his palms, rubbing it with his fingers.
The black bread in his mouth seemed to become the sour leftovers he had struggled to swallow as a child.
Memories he had never wanted to revisit came flooding back.
His name was Corlyon.
He had grown up with his mother in a brothel in Velonserys Town, scrubbing chamber pots in exchange for the sour scraps left by the customers.
For as long as he could remember, the customers coming and going from his mother's room, thick with the scent of cheap cosmetics, had mockingly called him a dragonlord bastard whenever they saw him, as though it gave them some peculiar pleasure.
As a child, he had wondered why everyone called him that. He kept asking drunken customers and gossiping whores, and when he finally pieced together that he was a "descendant of the Valyrian dragonlords," excitement filled his small body.
He thought he had finally found proof that he was better than others. He would often pick out the silver strands among his brown hair and flaunt them, only to be met with harsh laughter. In his childish mind, they were "proud" of him.
Knowing he descended from dragonlords seemed to give him a purpose in life. He spent his days asking after their legends, losing track of time as bards and drunken Mercenaries told him, with mocking faces, how dragonlords rode dragons and burned city-states to the ground. He would even miss his sour leftovers at the brothel.
His ears were filled with glorious tales of dragonlords, while his hands held a brush, scrubbing filthy, stinking chamber pots.
As he grew older, that childhood "pride" became his deepest shame.
Whenever he heard "dragonlord bastard" again, he felt that the lowborn part of his blood was foul, like the most stubborn grime in a chamber pot.
He hated the brown hair that sullied his silver strands. He even hated the mother who had given him this contradictory bloodline.
Until he watched lime being spread over his mother, dead of syphilis. Her silver hair, once like flowing moonlight, had become withered gray grass. Smelling the sickly-sweet rot beneath the lime, he clutched the few possessions she had left him against his chest.
Among them was something that would change his fate: an ancient book, one that recorded where they had come from!
It was also a history of the dragonlord House Torregar.
He was surprised to learn that he was a descendant of Torregar.
When he discovered that House Torregar had ranked among the greatest of the forty dragonlord houses even at the height of the Valyrian Freehold, the glory of his ancestors stunned him.
When the ancient book revealed a secret-that House Torregar had a forbidden site deep within Valyria, where a dragon waited to be awakened by blood-he went mad. He became frantic. He would awaken the dragon. He would ride it. For that, he was willing to pay any price. Any price!
He became a fiend in the shadows, weaving a web of sin like a greedy spider. Fraud, deception, smuggling contraband-he stopped at nothing to amass money. He even... sold children as merchandise, children as dirty and helpless as he had once been.
Every coin stained with blood and tears was poured obsessively into the bottomless abyss of exploring the Smoking Sea and the ruins of Valyria. Fleet after fleet sailed out, yet not one returned. It drove him steadily into madness!
Until he met the man who called himself Crow's Eye. He claimed to have traveled to and from the Smoking Sea several times unharmed. If Corlyon gave him half the treasure they found, he would take him to the ruins of Valyria.
Corlyon did not know how Crow's Eye had learned of this, and he could tell the man was a shameless pirate captain.
But he agreed all the same. Once he awakened the dragon, everything else would be ashes.
What followed went unexpectedly smoothly. With the help of the sorcerer beside Crow's Eye, they even reached their destination. But they could not get through the entrance to the forbidden site, now reduced to ruins. Following the method in the ancient book, he sacrificed several shiploads of slaves, with no effect. Only when blood from one of his wounded hired guards spilled onto the entrance and provoked a response did he realize that perhaps the great Torregar ancestors disdained the lowborn, cowardly blood of slaves. They needed the brave blood of warriors!
Returning to the present, Corlyon swallowed the bread he had long since chewed to mush, as though swallowing his humiliation with it.
The hand stroking the dragon statue tightened into a fierce grip. Its horns pierced his palm, and bright red blood flowed out, staining the stone.
He raised the statue before his face and stared into its bloodstained dragon eyes.
"Once I awaken the dragon, dragonfire will burn away every humiliation."
He was certain he could do it!
Because his name was Corlyon... Torregar!
Meanwhile, Euron Greyjoy was inspecting the deck with his men, his cold gaze sweeping over the sailors as they worked numbly. The grime and blood left by the battle had yet to be fully scrubbed away, giving off the scent of rust and death.
An Ironborn walking close behind Euron Greyjoy bared a mouthful of rotten teeth. Only half a lump of flesh remained of his left ear, and an old scar stretched visibly up onto his bald scalp. His voice rasped like sandpaper against iron:
"That bastard from the Green Lands!" He spat a thick gob of phlegm toward the cabin, the sticky fluid splattering onto the deck. "Spouting shit in front of you, Crow's Eye? He ought to piss himself a mirror and take a look at that rotten carcass of his!"
Bloodlust glinted in his eyes, and his rough fingers instinctively stroked the iron hook at his waist.
"Just give the word, Crow's Eye! I'll tear that shit-spewing mouth apart with my hook and rip out his vocal cords to feed the fish! Then I'll chop off those four weak limbs and hang him from your Silence's figurehead like a salted fish left out to dry!" He licked his cracked lips, as though he could already smell blood. "Let everything in the Smoking Sea see what happens when you anger Crow's Eye!"
The Ironborn's coarse roar sounded jarringly loud on the silent deck. The air around them seemed to freeze.
The other Ironborn looked at the half-eared man as though he were an idiot.
Crow's Eye did not like anyone making decisions for him. Even suggestions were unwelcome!
Every Ironborn knew that.
And everyone knew that Crow's Eye only tolerated the brown-haired bastard because he still had a use for him. Otherwise, knowing Crow's Eye, being chopped up and fed to the fish would have counted as a merciful death!
What good could this useless bullshit do except disgust Crow's Eye? Wasn't he just asking for trouble?
His attempt at flattery had backfired spectacularly.
Euron Greyjoy slowly turned at those words, his lone eye gleaming dully in the shadows like a dead fish's.
"Would you like to join the Silent Men too?" he asked softly, his blue-dyed tongue licking his cracked lips.
The Ironborn froze at once, his throat bobbing as he swallowed every word.
The sea breeze brushed the cold sweat seeping down his neck. His knees shook uncontrollably, sending faint little knocks through the deck.
Euron withdrew his gaze with a sneer, his boot heel grinding over a dark brown stain on the deck-the dried blood of a man whose tongue had been cut out yesterday.
"A descendant of dragonlords?"
"Just a whore's bastard." He stroked the dagger at his waist. "Once he and his Mercenaries spend their worthless lives opening the ruins for us..."
A sickly laugh mingled with the waves.
"I'll hook his eyelids open with fishhooks and let the gulls watch him choke to death on his own intestines."