The smell of the Narrow Sea was the smell of ancient, unforgiving stone and cold salt.
For three years, Rhea Royce had breathed the thin, starving air of the high mountains, surrounded by the paranoid whispers of the Eyrie and the desperate, caged anger of the Gates of the Moon. But as the long procession of House Royce crested the final ridge and the ancestral seat of Runestone came into view, Rhea took a breath so deep it seemed to fill her very soul.
The air here was heavy. It tasted of brine, crushed pine needles, and the smoky fires of a castle that did not hide from the world, but stood defiant against it.
Runestone was a brutalist masterpiece of dark gray granite. It lacked the soaring, delicate white marble of the Arryn stronghold, but it possessed something far more valuable in these darkening times: true, unyielding strength. Its walls were impossibly thick, angled to deflect the punishing coastal storms and the siege engines of any invading host. The bronze runes carved into the lintels of the gates hummed with a quiet, sleeping power that Rhea could feel vibrating in the marrow of her bones.
"We are home," Andar murmured beside her, his breath pluming in the crisp winter air. He sat tall in his saddle, his hand resting instinctively on the runic sword Rhea had forged for him years ago.
"We are," Rhea agreed quietly.
She did not look like the fifteen-year-old daughter of a highborn lord returning from court. She wore a heavy riding habit of boiled leather and dark bronze wool. Her pale hair was braided tightly against her scalp, a practical style taught to her by a man who knew how easily loose hair could be grabbed in a melee. At her hip rested the silver-chased scabbard of the Bravoosi water-dancer's blade, a gift from the deadliest knight in the Vale.
As they rode through the massive, iron-reinforced gates and into the bustling main courtyard, the castle staff paused their labors to bow and cheer for their returning Lord.
Bronze Yohn Royce dismounted from his massive destrier, his heavy boots hitting the cobblestones with the weight of an anchor dropping. He was immediately greeted by the castellan and the master of horse, demanding ledgers and reports on the grain stores. Yohn was a man of the earth; he wasted no time on pleasantries when winter was snapping at their heels.
Rhea dismounted gracefully, ignoring the stableboy who rushed forward to offer a stepping stool. She handed the reins of her mare to the boy with a quiet word of thanks and turned toward the keep.
Standing on the steps of the main hall, flanked by her ladies-in-waiting, was Lady Alys Royce.
The older woman looked pale, the stress of the last three years etched into the fine lines around her eyes. She had remained at Runestone to manage the household and the lower valleys while her husband and children had been trapped in the political quagmire of the Arryns.
When Lady Alys's eyes fell upon her daughter, she froze.
Rhea stopped at the base of the steps. She felt a sudden, sharp pang of uncertainty. She knew what her mother saw. She had left Runestone as a gifted, strange child who spent too much time in the soot of the forge. She had returned as a hardened, lethal weapon, shaped by Lyn Corbray's cruel hand and the bloody skirmishes of the mountain passes. The callouses on her hands were thicker; her gaze was flat, assessing the courtyard for threats before she even recognized faces.
"Mother," Rhea said softly, dropping into a formal, perfectly executed curtsy.
Lady Alys descended the steps, ignoring the mud that instantly stained the hem of her fine blue gown. She did not comment on the leather armor, nor the strange, foreign sword hanging at her daughter's hip. She simply reached out, pulled Rhea into her arms, and held her tightly.
"You smell of horse sweat and weapon oil," Lady Royce whispered into Rhea's braided hair, her voice trembling slightly.
"I can have the maids draw a bath, Mother," Rhea offered, the tight coil in her chest loosening just a fraction at the warmth of the embrace.
"Later," Lady Alys said, pulling back to frame Rhea's face with her soft hands. Her eyes scanned the hard, pragmatic lines of her daughter's jaw, the lack of childish softness, and the cold, ancient wisdom burning in her gray eyes. "You have grown into a storm, my sweetling. A beautiful, terrifying storm."
"The world is burning, Mother. We need a storm to put out the fires," Rhea replied evenly.
She did not wait a single day to reclaim her true domain.
The next morning, long before the sun had crested the horizon, Rhea walked across the frosted cobblestones of the courtyard and stepped beneath the heavy archway of the Runestone armory.
The blast of heat that hit her face felt like a welcoming embrace. The familiar, rhythmic CLANG-CLANG-CLANG of the heavy shaping hammers echoed off the vaulted stone ceilings.
Hugh the Blacksmith, his beard thicker and grayer than it had been three years ago, was barking orders at a trio of sweating apprentices. He paused mid-shout as the heavy wooden door creaked open, turning to see who dared interrupt the morning forge.
When he saw Rhea, he dropped his heavy iron tongs. They hit the dirt floor with a dull thud.
Hugh did not see a highborn lady. He saw the master of the flame. He saw the girl who had stared into the heart of the coals and commanded the metal to bend to her will.
"My Lady," Hugh breathed, his voice rough with coal dust. He immediately dropped to one knee, bowing his head respectfully. The three apprentices, young boys who had only heard the whispered legends of the Bronze Maiden, scrambled to follow suit, kneeling in the soot.
"Rise, Hugh," Rhea commanded gently, walking past them to inspect the massive granite anvil. She ran her hand over the cold, pitted surface. It felt like greeting an old friend. "The fires are running too cold for the deep iron. You are conserving coal."
Hugh stood up, wiping his brow with a filthy rag. "We are, My Lady. The Lord commanded it. With the war in the Riverlands, the trade routes are freezing up. The coal merchants from Gulltown have doubled their prices. We are making do with what we have."
Rhea's mind instantly began to dissect the problem. They were in the opening stages of the War of the Five Kings. The Lannisters were bleeding the Riverlands, Robb Stark was marching, and the supply chains of the entire continent were fracturing. If Runestone ran out of coal, they could not forge steel. If they could not forge steel, they could not replace broken weapons or outfit new levies.
"Open the reserves," Rhea said, turning to face the master smith. "I will speak to my father about the ledgers. But from this moment on, the fires do not sleep. We have two years of lost time to make up for."
"What are we building, My Lady?" Hugh asked, a spark of the old, eager fire returning to his eyes. He knew that when she took the anvil, miracles happened.
Rhea unbuckled her boiled leather bracer, setting it on the workbench. "We are not just outfitting the foot soldiers, Hugh. I want the Vanguard—my brother's personal guard—armored in something new."
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, heavy iron spindle. Wrapped around it was a thread so fine it was nearly invisible, shimmering with a strange, translucent pale light. It was the multiversal polymer, the silk generated by her hidden shooters. For three years, she had been secretly harvesting the excess fluid, spinning it into a raw material.
"I need your best leatherworkers," Rhea instructed, her eyes tracing the grain of the heavy boiled leather hanging on the racks. "We are going to layer the canvas gambesons. But between the layers of linen, we are going to weave this thread."
Hugh peered closely at the spool, his thick brow furrowing. "What is it, My Lady? It looks like spider's silk. It won't stop a blade."
Rhea didn't argue. She took the spool, unwound a length of the silk, and strung it tightly between two heavy iron vices on the workbench. She drew a common steel dagger from a nearby rack and handed it to Hugh.
"Cut it," she challenged.
Hugh snorted, raising the dagger. He brought the edge down hard across the tightened thread, expecting it to part like a cobweb.
The dagger stopped dead. The silk did not snap. It didn't even fray. The steel edge of the dagger, however, rolled slightly upon impact, the metal whining against the impossible tensile strength of the polymer.
Hugh gasped, dropping the dagger as if it had burned him. He stared at the unbroken thread in absolute horror and awe. "By the Seven... it's stronger than chainmail. But it weighs nothing."
"It is the craft of the Old Gods," Rhea lied, leaning into the myth that kept her secrets safe. "If we weave this into the padding beneath their breastplates, a man could take a direct thrust from a lance and walk away with bruised ribs instead of a pierced lung. The Vanguard will be unbreakable."
She spent the next week locked in the armory.
She did not wield the hammer for the standard swords; she left that to Hugh and the apprentices. Instead, Rhea used her Expert Item Construction gift to guide the leatherworkers. It was a painstaking, maddening process. The Westerosi craftsmen had no concept of multiversal polymers or composite layering. She had to teach them how to punch the leather and weave the impossible silk in a cross-hatch pattern, anchoring it securely to the seams of the canvas.
When the first prototype was finished, Andar Royce was summoned to the yard to test it.
He stood in the center of the frosted courtyard wearing the new gambeson. It looked like standard, dark brown padded armor, though it lacked the bulky, restrictive weight of true ringmail.
"It feels like I'm wearing a winter tunic," Andar noted, twisting his torso to test his mobility. He looked highly skeptical. "Are you certain about this, Rhea? If Ser Kaelen swings a live blade at me, I don't want to explain to Mother why I'm missing an arm."
Rhea stood a few paces away, holding a sharpened, castle-forged broadsword. "Trust the forge, Andar. Brace yourself."
Without warning, Rhea stepped forward, drawing a shallow Pulse of breath, and drove the point of the broadsword directly at her brother's gut.
Andar shouted in alarm, instinctively bracing for the agonizing bite of steel.
The tip of the sword struck the canvas. The fabric tore, but the blade immediately caught on the hidden, cross-hatched layer of multiversal silk beneath. The kinetic force of Rhea's thrust was instantly distributed across the entire weave of the chest piece. The sword bent dangerously, bowing under the pressure, but it did not penetrate.
Rhea stepped back, lowering the sword.
Andar looked down at his stomach. The canvas was ripped, revealing the shimmering, unbroken web beneath, but his skin was entirely unpunctured. He looked up at his sister, his face pale.
"You have made me impervious to arrows," Andar whispered, the tactical reality of the armor crashing over him.
"Nothing is impervious, brother," Rhea corrected firmly. "A crushing blow with a warhammer will still break your bones, and Valyrian steel will likely shear right through it. But against standard iron, castle-forged steel, and common arrowheads? Yes. You will hold the line."
The quiet rhythm of the forge was shattered a fortnight later by the bloody realities of a fractured kingdom.
Rhea was in the high solar, standing quietly by the hearth while her father held council with his sworn swords and minor bannermen. The Lords of the Coldwater Burn and the Tolletts of the Grey Glen were present, their faces grim, their voices raised in anger.
"It is the Sistermen, My Lord, it must be!" Lord Coldwater slammed his fist on the heavy weirwood table. "Three fishing villages burned to the ground in the past moon. The storehouses looted, the women taken, the men slaughtered in their beds. They are sailing longships out of the Bite, using the cover of the winter storms to hit the coast and vanish before the dawn."
Bronze Yohn Royce sat at the head of the table, his face carved from dark stone. "The Sistermen are sworn to the Eyrie. Lord Sunderland would not dare authorize raids on the Vale coast without Lady Lysa's leave."
"Lord Sunderland is a smuggler and a pirate wearing a lord's cloak," scoffed old Lord Tollett. "With the War of the Five Kings raging, there is no Royal Fleet to police the waters. Stannis Baratheon is locked on Dragonstone, and the Lannisters are bleeding in the Riverlands. The pirates know the Vale is paralyzed by Lady Lysa's cowardice. They are testing our borders."
"Then we will teach them a lesson in stone and bronze," Yohn commanded, standing up, his massive frame dominating the room. "Andar! Marshal a hundred heavy horse and two hundred foot. We will march for the northern coast. We will set watches on the bluffs, and when they land again, we will drive them back into the sea."
"Father."
The word was spoken softly, but it cut through the bluster of the war council perfectly.
The Lords turned to look at the fifteen-year-old girl standing by the fire. She wore her dark riding leathers, her pale hair braided tight, the Bravoosi blade resting easily at her hip. Many of the bannermen who had not seen her since she was a child looked at her with a mixture of confusion and mild offense. A war council was no place for a maiden, even one as famously strange as the Royce girl.
"This is not a matter for the household, Rhea," Yohn said, his voice carrying a warning rumble.
"It is a matter of tactics, My Lord," Rhea replied, stepping away from the hearth and approaching the map table. She did not ask for permission; she simply claimed the space. "Marching three hundred men to the coast is a waste of resources and a guarantee of failure."
Lord Coldwater sputtered, his face flushing red. "And what would a girl know of repelling sea-raiders?"
Rhea looked at him, her gray eyes flat and entirely devoid of intimidation. She did not see a proud lord; she saw a man failing to understand the terrain.
"I know that heavy horse cannot charge on a shingle beach covered in sea-ice and driftwood," Rhea stated, her voice calm, projecting the absolute authority of a master analyzing a flawed design. "I know that a host of three hundred men requires supply wagons, campfires, and noise. Longships do not have deep drafts. The pirates will see your fires burning on the bluffs from ten miles out at sea. They will simply row further south and raid a different village while your knights freeze in the dark."
The room went silent. The tactical logic was undeniable.
"They are hitting the coast because they believe we are slow," Rhea continued, tracing a calloused finger along the jagged coastline drawn on the parchment map. "They strike, loot, and launch before a raven can even be penned. If you want to catch them, you do not build a wall. You set a trap."
Bronze Yohn looked at his daughter, a complex mixture of lordly pride and fatherly concern warring in his eyes. He remembered the blinding speed she had displayed in the yard against Lyn Corbray. He remembered the oath he had sworn to let her learn the bloody truth of the world.
"Speak your trap, Rhea," Yohn commanded, overriding the muttered protests of his bannermen.
"We know they are targeting the storehouses," Rhea said, her finger tapping a small, isolated inlet known as Gull Cove. "This village has the deepest natural harbor on this stretch of coast, and their winter granary is full. It is the logical target. We do not send an army. You send a strike force. Twenty men, lightly armored, hiding inside the granary itself. No fires. No horses. When the pirates land and breach the doors... we slaughter them in the bottleneck."
Andar Royce, standing beside his father, let out a slow breath. "It is a butcher's work. Close quarters in the dark. It will be brutal."
"Pirates do not respect honorable combat, brother," Rhea said, her hand dropping to the pommel of her Bravoosi sword. "I spent three years learning how to kill men who fight dirty. Let me lead the strike."
"Absolutely not," Yohn roared, slamming his hand on the table. "I allowed you to squire for a madman to sate your curiosity. I will not send my daughter into a pitch-black room with twenty cutthroats!"
"You named me the weapon of this House, Father," Rhea challenged, her voice rising to match his, the stone in her blood flaring to life. "You made me forge the steel! If I cannot wield it in defense of our people, then take the hammer back and lock me in the solar to sew banners!"
Father and daughter locked eyes. The air in the solar felt thick enough to cut. Bronze Yohn saw the unwavering, terrifying resolve in her gray eyes. She was not asking for glory. She was stating a tactical necessity.
"I will lead the strike force," Andar interjected quickly, stepping between them before the argument could escalate. He looked at his father. "Let her come with me, Father. She knows close-quarters fighting better than any knight in this room. And... she has her gifts."
Yohn Royce stared at his son, then looked back at Rhea. He saw the cold, rational killer she had trained to become. He closed his eyes, a heavy, exhausted sigh escaping his chest. The realm was changing, and the old rules of chivalry were burning away.
"Twenty men," Yohn finally growled, his voice rough. "You leave at nightfall. Andar, if she takes so much as a scratch, I will have your hide."
The inside of the Gull Cove granary smelled of old wheat, damp earth, and the nervous sweat of twenty Royce guardsmen.
It was the dead of night, the wolf hour. Outside, the freezing winds of the Narrow Sea howled around the wooden structure. Inside, the darkness was absolute.
Rhea stood perfectly still near the heavy oak doors, wrapped in a thick, dark cloak. Her Pulse breathing was currently suspended, her lungs drawing slow, deep, silent drafts of air to conserve her energy. Her eyes, adjusted to the pitch-black, tracked the silhouettes of Andar and the guardsmen waiting in the shadows behind her.
She did not need to see the beach to know what was happening. She had eyes in the sky.
High above the roaring winter storm, flying above the cloud cover, Horus circled. The mental link between Rhea and her multiversal familiar was a cold, sharp tether in the back of her mind. She could "feel" the ocean through his predatory gaze.
They are here, Rhea's mind translated the sudden spike of icy recognition from the falcon.
"Swords ready," Rhea whispered into the darkness. Her voice carried perfectly, lacking any tremor of fear. "Three longships. Roughly fifty men. They are dragging the boats onto the shingle."
Andar drew his runic sword. The soft hiss of steel leaving scabbards echoed through the granary. The men were tense, terrified by the overwhelming numbers, but they held their ground, bolstered by the strange, impossible calm of their Lord's daughter.
"They outnumber us two to one," Ser Kaelen whispered from the back of the room, his heavy axe gripped tightly in his hands.
"Numbers only matter in a field," Rhea replied coldly. "They have to come through a door that is ten feet wide. And we have the dark."
The sound of heavy, crunching footsteps on the frozen gravel outside grew louder. Muffled voices, speaking in the harsh, guttural accents of the Three Sisters, argued over the best way to breach the doors.
THUD.
A heavy axe bit into the oak.
THUD. CRACK.
The rusted iron hinges groaned in protest. The pirates were not using a battering ram; they were simply hacking their way in, confident that the village was asleep and defenseless.
Rhea unclasped her heavy cloak, letting it fall silently to the dirt floor. She drew the Bravoosi blade. It made no sound.
"Horus," Rhea projected her thoughts up into the storm. "Blind them."
The heavy oak doors finally shattered inward with a splintering crash.
The pirates poured into the doorway, holding torches aloft, roaring a battle cry intended to terrify the sleeping villagers.
But as the torches illuminated the interior of the granary, the pirates did not see cowering peasants. They saw a wall of hardened Royce guardsmen, shields locked, spears leveled.
Before the pirates could even react to the ambush, the temperature in the doorway plummeted instantly.
From the darkness of the rafters above, Horus plummeted like a stone. The massive snow falcon did not attack with his talons. As he swooped over the heads of the invading pirates, he opened his beak and unleashed a concentrated, swirling vortex of absolute, magical frost.
The torches were extinguished instantly, the flames frozen and snuffed out by the unnatural cold. The vanguard of the pirates screamed as the freezing vapor bit into their exposed skin, turning the moisture in their eyes and lungs to ice. The sudden, terrifying darkness and the agonizing cold threw the invaders into absolute chaos.
"Now!" Rhea shouted.
She didn't wait for the guardsmen. She engaged her Pulse.
The hyper-oxygenation turned her blood to lightning. She shot forward, a blur of motion in the chaotic gloom. She didn't fight like a Westerosi knight; she fought like Lyn Corbray. She fought like water.
She slipped beneath the wild, panicked swing of a blinded pirate, driving the Bravoosi blade upward into his jaw, killing him instantly. She didn't pause to pull the blade free; she let his falling weight dislodge the sword, spinning on her heel to face the next man.
A massive, bearded pirate lunged at her with a boarding pike.
Rhea flicked her left wrist. A strand of invisible silk shot out, sticking to the pirate's chest. She yanked hard, pulling him off balance, and stepped perfectly into his stumbling momentum, drawing her blade cleanly across his throat.
The bottleneck of the shattered doors became a meat grinder. The pirates, blinded by the sudden frost, terrified by the screaming falcon above them, and crammed together in the narrow opening, could not use their numbers.
Andar and the Royce guardsmen pushed forward, their spears finding easy marks in the panicked mob.
But Rhea was the true terror of the dark.
She moved with an efficiency that was beautiful and horrific. Her Expert Item Construction gift allowed her to perfectly assess the structural weaknesses in the crude, mismatched armor of the pirates. She saw the rusted chain links, the rotted leather straps, the exposed joints. Every strike she made was a killing blow.
A pirate captain, recognizing the silver-haired girl slaughtering his men, roared in fury and charged her, swinging a heavy, two-handed greatsword.
He was fast, his strike carrying brutal, lethal weight.
Rhea's Pulse breathing was burning her muscles, pushing her to the absolute limit. She couldn't dodge the wide arc of the greatsword in the crowded space.
She reached into the deep, silent well of her mind.
Father Time.
The chaos of the melee thickened. The blood spraying from a severed artery hung in the air like red jewels. The pirate captain's roaring face was frozen in a mask of slow-motion fury, his heavy sword descending at a crawl.
Rhea stepped calmly inside the arc of the greatsword. She raised her Bravoosi blade, aligned the razor-sharp edge with the gap between the pirate's iron helm and his leather gorget, and thrust.
She released the temporal hold.
Time snapped back into place with a sickening crunch. The pirate captain collapsed, the silver blade protruding from the back of his neck.
The death of their captain, combined with the impenetrable shield wall of the Royce guards and the freezing, shrieking phantom bird attacking from above, broke the pirates entirely. The survivors turned and fled back toward the beach, dropping their weapons in their desperation to reach the longships.
"Let them run!" Andar bellowed, grabbing the shoulder of a guardsman who tried to pursue. "Hold the line! Secure the doors!"
Rhea stood amidst the carnage. The granary was silent save for the groans of the dying and the howling wind outside. The air smelled strongly of blood, voided bowels, and the sharp, clean scent of ozone from Horus's frost.
She slowly lowered her sword. Her chest heaved, her lungs burning as the Pulse faded, leaving her trembling slightly from the massive adrenaline dump.
Andar stepped over a pile of bodies, a torch in his hand, illuminating the grim scene. He looked at the dead men scattered around Rhea. There were at least a dozen, all bearing the precise, fatal cuts of the Bravoosi blade.
He looked at his fifteen-year-old sister. Her pale face was splattered with blood, her gray eyes dark and dilated. She didn't look like a highborn lady. She looked like a god of war carved from marble.
"You were right," Andar whispered, his voice thick with a mixture of awe and fear. "It was a butcher's work."
"It was necessary work, brother," Rhea replied, finding a clean patch on a dead man's cloak to wipe her sword. She sheathed the blade with a soft click. "The dead do not raid."
The return to Runestone was a triumph, though a quiet, grim one.
When the strike force rode back through the gates, carrying the severed head of the pirate captain and not a single Royce casualty, the doubts of the minor bannermen vanished completely.
Lord Coldwater and Lord Tollett looked at Rhea not with the dismissive annoyance of old men dealing with a child, but with the wary, respectful silence reserved for seasoned commanders. She had proven that her mind was as sharp as her steel, and that she was willing to bloody her own hands to protect the Vale.
Bronze Yohn Royce met them in the courtyard. He listened to Andar's report, his face impassive, though his dark eyes tracked the dried blood on Rhea's leather armor.
When the lords had dispersed, Yohn motioned for Rhea to follow him into the quiet sanctuary of the family godswood.
They walked in silence among the ancient, twisted pines and the solemn faces carved into the heart trees. The noise of the castle faded away, leaving only the sound of the wind through the needles.
Yohn stopped by the small, freezing pool at the center of the grove. He looked at the reflection of the sky in the dark water.
"Andar told me what you did in the granary," Yohn said, his voice a low, heavy rumble. "He told me you moved faster than any man he has ever seen. He told me the air itself turned to ice around your enemies."
Rhea stood perfectly straight, her hands clasped behind her back. "I used the tools available to me, Father. The element of surprise, the close quarters, and the fear."
Yohn turned to look at her. The fatherly concern was gone, replaced by the heavy, evaluating gaze of a liege lord looking at his most powerful asset.
"I asked the gods for a smith to forge our armor," Yohn said softly. "They gave me a warlord."
"Are you displeased, My Lord?" Rhea asked smoothly.
"I am terrified, little bird," Yohn confessed, the admission stark and honest. "The War of the Five Kings is tearing the continent apart. The Lannisters have gold, the Starks have numbers, and the Baratheons have a fleet. We have the mountains, and we have you."
He reached out, his massive, calloused hand resting heavily on her shoulder.
"You proved yourself on the coast. You are no longer just a daughter of this House. You are its shield," Yohn said, his voice echoing with absolute authority. "From this day forward, you do not just command the forge. You sit at my right hand in the war councils. You have a voice in the defense of Runestone."
It was the ultimate validation. It was the dismantling of the patriarchal cage that had threatened to trap her since the moment of her reincarnation.
"Thank you, Father," Rhea said, bowing her head. "I will not fail you."
As she left the godswood and walked back toward the towering keep of Runestone, Rhea's mind was already racing, analyzing the new parameters of her existence.
She had secured the absolute backing of her father. She had the loyalty of her brother. She possessed a Vanguard armored in multiversal silk, a mastery of lethal combat, and the magical gifts of time and frost.
But as she looked up at the sky, watching Horus circle high above the towers, she knew it was not enough.
Runestone was secure, but the Vale was still paralyzed by Lysa Arryn's madness. The Eyrie was a blind spot, a festering wound of paranoia and Littlefinger's hidden poison. If Rhea was going to protect her home, she could not just wait for the war to come to her.
She needed to expand her web.
She returned to her chambers, ignoring the bath the maids had drawn for her. She sat at her heavy oak desk, pulled a piece of fine parchment toward her, and dipped a quill in dark ink.
She began to write a letter, not to a lord or a king, but to Lady Anya Waynwood of Ironoaks.
It was a letter filled with polite, courtly pleasantries, discussing the upcoming winter and the successful trade of mountain iron. But buried within the carefully chosen words, using a cipher she had devised based on the metallurgical properties of Waynwood steel she had discussed with Anya years ago, was a clear, unmistakable message.
The coast is secure. The Bronze is ready. It is time to look toward the sky.
Rhea sealed the letter with the runic stamp of her House.