The third day of Thaddues' stay at Ghost Hill arrived beneath a sky as clear and merciless as those before it. Dawn spread across the arid expanses of Dorne in sharp gradients of harsh gold and pale, blinding white, casting the castle's ancient sandstone walls and the cracked terrain beyond into stark relief.
Under ordinary circumstances, such brilliance might have drawn admiration, but this morning few among the thousands of smallfolk, laborers, and highborn lords within the perimeter paid any heed to the horizon. Their attention remained fixed instead upon the great work unfolding across the flats below, now drawing toward its final stage.
For three consecutive days and nights, an unprecedented host of laborers, craftsmen, maesters, and guards had toiled from first light until long after dusk under Thaddues's command. Stone and earth alike had been broken and reshaped by their hands, the work extending far beyond Ghost Hill's central courtyard and spilling into the surrounding valleys, remaking the very contours of the estate itself.
In that time, thousands of intricate runes had been carved into stone, etched into packed earth, and set within reinforced foundations. They bound the land in a vast lattice, anchoring at the four outer corners of Ghost Hill's borders before drawing inward to converge upon the castle itself, as though the seat of House Toland had been made the heart of a great and unseen design.
To the untrained eye, the arrangement resembled neither fortress nor monument. Instead, it sprawled across the land like a vast, ordered lattice of faintly glowing lines and runes, its purpose unknowable to any who lacked the sight to understand it. Strange sigils—ancient in form yet alien in arrangement—had been carved and inscribed into stone and earth alike, binding the entire expanse into a single, deliberate whole.
None among the gathered crowd could discern its meaning. Only the man who had conceived it understood the language it spoke.
Rumors had spread across Dorne faster than ravens could fly, twisting with each telling. In the shadow of the Red Mountains, some swore the foreign Lord Peverell meant to challenge the dominion of the Seven. Deeper within the dunes, others whispered he sought to rouse ancient horrors buried since the days of the First Men. Yet the most persistent tale was also the most impossible—that he intended to command the empty sky itself and draw rain from it by force of will.
Such claims would once have been dismissed as the babblings of sun-maddened fools. Dorne had long since learned that the heavens bowed to no man. Wells failed, rivers withered, and generations lived and died beneath an unfeeling sun that gave nothing and asked nothing in return.
And yet the Lord of House Peverell had already done the impossible since his arrival. They said he turned back the Reach's invasion as though it had never truly begun, breaking an advance that should have swallowed half the continent. Others claimed he was a dragonrider—an assertion many dismissed as impossible, for dragons were thought to belong only to Valyria and those under the Iron Throne's rule.
By midday, the gathering around Ghost Hill had swelled into a vast, ordered encampment of onlookers. Farmers stood in clustered groups beside silk merchants under the watch of royal guards, while sailors from the Stepstones and desert shepherds were kept to designated ridges and slopes. Nobles occupied shaded balconies and stone terraces, their attendants fanning them against the stagnant heat, while common folk filled the lower approaches beyond the cordons.
They had come from border villages and coastal settlements alike, drawn by hope, doubt, and the promise of witnessing what few would ever dare attempt—and all of it under strict royal sanction, for precautions had been taken against any consequence the ritual might bring, including the threat of sudden waters where none should fall.
At the leftmost edge of the site, Thaddues stood upon a raised stone platform, overlooking the completed runic formation. His gaze traced the interconnected pathways in silence, reviewing a design already measured and refined until no flaw remained.
He then heard the system speak.
--
"The option you had chosen matches the design perfectly, Host… but your strength is insufficient for what follows. If you proceed in this state, the land will resist you beyond endurance. Take the draughts. They are required if the ritual is to succeed."
--
Thaddues reached into the folds of his robes and drew out a small vial of thick, silver-tinted potion. He paused only a moment before drinking it down. The strengthening draught burned like liquid fire as it went down, settling into him with a steadying weight, bracing his body against what was to come.
Even with his current magic capacity after stepping in another level within soul arts. He still can't do the ritual on his own without relying to potion.
A year earlier, this ritual would have been impossible to do. Its foundation had not come from the knowledge given by the system, but from a dream he had in the Broken Arm. In that dream, he had not merely seen magic—he had heard it, the voices of the Children of the Forest weaving power into the world itself.
It was a fractured relic of weather-working from the age before the Breaking of the Arm of Dorne—the Invocation of the Tide. In its original, ancient form, it had been the apex of primal stormcraft, the very magic the greenseers had unleashed at the Isle of Faces to tear the continents asunder.
It was never meant to create water from nothing, but to seize dominion over the skies themselves—binding wind, pressure, and storm into a single obedient course. In the hands of the old sorcerers, such forces were turned upon the sea, driving its vast weight across the land like a crushing hammer. Thaddues, however, saw another path.
Armed with his System and a deep-seated hatred for the old gods, he stripped the ritual of its violent intent and bloody foundations, refining its cataclysmic energy into a work of deliberate defiance: a force meant not to drown the earth, but to heal it.
What remained was no longer a passive song of nature. It had become something else entirely: the Invocation of the Rain. A work of deliberate defiance against what the world would normally allow, refined into something that proved he was not a man to be trifled with.
"You still believe this will work."
Rowena Ravenclaw's voice cut through the air. Beside him on the stone platform, her likeness formed in the silver-blue light of the diadem upon his brow—less apparition than echo given shape.
In the days since, her presence had become familiar: sometimes advisor, sometimes observer, and increasingly a voice he no longer questioned.
Thaddues smiled faintly, wiping a bead of cold sweat from his brow. "You make it sound like I'm gambling in a tavern."
"Is it not a gamble?" she asked, studying the vast network below. "To bend the skies of an entire region with a ritual never tried at such breadth… your body will be made to endure its weight."
"A gamble depends on chance," he said, adjusting his posture while taking out another potion, a goldedn liquid in a vial, Felix Felicis. "This depends on preparation." he then drank the potion.
Rowena's gaze traced the interwoven runic paths. "I have seen commanders raise armies with less complexity than this."
"War is simpler," Thaddues replied. "It requires supply and command. These do not. Ordinary hands may carve them—but when I give them breath, every line must be perfect. If even one fails, the entire structure will collapse… and it will take me with it."
A quiet laugh escaped her, quickly lost to the wind.
They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the low murmur of the waiting crowd.
Eventually, she asked, "Are you nervous?"
"A little," he admitted. "The margin is thin when you are shaping weather across an entire land. One misstep, and the strain will turn upon me before the work is done."
"That is more honesty than I expected from someone presenting himself as invincible."
"Only fools feel nothing before defying reality," he said. "Arrogance belongs to crowds, not practitioners."
Rowena regarded him, then looked toward the dry horizon. "If this succeeds, it will outlive you."
"If it succeeds," he said, "the crops survive. That is enough." Thaddues didn't say anything about his goal of attaining immortality. There will be a perfect time for that.
"Do not pretend humility," she said quietly. "That is not your aim."
"No," he admitted.
Neither elaborated. The truth remained unspoken between them: a man who could bring rain to Dorne would no longer be a political figure, but a living myth.
A horn sounded.
The crowd fell silent.
Thaddues Apparated with a sharp crack of displaced air, vanishing from the platform and reappearing in the heart of Ghost Hill's inner courtyard. The crowd withdrew as he stepped forward into the center of the formation, the tension tightening like a drawn bow.
He stopped, closed his eyes.
"System start the ritual."
--
"Ritual initiated."
--
The moment the ritual began, the air across Ghost Hill shifted. Wind stilled where it should have moved, and moved where it should have been still. Across the runic formation, faint light stirred along carved lines like embers waking beneath stone.
Pressure gathered in the space between breath and silence, heavy enough that the crowd instinctively faltered.
Thaddues felt it before he understood it—not as knowledge, but as strain. His vision blurred at the edges as the world pushed back against the shape he was forcing upon it.
--
"Ritual has begun, Host. The sky is answering. Do not resist the pressure—guide it."
---
With a swift, practiced motion, Thaddues uncorked a second vial—a potent blend of Blood-Replenishing and Invigorating draughts. He downed it, coughing as the harsh potion forced his failing muscles to lock into place, overriding his body's desperate urge to collapse under the pressure.
He began. Ancient words rose from his throat in a steady cadence, heavy with meaning no living tongue should have held.
"Vaeven… Turados… Minus…"
The runes ignited.
A sharp silver light erupted across the trenches, spilling through the carved lines like liquid moonfire. A gasp rippled through the crowd.
He continued, his voice straining now, as though the air itself had grown heavy against his throat:
"Calidor… Exhal… Obdur…"
The glow surged outward, racing along the formation until thousands of symbols flared at once, burning in unison.
Then he spoke again—faster this time, the cadence tightening, the strain deepening:
"Numen… Pluvia… Aper…"
Magic surged through the anchors and into the ground, spreading outward before rising again as though the earth itself had answered. Thaddues felt it catch inside him—heavy, pressing, as if something vast had wrapped itself around his chest and lungs at once.
His vision began to blur at the edges. The world dimmed, then flared in deepening shades of red as pain bloomed behind his eyes. Blood warmed at his lashes, not as injury alone, but as the cost of being made into a vessel too small for what he carried.
He was mortal—no more than flesh and breath—yet through him a continent was being forced to speak.
--
Detected: The northern anchor is overloading. The Narrow Sea resists the pull, building pressure across the formation.
"The anchor is straining, Host. The sea will not yield. I am forcing the excess into the stone below… but your body is failing. Hold."
--
Thaddues bit through his lip and tasted blood. Still he refused to yield. The last strength of the draughts burned within him as he reached for the winds, seized them, and bent them to his purpose. They bucked and twisted like wild beasts beneath his grasp, but slowly, inexorably, he drove them upward into the wound he had opened in the sky.
The magic expanded far beyond the valley. Five luminous anchors tethered earth to sky as darkness spread overhead like ink in water. Storm clouds formed and rotated violently above Ghost Hill.
Rowena gripped the stone railing, her cloak whipping in the rising wind. Her gaze moved between the pillars of silver light and the lone figure standing at their center.
Thaddues did not move. Blood ran down his face, mingling with sweat. The diadem upon his brow shone with a cold radiance as he bore a burden that should have broken any mortal wizard.
Only then did she understand.
This was no mere display of power.
He had found a fragment of forgotten magic and carried it far beyond the bounds for which it had been made. Where others would have accepted those limits, he had challenged them.
And somehow, impossibly, the sky was yielding to him.
At Sunspear, Princess Dareya and other court advisers rushed to the balconies as the sun vanished behind advancing storm clouds. Heat collapsed into a sudden, shocking cold wind. Guards tightened their grip on their spears, looking up in disbelief.
"He had done it," She whispered.
In Salt Shore, fishermen and laborers paused in their work as the horizon darkened over the Narrow Sea. Broken docks stood beside fresh timber, and half-finished homes rose where the invasion had left ruin behind.
Far in the distance, beyond the coastline and the rolling hills, a pale pillar of silver light stood against the sky. Some swore they glimpsed others farther away, faint as ghosts upon the horizon.
No one knew what they were.
Yet no one seemed afraid.
Men set aside their hammers. Fishermen left their nets. Women emerged from temporary shelters with children at their sides.
The air grew heavy with moisture, cool and strange against skin long accustomed to Dorne's relentless heat.
They had heard the promise made by their Lord.
And as the clouds gathered overhead, the people of Salt Shore turned their faces toward the sky and waited.
In the Deep Desert, caravans came to a halt beneath the endless dunes. Men and beasts stood still, not in alarm, but in quiet disbelief as the eternal sun dimmed for the first time in living memory.
From the western horizon, a wall of cloud advanced—vast and unbroken, rolling forward like a tide that had finally answered a long-forgotten call. The heat began to soften. The wind lost its bite.
No one spoke loudly. There was no panic—only a slow, uncertain stillness, like men afraid to disturb a miracle as it approached.
Some dismounted. Others simply stared, as if waiting for something they had been told would one day come.
The desert had never changed.
Until now.
Back at Ghost Hill, Thaddues maintained his grip on the magic, forcing his trembling body to stand tall. Then he heard the system voice.
--
"Ritual successfully complete Host, the sky has bent to your will. The strain is passing through you now… and you remain."
--
Thunder rolled across the Dornish sky as if the heavens themselves had been split. Rain fell in a torrent across the entirety of Dorne.
It came as both ruin and release. Stone, sand, and parched fields drank deeply. Crops revived within minutes. Dry riverbeds swelled into rushing streams.
For a moment, stillness held across the gathering.
Then came the rain in full.
Joy spread across Dorne. In Ghost Hill, the crowd roared. In Sunspear, men and women laughed openly as water struck stone and skin alike. In the desert, hardened warriors lifted their faces to the downpour, some weeping, others silent in disbelief.
Dorne rejoiced.
At Ghost Hill, thousands of voices rose into a single, deafening chant that drowned even the thunder:
"Wizard of Dorne!"
"Wizard of Dorne!"
"Wizard of Dorne!"
Thaddues gave a slight, exhausted nod. No words followed.
He look at the window panel in his sight as he heard the system voice resounding in his again.
---
"Congratulations, Host, on achieving another milestone. You have bent the laws of this world and created a new spell. As a reward, the system grants you a Master Card."
---
He was stunned.
A Master Card?
After a year of dormancy during its major update—and now, upon its completion—the system had finally given him a Master Card.
TBC
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