Practice

Moonlight spilled like quicksilver through the stained-glass windows, casting dappled light and shadow across the floor of Viserys's bedchamber.

The silver-haired boy lay on his back in the soft bed, breathing steadily. Beneath that peaceful exterior, however, his consciousness was stirring up a tempest within his mind.

Several days had passed since his encounter with the Three-Eyed Crow in the dream. On the surface, Viserys's days remained as uneventful as ever.

He was still the prince who diligently practiced swordsmanship under the stern guidance of Ser Barristan Selmy of the Kingsguard, as though learning and training with a sword were all that remained of his world.

Only late at night like this, when everyone in the Red Keep was sound asleep, could he set aside the mask he wore and explore the realm of magic that had only just opened a crack to him.

For the first few nights, he did nothing but inspect his own mental world. Bloodraven's terrifying face lingered in his mind.

Since Bloodraven could forcibly drag him into a dream, there was no guarantee he had not left something in Viserys's consciousness to influence him. Only after Viserys was certain there truly was nothing in his mental world did he dare to delve into the magical knowledge of Greenseers that he had unexpectedly acquired.

After several days of practice, Viserys was surprised to discover that a Greenseer's abilities were unlike conventional magic that required spells or rituals. They were more like the awakening of an innate gift, an ability to perceive and merge with the world's network of life.

Viserys roughly divided the core Greenseer abilities he had learned about over the past few days into four parts. The first was greensight, the most fundamental and essential ability.

It allowed a Greenseer to "see" beyond what was visible to the naked eye and glimpse the true nature of all things. The spheres of elemental light Viserys had seen before, for instance, were the life energies of various living creatures. Through greensight, the user could touch those spheres and sense what they contained. Rather than observing with the naked eye, he would see what was happening in real time directly within his mind.

The second could be called the Heart Tree's Eye. With the aid of a weirwood, it allowed the user to observe everything that happened near that tree at any time, including events from long ago, as long as the weirwood had "eyes."

The third was the ability of a skinchanger. It not only allowed the user to enter an animal's consciousness, but also to merge with it completely, combining the animal's senses with his own intelligence to achieve perfect control. The Three-Eyed Crow was the perfect manifestation of Brynden Rivers's consciousness within a crow's body.

The last was dreamweaving, like the unfamiliar setting Brynden had drawn him into before. That had not been the real world. Brynden's true body had still been beyond the Wall at the time, and that place had been a dream world he had woven with his Greenseer abilities.

Precisely because it was a woven world, its elemental energy had been more concentrated, allowing Viserys to sense the magical elements quickly.

Dreamweaving, however, required a considerable amount of mental power, or soul power. Viserys felt that he did not yet have enough to weave a dream.

As for why Brynden could do it, he had inherited the legacy of generations of Greenseers, giving him greater mental power, and he also had the weirwoods to assist him.

There were almost no weirwoods near King's Landing now. If he borrowed the power of the weirwoods in the North, the risk of Brynden discovering him would be far too great. Viserys did not want to meet him again just yet.

Besides, the abilities that mattered most to Viserys at present were greensight and skinchanging, so those were the two he had been practicing lately.

Greensight was straightforward enough. Viserys had at least experienced it before, which made it relatively easy to practice.

The only problem was perhaps that magic was currently depleted, and the magical tide had yet to arrive. The spheres of magical elemental light in the outside world were sparse, nowhere near as abundant as those he had sensed in the dream. But none of that mattered, as long as he knew the method and could use it.

The main difficulty now was mastering the ability of a skinchanger. After all, skinchanging required him to separate a thread of his consciousness and attach it to another living, moving creature with a will of its own.

That might be relatively simple for those born with the gift of skinchanging, but Viserys's gift had awakened later in life. He still needed constant practice and an understanding of the principles behind it.

Viserys's first few attempts with rats had all ended in failure. Besides its abundance of people, King's Landing also had a remarkable number of rats. Whenever his consciousness tried to connect with one, it was either rejected or pushed too hard and erased the rat's consciousness outright.

Once that happened, placing Viserys's consciousness inside was useless. He could not control the rat at all. It required a resonance between living beings, not cold manipulation.

Like the opposition between ice and fire, the fundamental distinction between life and death formed the most basic order of this world. Under its laws, an insurmountable gulf existed between the living and the dead. A Greenseer's power sprang from the pulse of life, while the magic of the legendary Others was founded on the stillness of death.

But during tonight's attempt, Viserys felt some strange change taking place. When a thread of his consciousness touched a rat again, there was no longer any sense of something being wrong. It was as though that consciousness had always belonged in this body.

Everything in Viserys's field of vision grew larger, and the stench of the sewer flooded his nostrils. He had truly succeeded.

Viserys hurriedly made the rat climb out of the sewer and away from the stench. He sent it running through the streets of King's Landing, and from this entirely new perspective, the city at night revealed a completely different face.

The forging workshops on the Street of Steel had extinguished their fires, leaving only residual warmth in their furnaces. A faint aroma of bread drifted from Bread Alley, stirring an instinctive desire in this body.

Along several streets crowded with brothels and taverns, he saw drunks sprawled by the roadside. From this angle, they looked like sleeping giants.

Seeing the world through a rat's body and eyes was rather interesting, like playing a game through a brain-computer interface. He continued roaming through King's Landing, sensing everything the body experienced.

When the first ray of morning light came through the high window, Viserys severed the connection.

The return of his consciousness brought not exhaustion, but an indescribable sense of accomplishment. He had only controlled a single rat, yet it was another step forward for him in this world.

And he had already decided how to use this power. He would control more small animals, then have them help him search the Dragonpit for Dragon Eggs.