Harrenhal's newly designated iron smelting district was sweltering.
It was a brilliantly sunny day. The scorching heat beat down upon the earth, making the air ripple in thick, hazy waves above the dirt.
The newly arrived blacksmiths were ordered to assemble in a large clearing, where massive mounds of various clays and soils had been piled high.
"Why in the seven hells do you think Lord Roman dragged us out here?" a grimy smith muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. "To make us play in the mud under the midday sun?"
Before long, Roman and a small contingent of guards arrived, dragging several heavy carts filled with strange, porous black charcoal. The murmuring crowd instantly fell silent.
"Welcome, everyone," Roman called out, his voice easily carrying over the yard.
Scanning the crowd, Roman counted roughly eighty blacksmiths. The fact that twenty men had been quietly removed during the journey proved that Old Jessy's counter-espionage vetting had been incredibly thorough.
"I have gathered you all here today to revolutionize the way we smelt iron."
The blacksmiths exchanged bewildered glances. They had absolutely no idea what this young lord was plotting.
Currently, iron smelting across Westeros was agonizingly primitive. Blacksmiths relied entirely on felling massive swaths of timber and burning it down into basic charcoal to fuel their modest bloomeries. Not only was this practice devastating to the forests, but it was also incredibly inefficient for mass production.
Yet Westeros possessed utterly massive, untapped coal reserves. A continent roughly the size of South America was quite literally bursting with mineral wealth beneath the soil, and the Riverlands were no exception.
Weeks prior, Roman had secretly repurposed several abandoned brick kilns. By sealing the coal and baking it using his own Pale Dragonflame, he had successfully produced the castle's first batch of industrial coke.
Roman reached into a cart, picked up a dark, porous lump of coke, and held it up for the crowd to see.
"This is a new, refined fuel that Maester Tom and I have developed. It burns vastly hotter, cleaner, and longer than ordinary wood charcoal. Now, I need you all to design and build a massive furnace tall enough and strong enough to harness this fuel's true potential."
The blacksmiths stared at the strange lump of coal, completely baffled. They could not fathom why a high and mighty lord would suddenly take such a keen interest in the filthy, back-breaking trade of iron smelting.
But House Whent was paying them a small fortune in silver stags, so they honestly didn't care if Roman's little mud-pie experiment failed completely.
The tradesmen quickly divided themselves into specialized crews. They rounded up the men with experience building standard kilns and immediately set to work.
"No, no, the hearth is far too small!" Roman yelled over the din of construction, pointing at a blueprint. "It needs to be at least four times taller to trap the heat!"
"Make sure you build a steep, angled reverse slope at the base of the hearth so the molten iron and slag can flow out smoothly!"
"Stop slapping wet mud on the exterior! Use proper stone bricks for the outer shell!"
To be completely honest, it wasn't until Roman actually got his hands dirty that he realized just how overwhelmingly complex industrial iron smelting truly was.
The internal architecture of the blast furnace, the precise angles of the ventilation shafts, the location of the bellows, and the exact ratio of raw ore to fuel were all monumental logistical headaches.
Roman had drafted a rudimentary blueprint based on his modern knowledge, but adapting those theories to medieval limitations proved incredibly difficult.
It took the Whent guards and the blacksmiths a full, grueling week just to construct the massive stone shell of the furnace.
During the frantic construction, Roman's patience finally gave out. Completely ignoring the horrified protests of his guards, he stripped off his fine tunic and waded directly into the mud to help haul heavy stone blocks alongside the commoners.
"My lord, please! This is entirely improper for a man of your station!" a guard begged, trying to take a stone from Roman's hands.
"You will understand why I am in such a rush once this beast is lit!" Roman shot back, effortlessly hoisting the boulder onto his shoulder. "And stop standing around whining! If you have the breath to complain, you have the breath to haul bricks! Get in the mud!"
The blacksmiths were profoundly moved by the display. To see a high lord strip to the waist, wade into the muck, and sweat alongside them was utterly unheard of in Westerosi society.
Furthermore, Roman proved to be a highly motivational leader. Even when a crew made a critical structural mistake, Roman didn't reach for a whip. He simply offered firm encouragement and worked with them to fix it. Over the grueling week, only a handful of men who actively tried to shirk their duties were severely disciplined.
In Roman's eyes, honest failure was acceptable, but lazy incompetence was a crime.
When the gargantuan blast furnace was finally completed, Roman stood back, covered head-to-toe in dust and soot, admiring the towering structure.
They had built the furnace directly beside a fast-flowing tributary of the Gods Eye. The waterway had been forcefully widened and diverted to power a massive waterwheel, which in turn drove a set of immense, double-acting leather bellows.
This towering brick monstrosity was easily four times taller and wider than any standard bloomery in the Seven Kingdoms.
The gathered blacksmiths stared at their creation with genuine, trembling excitement. They were absolutely convinced they had just constructed the largest iron smelting forge in the known world.
"By the Smith's hammer!" one of the master foremen gasped. "Look at the size of that beast! With a hearth that massive, we could smelt a month's worth of iron in a single day!"
"Lord Roman must be blessed by the gods!"
But the greatest surprise was yet to come.
When Roman finally ordered the men to ignite the massive bed of coke at the base of the furnace, the flames that erupted were not the standard, lazy orange-yellow of a wood fire. Instead, the fire burned with a ferocious, blindingly pale white light, tinged with a faint, ghostly blue at the edges.
As I suspected, Roman thought to himself, a triumphant grin spreading across his soot-stained face. My magic permanently altered the chemical structure of the coal during the coking process. The fuel has essentially absorbed a fraction of my Dragonflame.
The blacksmiths scrambled backward in shock, astonished to find that the strange black rocks produced an agonizingly intense, blistering heat, burning vastly hotter and longer than the finest oak charcoal.
After a brief moment of stunned silence, the master smiths were overjoyed. They immediately grabbed tongs and began experimenting with the pale fire.
They quickly discovered that melting down raw iron ingots using the white-flame coke took a fraction of the usual time. Furthermore, the sheer, unnatural intensity of the heat caused the slag and impurities within the iron to separate and boil away almost instantly.
Even rusted, low-grade scrap iron tossed into the crucible was miraculously purified and smelted into high-grade, resilient steel.
The blacksmiths were practically weeping with joy, frantically hammering out pristine steel bars on their anvils. Eager to test the limits of the new fuel, they began shoveling massive quantities of raw, unrefined ore directly into the main blast furnace.
Then, disaster struck.
The furnace violently exploded.
By the time Roman sprinted back to the site, the entire upper half of the towering stone furnace had ruptured. A terrifying stream of molten, glowing-black slag and boiling rock was vomiting down the sides of the structure like an erupting volcano.
The surrounding blacksmiths stared in absolute, paralyzing terror. The horrific sight of melting stone looked entirely too similar to the cursed, melted towers of Harrenhal looming above them.
Roman slapped his forehead in sheer frustration. He had completely forgotten that standard clay and stone could not withstand the apocalyptic, prolonged heat of an industrial blast furnace fueled by magical coke. He needed to forge specialized refractory bricks for the inner lining.
"Well, damn it all," Roman sighed heavily. "Douse the fires. We start over tomorrow."
While Roman was working himself to the bone in the mud, Lady Shella was sitting comfortably in her solar, reading a royal missive sealed with the crowned stag of House Baratheon.
The letter was surprisingly warm. King Robert briefly offered Lady Shella his formal regards before dedicating the rest of the parchment to excitedly asking about Roman's well-being.
The King eagerly reminded Roman of his promise to host a grand hunting banquet, explicitly stating he hoped to ride north to the Riverlands to see the Whent boy again very soon.
"My Lady, what does the King say?" Maester Tom asked, hovering nearby.
Lady Shella handed the heavy parchment to the maester, a deeply satisfied smile gracing her lips. "Roman has played the King perfectly. Robert Baratheon has actually written a personal letter to Harrenhal."
Maester Tom's eyes widened in genuine shock as he read the King's booming scrawl. Ever since Robert won the Iron Throne, the Whents had been political pariahs. Robert had never once initiated contact with Harrenhal unless it was to demand taxes.
"It seems Lord Roman has firmly secured the King's personal favor. We no longer need to fear sudden, hostile interference from the Crown."
Tom carefully rolled the royal scroll and then handed Lady Shella a far more mundane, leather-bound report.
"My Lady, I have completed my research into the higher mysteries. According to the oldest Valyrian texts I could procure, the pale white fire Lord Roman commands is undeniably a form of true Dragonflame. However, its properties—specifically its ability to heal and purify—are entirely different from the destructive fire of the Targaryen dragons."
Lady Shella carefully read through the maester's meticulous notes, her expression growing incredibly grave.
"Maester Tom," she ordered, her voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "You must seek Roman out tonight and warn him. This truth must never leave these walls until Harrenhal commands an army strong enough to defend itself. If this secret leaks prematurely, it will bring absolute ruin upon us."
Maester Tom nodded emphatically. Because Roman had used his fire to publicly cleanse the castle of its ghosts, the common folk had invented dozens of wild, religious explanations for the "Holy White Fire." But thankfully, no one had accurately connected the magic to dragons.
The cynical lords of Westeros largely believed the ghost stories were just the mad ramblings of the cursed Harrenhal staff. They viewed the Whents as superstitious clowns.
But if the Small Council—and specifically King Robert—ever discovered that Roman Rivers possessed literal Dragonflame, Robert's blinding, genocidal hatred for anything related to dragons would instantly reignite, and he would march the royal army north to slaughter them all.
Time flowed like water. Over a month passed in a blur of smoke and sweat, bringing the year 294 AC to a close.
Because the realm was still locked in the grip of a multi-year long summer, the temperatures at Harrenhal remained blissfully warm.
But the heat of the sun was nothing compared to the roaring, triumphant cheers erupting from the iron smelting district.
Roman's second, heavily modified blast furnace was finally complete!
When the master craftsmen saw that the towering forge—now properly lined with heat-resistant refractory bricks—had successfully contained the apocalyptic heat of the white-flame coke for a full day and night without cracking, they erupted into deafening applause.
The master smiths had already proven that even a tiny bloomery could produce master-crafted steel using the magical coke. Now, with a fully operational, water-powered blast furnace, Harrenhal was capable of mass-producing the finest, most resilient steel in the known world at a terrifyingly rapid pace.
Roman stood before the roaring furnace, his clothes ruined and his face completely smeared with a mixture of black soot and sweat. Yet his bright blue eyes danced with unrestrained excitement.
"The furnace holds!" Roman roared over the cheering crowd. "You are all heroes of House Whent! I am ordering the castle cooks to prepare a massive feast for you tonight! Go wash the soot from your faces, fill your bellies with ale, and then come see the steward to collect your bonus silver!"
Illuminated by the brilliant, pale white flames dancing atop the massive blast furnace, the exhausted but overjoyed craftsmen and Whent soldiers immediately began clearing the yard, singing their young lord's praises into the night.
A new, terrifyingly powerful era for Harrenhal was officially being forged in Dragonflame.