-Chapter 153-
-1st day of the 1st moon of the year 299 AC-
-POV MC-
The rest of the year passed quietly without another incident, despite the defeat I suffered at Meereen against Daenerys to keep control of Slaver's Bay.
I wasn't too affected by this loss because I didn't care much about what happened in Essos. For me, it was a kind of game: if I won, so much the better; if I lost, too bad.
In the end, I didn't even come out a loser. I managed to capitalize on my defeat and erase a large part of the debt I had incurred thanks to Daenerys, so everything was fine in the best of all possible worlds.
I took care to rest and enjoy the wonderful life I had with Arianne, who was becoming closer to me as the birth approached.
Since the death of her uncle and her quarrel with Ellaria, Obara, and Nymeria, I felt she relied more and more on me to live. I didn't immediately understand why, but I realized later that she and Tyene were afraid as the birth of our child approached.
They were afraid that I wouldn't recognize our child as my heir if it was a girl.
I found it surprising that doubts about the sex of our future child only appeared now because I too had many doubts for a while and had come to the point that I would never let my future empire be controlled by my daughter, however intelligent and capable she might be.
The world I am in is far from being a just world where genders are on an equal footing.
I want my dynasty to continue for at least a thousand years and letting a woman inherit an empire is an unstable factor.
All emperors must have a designated heir to avoid a bloodbath during the transfer of power.
The mere fact of giving birth could kill a woman, so how could I logically take the risk of naming her as my successor?
Not to mention the arrogance of the lords of Westeros.
None of these lords will bend the knee to a woman, which will create tensions within the imperial family and, in the worst-case scenario, a civil war.
The examples are numerous: Rhaenyra Targaryen, although the legitimate heir and designated for years by her father King Viserys, had to fight throughout her life as heir and queen to keep her place until her death and the death of almost all her children.
Jeyne Arryn, although not a queen, also suffered the contempt of the male members of her family who repeatedly tried to take power.
Rhaenys Targaryen, the queen-who-never-was, rider of Meleys, legitimate heir of her father the late prince heir, cousin of the lord of the Stormlands, married to the most powerful and richest lord of Westeros, mother of Laenor Velaryon, already having a dragon at the time of the Great Council, was first sidelined by her grandfather for his second son and then rejected by the entire kingdom except for a few for a weak king, without a dragon, without any sons, and with a wife producing stillborn children one after another.
In any case, apart from that, our days were peaceful and filled with laughter and joy, although Tyene was still in mourning and not joyful. She pushed Arianne to come out of her shell; the arrogant and well-meaning young woman who arrived in the capital over a year ago was long dead and buried.
Now Arianne focuses on her duties as queen and on learning how to rule with a seriousness I had rarely seen, even during my years as an apprentice at the Citadel.
She established good relationships with the surviving houses following the incorporation of the Stormlands, Riverlands, and Crownlands into the Royal Domain at an incredible speed, and she helped, in the name of the crown, the poor, the needy, and the orphans, something she learned by befriending Margaery Tyrell, much to my surprise.
I was very surprised the day I realized that the two had formed an alliance to separate me from Cersei and to reprove her because they were both afraid of her. I imagine they are afraid of what will happen once Cersei gives birth to a son for me.
To be very honest, even I do not know what I would do if such a scenario were to occur. It would be a good way to incorporate the Westerlands, but thinking it through properly, I had already greatly weakened the structure of the Kingdom by destroying and incorporating the Iron Islands, a good part of the North, the Riverlands, the Stormlands, and the Stepstones into the Royal Domain.
Managing all this was not easy because due to the very low number of educated people and the monopolization of writings by the Citadel, few people outside of the maesters, whom I had no trust in, could be of any help to me in managing my territories.
Even some nobles were not more educated than peasants, so everything had to go through me and the castellans I appointed to take care of a fief and the surrounding lands.
My well-deserved vacation was therefore not as idle as one might think, but at least I was at home with my new 'family.'
With all the rebellions suppressed, I noticed that all the people, and I mean ALL the people who had resentment or even doubts about me had stopped having any and flattered me in all sorts of ways whenever I organized a banquet or went to watch an interesting fight at the Colosseum, sometimes offering me swords, armor, priceless jewelry, furniture, and even exotic animals to win my favor.
The power I had demonstrated as well as the establishment of my immense army had caused radical changes in the perception people had of me. In fact, in their eyes, I had become an invincible and indomitable existence.
How could I know?
Very simple: once I understood that betrayal could come from anywhere, I simply asked Connor and Bryan, both responsible for the Bloody Moon, my personal intelligence and assassination organization, to infiltrate or bribe servants from all the noble houses.
I therefore now had at least one person who could provide me with information in each noble's household, whether they were knights or princes. That's how I learned, for example, that Viserys had already fathered two bastards this year and that a third was on the way.
I didn't tell him about it because the mothers of these two bastards were just whores and he knew full well that both were pregnant. So I asked Chataya to warn them in my name about what they could and couldn't do under threat of being accused of conspiracy against the throne and treason against the kingdom. Then I asked her to take care of the three mothers; who knows, maybe they and their bastards could prove important in future events.
If Rhaenyra had managed to keep the two bastards Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White by her side, she would have most likely won the civil war against her half-brother Aegon II, which was later called the Dance of the Dragons and marked the beginning of the fall of House Targaryen.
---
I sighed deeply as I observed my reflection in a unique and beautifully decorated mirror, a gift from the slavers of Myr with whom I had maintained good cooperative relations since we had developed a preliminary cooperative agreement regarding the creation of glass, crystal, and repeating crossbows.
'It has finally happened,' I thought, having a thought for Valeria who left me long before my dream came true.
"You look worried," said Arianne, pressing against my back and hugging me from behind.
"I'm not worried, I'm simply turning a page in my life for good and it's difficult."
"What are you planning to announce today?" asked Arianne, knowing I wouldn't be nervous for something as trivial as a meeting with delegations from Essos, given the power I had.
I smiled mysteriously before turning to my wife and said:
"I am going to announce something that will shake the entire world. I am going to announce the creation of my greatest dream. Everything I have always wanted is now within reach. That's what I'm going to announce, my love."
"That still doesn't tell me what you're going to announce," said Arianne, pouting in my arms.
I whispered in her ear, amused by her reaction:
"I will announce the creation of the Empire of Westeros."
She looked up, surprised, and then said: "What will that change for us?"
"Everything, it will change everything. As an empire, Westeros will finally be united once and for all. We will be able to gather military and economic power as we please and, in addition, we will be able to create colonies all over the world as long as we manage to conquer lands. The very perception that people will have of us will change. A king and an emperor are not equals, and I am not the equal of my predecessors. I am much more, and I intend to show it to the rest of the world."
"You thirst for power," said Arianne, looking at me as if she were seeing me for the first time.
"Everyone thirsts for power," I said without really answering her 'accusation.'
"That's a good thing. I hope our son will be like you," she said.
"I am sure he will take the best from both his parents," I said, smiling.
"That would be for the best," said Arianne.
---
-POV Joffrey Lannister-
"You were supposed to arrive three days ago, weren't you?" Mother said to me, looking displeased with her already round belly.
'She couldn't resist spreading her legs for him,' I thought with disgust as I looked at the woman who was supposed to be my mother.
"I wanted to stay a little longer on my lands to see what I could do with those ruins," I said in a displeased tone.
I noticed from the corner of my eye the slight warning she threw at me and I said coldly:
"I am not stupid, and I know perfectly well how to act in his presence. I am not foolish enough to follow in the footsteps of all those who opposed him. I will prove to him that I am useful."
'And that it is me he should choose to become the next Duke of Lannister and Warden of the Westerlands,' I thought silently, looking furiously at Tommen, who didn't even dare meet my gaze.
Since the revelation that I was a bastard and not the previous king's son, nothing was right anymore.
I had become the laughingstock of everyone, the object of ridicule.
Logically, I should have hated the man who shattered my dream, and that's what happened for a very long time, but it only took seeing his power once to realize how lucky I was not to be the true son of Robert Baratheon.
'If I were truly his heir, I would have been beheaded without a second thought or burned alive,' I thought.
All the anger and resentment I harbored towards him slowly turned into a kind of admiration and respect.
'Deep down, we're not so different.'
Just like me, he is cruel. Just like me, he is a visionary.
The proof, we both had the idea to create a royal army, which secured his position.
I glanced disdainfully at Cersei, thinking that she had told me that such an idea would never work, and here he had done it.
'Idiot, Grandfather and Uncle Tyrion were right: you are not as intelligent as you think you are,' I thought inwardly.
We are two sides of the same coin. He was the bastard born a prince while I was the prince born a bastard. If he could rise so high, there is no reason I couldn't rise at least as high as my whimpering brother.
"THE KING AND QUEEN"
I turned in the direction of the sovereigns and then thought with a small cold smile: 'As long as he understands and sees that we are the same, I will be the next Duke of Lannister.'