Margaery stood there, her thoughts in turmoil.
Those clay jars seemed to weigh a thousand tons, pressing down on her until she could barely breathe.
Canned food.
Grain.
The Long Night.
Those words echoed endlessly in her mind.
In the end, they came together into a single word that chilled her to the bone.
Power.
This was true power.
Not a king's title, not the Lannister gold mines, and certainly not Highgarden's supposedly invincible order of knights.
It was being able to calmly open a jar of food worth dying for while everyone else wailed in despair from hunger and cold.
Winter is coming. The Long Night is approaching.
House Stark had repeated that maxim for eight thousand years.
Yet in all those eight thousand years, what had anyone done besides build a wall of ice?
Nothing.
But the man before her, this King Beyond the Wall whom the southern nobles dismissed as a savage, had already found the only path to survival through a catastrophe that would sweep across the entire world.
Not only had he found it, he held it firmly in his own hands.
Margaery understood better than anyone what that meant.
It meant that from this moment onward, the fate of every kingdom in Westeros would be decided by this man.
Whoever he wanted to live would live.
Whoever he wanted to die would become a stiff corpse amid hunger and freezing cold.
When the Long Night descended, when all of Westeros sank into the despair of hunger and cold...
This man, and the barren land beneath his feet, would have enough food to feed the entire continent.
What did that mean?
It meant he would not even need to use that terrifying dragon.
*He needed only to sit on his cold throne and watch the