My family was still in our camp in the mountains near Mereen. My mother was a bit weak the year after my birth so we stayed for some time and later we were contracted by the Lhazareens in Hesh to protect them from the harassment of some minor Khalasars, which is a horde of Dothraki riders under a minor Khal. Hesh is one of the three cities of Lhazar and it's the closest to Mereen, connected to it by trade routes passing by the Khyzai Pass. My father only dealt with major Khals with tens of thousands of riders so he had no qualms about accepting the contract and garrisoning in Hesh, especially that my mother needed prolonged rest to nurse her body after the taxing labor she had gone through.
Hesh was a nice place to spend my early years. The Lhazareen are peaceful people who live in the lands of Lhazar south of the Dothraki Sea. This region is an extended expanse of pastures and hills on which the Lhazareen herd their sheep. I enjoyed the peace and my mother was healing peacefully, my father was drilling his men and occasionally send detachments of the army to accept contracts in nearby regions, rotating them to keep their battle instincts sharpened.
The foolish small-time Khals, who were enticed by the Lhazareen sheep and women, were killed mercilessly and their Khalasars were dispursed as vagrant riders seeking to be recruited by a better-fated Kahalasar. This was the first time I saw a real medieval battle withswords cutting men and spears piercing their innards. As much as it was disgusting and brutal as much as I felt I need to get used to it as I knew I will definitely see a significant amount of bloodshed in my journey to come.
Year 278 AC
I have been training for six months now and I have shown incredible progress that astounded everyone in my father's command room. His subordinates felt even safer that the future of the Company is even more secured with the development of a very suitable heir to the Commander position. I showed great promise in fighting with varied kinds of Weapons I handled one-handed weapons. I handled one-handed swords along with a shield, two- handed greatswords, dual swords, spears, bows, and crossbows. My knowledge f my previous life helped me learn effectively and try to bond with each weapon to see which fighting style would grow with me.
Of course, I am not even close to being considered a squire-level fighter in these varied weapons. Although I do not lack physical strength, I lack severely in training and experience. As a modern man, I know the importance of specialization as being a jack of all trades was never the way I sought. I just wanted to try everything. The naive mind of a youth historian seeing all these ancient weapons in the flesh, or steel, and having the opportunity to train with them was just like exposing a drug addict to all sorts of drugs ever made. It took me six months to satiate my lust and greed as I started to narrow down my focus. I wanted to specialize in a couple of routes to maintain my versatility to adapt to different situations on the battlefield but at the same time focus on a few weapons to achieve peak mastery. I focused on three aspects; long- range, mid-range, and close-range.
For long-range I started training in archery, particularly recurve bows as they offered more speed and explosive power and were less bulky to handle when compared to longbows. For mid-range I chose the glaive. Exactly the monstrous polearm that is mainly used for cutting than penetrating as my early life I will spend it in Essos where plate armor was not common so I mainly had to cut enemies with asmuch power and speed as possible. The glaive was the best option especially on the battlefield as it will allow me to dominate my surroundings and keep enemies at a certain distance as a swing of a glaive supplied with enough arm strength would certainly pose a threat to the best warriors in Essos. For close-range fighting, I chose a circular shield and a scimitar, a curved saber famous in Arabia and Persia. For emergencies, I designed ways to hide a Kukri dagger which had high lethality and almost instant death on impact, as well a couple of small black karambit knives which were the last life-saving weapons as I can basically draw and swing them to slit an enemy's throat in one fluid motion due to their crescent shape.
I never lacked teachers as every single aspect of combat had a master among the 20,000 killers my father commanded. I read countless books before about training and discipline and it was once mentioned that to master a skill one needs 10,000 hours of focused training. I planned a routine of 10 hours of training a day giving me a minimum of 3,500 hours a year. Since I had three aspects of training I needed a massive sum of 30,000 roughly to reach complete mastery in my desired combat techniques. This gives me a timeline of ten years to finalize this training and some extra time for some auxiliary skills like dagger- wielding and poison detection. I will prioritize my close-range combat and then expand my range step by step.
Of course, there is no guarantee that I will really reach that level of mastery by just training 10,000 hours as that would depend on my talent, but this sort of calculated target was motivating me to blaze through this tedious childhood ahead of me. Bear in mind that I was not born a great warrior, I was just a kid with nothing to brag about but my insatiable curiosity about history and warfare. I needed a plan to stick to and bear with it till I forge my own indomitable will of discipline and perseverance.
I was not worried about my safety though in those ten years as I basically had all my bases covered. First of all, I was the next Company Commander so I was never left without protection. And in secret, the scattered deputies in the Company who were of northern descent considered me the uncrowned Crown Prince of the North, since our ancestor Jon Stark never renounced hiskingship. I was always protected by many guards seen and hidden around me. It took me some time to recognize that some of the servants around our household, although they hold normal jobs like a squire, a cook, or a horse hostler, they actually have higher combat strength than their jobs are entitled. I figured they are hidden guards and confirmed this with my father who was rather impressed that I noticed them.
Moreover, medieval combat was not just based on techniques it also depended heavily on physical strength, as simple brute strength can often break any superior technique. I had no worries in the physical aspect as I was nothing like a normal human, I was a wolf. My Wolf Shifter bloodline comes with a massive strength enhancement, though not obvious now, as I grow older and get closer to my maturity, my body is forged and strengthened continuously as if to prepare it for the phasing.
In the past five years, my father introduced me to a group of sworn shields who would become my close men in the future. For now, they are three with the eldest soon approaching his eleventh name day and the youngest almost my age. The youngest was my cousin Alaric Stark, who was a very talented warg, although right now he was limited to small birds like crows, the ten crows he controlled at such a young age were evidence of his extraordinary talent and supreme potential as a spymaster. The middle one was a distant cousin of mine who had great potential to be an exceptional warrior due to his apparent stalwart build and talent in Axe-wielding. The eldest was Meng Tian of the Meng clan, the second-strongest house in the Company of Rose after the Winter House(Stark). Tian was an extremely talented young warrior, who although had prominent skill in Spearmanship, his greatest gift laid in his steel sharp mind. He was almost guaranteed to succeed his father in being the unofficial master-in-arms of our house and officially being the strategist and military deputy commander under my father in the company.
Meng Tian's father, my father's deputy, is called Meng Wu of Yi Ti. Meng Wu was basically a brown-skinned hulk. He was a former YiTish General. Yi Ti is a nation and region in Essos, east of Qarth and the Bone Mountains and bordered by the Jade Sea to the south. Nearby islands in the Jade Sea are Leng and the Isle of Whips. North of Yi Ti are the Great Sand Sea, the Shrinking Sea, and the Bleeding Sea; a great river runs south from the Bleeding Sea through Yi Ti to the Jade Sea. East of Yi Ti are the Mountains of the Morn, the Shadow Lands, and the city of Asshai. In the Common Tongue, things relating to Yi Ti are known as "YiTish".
Meng Wu the man who had a figure of giant bronze statue rippled with muscles so buffed that they looked like metal carved into the shape of a man. He towered over everyone I ever saw as he stood at 7 feet high, yet ironically he could definitely be called a handsome man. He had a square face with smooth slightly brownish skin and unkempt spiky hair that gave him the image of a dangerous and savage beast. His weapon of choice was a huge blunt mace that looked like an enlarged cylinder of cast steel. He was schemed against and branded a traitor of Yi Ti and reduced to slavery protecting Spice caravans. My father met him and recruited him in Volantis a year before I was born. His intimidating presence and martial prowess were one of the reasons that my father's Silent Army reached a level of discipline never reached before by any of our ancestors. He was a man of a zealous belief that the greatest army is the most disciplined one.
Since I set my training routine in motion a month ago I decided to approach my father about an equally crucial plan, as I am approaching my sixth name day and I thought being one year older will somehow elevate my chances of convincing him. I slipped into his make-shift solar of a tent and coughed loudly as he raised his calm blue eyes from the letters he was previewing and gazed at me with curiosity, "Spit it out lad, these are the looks of request I see in your eyes. What do you need?"
I scratched my head sheepishly and with a cheeky grin said "Father I need to borrow some gold from you, lots of it."
"Why?" he asked momentarily with obvious curiosity in his eyes.
"Father, you must have realized by now that the Hour of the Wolf is nigh. It is time to reclaim what is ours, not some trivial Lordship of Winterfell, but our birthright of Kingship. We have the pure unbent wolf blood in us and that by itself entitles us to grasp everything that lies between the Wall and The Neck. The cursed Targaryens drove their own dragons extinct for more than a century since Aegon III the Dragonsbane. The North is in chaos, with the fucking descendants of the Red Kings growing in strength to rival the Starks. The damn Boltons have grown to such an extinct that they had the guts to flay men again."
I heaved a heavy sigh unmatching with my childish face, "Father our time has come, we will proclaim loudly again that we are the Royal House Stark, Kings of Winter. We will wear the Crown of Winter proudly again and let the wolves howl endlessly in every area of the North."
I fidgeted anxiously as he gazed wistfully at me with his eyes seemingly phasing through space to gaze at the distant horizon.