Despite its name, the kingdom of Westeros would ironically not actually control the entire continent from which it took its name until the year 323, long after the Nations golden age had ended.
Extract from "After the End Times" by Lena von Duskendale.
---
The sky was clear, the sun was shining, and not a hint of wind.
It would have been the perfect time to fly and visit every other seat in the North.
That wasn't happening though. I was done with flying in the north. I was making a few smaller trips, then I would eventually make one more trip even more north to the wall, and then it was back to the south for me. And hopefully, I would never have to visit this province ever again.
For now, I would enjoy Winterfell and it's marvels.
The sight of Wintertown was an impressive one as far as Westerosi towns went. The city(as it's new charter deemed it.) was impressively made, though not quite as majestic as White Harbor.
The city had a grid, though not a perfect one. It wasn't nearly as perfect as my king's Landing would be, but compared to the current King's Landing, it was a masterpiece.
The main road the city was based around, was the east road from Winterfell itself, and that give it a pretty decent starting point. The main thing that made the city different from others in the land was it's interconnectivity.
Like its castle, many of the buildings were made in such a way that you could go through them without having to go outside.
It wasn't as committed to that idea as it could be(the buildings which fit this criteria was the parts that were currently unpopulated until autumn.) but a truly massive part of the city had those second story pathways over the roads.
It was an interesting idea, but I could see that going really wrong in a city of millions, so none of that for king's landing.
I wasn't entirely sure how to improve the internal Northern Cities, to be honest. My preferred way would be through trains. If I could set up a train network I would be able to transport food and all the other resources the North needed no problem.
Problem was that my expertise had never been on trains. I had been marveled by steamships and in my youth, those had been what I memorized so diligently.
I knew the concept behind steamtrains, they weren't that different than steamships in inner workings, but that didn't mean I would be able to make one. It was like asking a swordsmith to make plate armor. Both were technically the same field, but the implementation was different enough that it didn't instantly translate between each other.
So that would mean that realistically we would be stuck with steamship for the foreseeable future. Great for all my coast settlements, and I would hopefully be able to get ships up the white knife to near Winterfell, but that was it. Further inland wasn't gonna happen. Not until I got my canals going anyway.
That meant that sleds would be how I transported goods in the North during winter.
Stark hadn't believed much in the concept. Nor in my skiis. Or… whatever the hell you called those tennis rackets you put under your feet to go over snow easy.
Stark had in general proven a much more neutral audience than Arryn, Greyjoy and Tully had been.
He hadn't been opposed to my ideas, but he hadn't been particularly interested in them either. In particular he had not enjoyed the idea of a biyearly council of the king and all the Lord Paramounts and Wardens either.
It wasn't quite the house of lords, but…
Actually, it wasn't like the house of lords at all. The point of the thing wasn't really a democracy, it was to get the leaders of my continent together to set a course for the future and to determine where the major investment in each province would happen the next years.
I was still the defacto and dejure dictator of the land, with all power that was not directly against my feudal limitations.
I could either set the stage for an absolute monarchy, or a constitutional one of some kind. Either was fully possible at this point.
I was going to go with a constitutional monarchy, though how far I would introduce democracy remained to be seen.
I had some idea of each region having a regional parliament, that answered to a royal continental council in King's Landing.
Whether that council would be made up of representatives from each region, one made up of crownlanders or a mixture, I wasn't sure.
One thing was for sure though, even if a provincial policy was set in the capital, if I wanted shit done, I would need to let each of the provinces have some say or input in how cash was spent.
The sheer size of Westeros wouldn't allow for anything else.
If my estimations were right, the North by it's lonesome was the size of Brazil, the fifth-largest country on Earth.
Trying to micromanage everything was never gonna work.
There would be no bullshit about "State Rights", or "No Taxes without Representation" though.
Every single province would operate under the same rules, the laws and the same rights and duties as everyone else. I had no plans of my Kingdom going down the same road the USA, with half the country up in arms due to shitty separate laws. One united law code was the best way to go, as history had proven time and again.
As for taxation, that was literarily going to be on top of the section of duties under the Westerosi Constitution. If you owned property, you paid the yearly taxes. End of story. The monarch owned the land everything was built on, every field that was tilled and planted belonged to me.
The smallfolk would have the right to sell their buildings, move wherever they pleased and to make new fields and houses wherever they wished(outside certain areas like my royal woods of course), but if you owned a building, a tilted field, or anything else, you paid taxes to your overlord, who in turn cashed it in to me eventually.
I wondered how Stark would react when I told him about my plans for the taxation reforms.
Maybe that would bring a smile to his face? Or maybe he would be cold and tell me how much the smaller lords would hate it? Probably that.
I had not gotten a warm reception at Winterfell. I hadn't gotten a horrible reception either, but for the most part, it had been a more quiet affair.
His son Walton was terrified of me for whatever reason, his brother Alaric was as cold as the reputation the North had about him during the time Alysanne came to the North.
He was basically Stannis if Stannis got along well with his family.
I got a bit more well along with his sons and wife who had all been interested in hearing tales from the crushing of the revolt on the islands.
Truth be told everyone at the castle had been eager to hear how thousands of Ironborn died horribly during two short and brutal battles. It was really kinda disturbing, to be honest.
All in all, Winterfell was courteous, but not warm. I hadn't expected tourneys or celebrations but… Well, this passive-aggressive coldness was something new so far in my reign. I couldn't remember it being this cold during my previous visits to the North, back when Aenys had been crown prince.
But that had been long ago. Back when Aegon was alive. I hadn't meet Walton back then. He had apparently been ward to some lord during that time. Was that the reason for this reception? That the heir was terrified of me?
Well, I wouldn't be staying much longer.
At least Wintertown seemed to love me. I had held court there several times now and frankly, the smallfolk had been a much more pleasant company their lord.
Quicksilver had woken quite a lot of awe in the townsfolk, and as I had let anyone who wished see her, to so free of charge.
We were still at the honeymoon phase of that relationship, but we'd leave before they began to resent how much food she needed.
Unlike the Northern Nobility, the smallfolk didn't resent my style either.
Admittingly it was a bit fancy but I had seen more than one annoyed scowl at my more subdued clothing. Well, subdued compared to my regular wear anyway.
Right now I was wearing a piece that was essentially an edited version of the Emperor's robes from Skyrim, with the septim dragon replaced by my three-headed firebreathing one of course.
It had not woken any annoyance in White Harbor, but here in the capital of First Men Culture, extravagance of any kind was frowned upon.
Well, that and my rings and jewelry.
The Northerners had not been impressed by my Royal regalia.
Well, the nobility anyway. The smallfolk had been properly awed, though the fact that I had been doing a good job at dispensing justice during my court here probably had something to do with it.
It was a much more impressive sight when the fancy-dressed lord actually did his duty in a regal manner after all.
Thankfully it hadn't been anything too difficult I had had to judge so far. A man had beaten his wife to death, and I had summarily cut his head off with Blackfyre to the cheer of the crowd(Bloodthirsty lot that they were). There had been other criminals too, but he was the only one of the level I needed to kill him for his crimes.
I should probably be really worried about how quickly I had adapted to killing people. I could only assume Aeny's upbringing had a lot to do with that.
I kinda wish I could just cold court in Wintertown all the time, given the reception I got there, but that road led nowhere.
It was Brandon Stark I needed to win to my side here, not merely his smallfolk. That was canon Aenys big fault. He had thought having the love of the common folk was enough to rule.
It wasn't.
I Needed to get Brandon Stark on board with my plans.
It was one of the reasons I had chosen not to offer a royal match to Tully when staying at Riverrun.
I had hoped to bind either Greyjoy or Stark to me through blood, as they were the most "Other" of my lord paramounts. A marriage would have smoothed and helped those relationships over a lot.
In hindsight that had been a mistake, and continuing this luck, the Tully girls had probably gotten married too while I was in the North.
If so that left only the Tyrells.
I had blood ties to house Baratheon already in my own veins, and I had betrothals to both Arryn and Lannister. I really wanted to secure another great house marriage, but with this luck, I would need to settle for a secondary house. God knows there were a lot of those.
The more powerful houses I had on my side, the easier it would be to force my constitution of Westeros down the throats of my nobility.
There would be a lot of things in it that would gall them, but they would swallow it. With fire if necessary, but I would much rather they swallowed it of their own free will.
My musings on the future were interrupted by the somewhat mundane, but out of nowhere occurrence of a cat leaping and killing a bird on the castle walls.
Both I and Humfrey turned to look at the cat as it bit the bird hard across the back as it trashed it with it's lower legs.
It was an usual sight, one I had seen countless times in Amsterdam, the Aegonfort, Dragonstone and the streets of King's landing.
What was not usual was the cat. This northern cat breed was something else.
I had expected most cats of the North to be breeds like the Norwegian Forest Cat, and they're certainly was Kitties like that here. But there were also these guys.
It was the fluffiest breed I had ever seen, completely covered in huge dense fur. Pretty understandable for a northern cat.
It also had round ears like a teddybear and round human-like pupils giving it expressions that seemed far more human than any cat should. It was a strange and somewhat unsettling sight.
"The Northerners truly have the most bizarre animals," Humfrey commented as the kitty began dragging the now dead bird away while looking at us like we were assholes for staying around here.
"It's just a cat breed Humfrey. In Dorne, they breed the common tame cats with their local wildcats to breed larger and more clever pets into existence."
"Umm… They do so here too your grace."
"Really?"
"Yes, there is a local breed of cats where they interbreed the Lynx population with their cats."
"Huh, that so."
Did that happen on earth too? I didn't know, about the only such pet I had familiarity with was the savannah cat, and I knew the dornish breed those.
I wondered how many other such fantastical hybrids existed in this world whether through magic or natural.
Whether the Valyrians really had used magic to infuse their genes with the DNA of dragons as some theories suggested was a question I did not know the answer to. I did, however, know they had been big into their Frankenstein shit on Gogossoss, where they had used slave women, captive beasts and sorcery to breed horrible chimeras.
If the timeline hadn't made it impossible, I would have assumed the product of these monstrous experiments was the origin of the more fantastical humanoids of the far far east.
The tales of the age of the long night spoke of Tiger women and a girl with a monkey tail, the tales beyond the five forts talked about the shryke snakemen, who if they were real, was the closest thing this world had to argonians, and around the hidden sea, there was supposedly men with large leathery wings who could fly.
The maesters dismissed all of it as nonsense, but the Maesters always would downplay any fantastical element of the world.
All of these tales predated the rise of Gogossoss, and the geography didn't match up with their locations anyway. Which meant if they existed, they were either natural, or there had been some other horrible society that bred forth Chimeras into the world.
K'Dath, Carcosa, and Stygai would be my picks as the most likely culprits in that case.
2 Cities named after creepy supernatural Lovecraft cities and one after the old land of darkness from Conan myths, and the origin of "The Shadow", whatever that was.
The world was filled with horrors, not merely to the North.
"How many mammoths do you think still lives beyond the wall Humfrey?"
"Mammoths? I… I don't know. Some thousands?"
"I rather hope it's more than merely a few thousands. One would need at least 2000 or so to serve as a strong breeding pool to avoid the full consequence of inbreeding."
Humfrey didn't answer but looked mighty uncomfortable.
"That's, of course, assuming I could get a decently sized population south of the wall. Which seems rather tricky unless I allowed giants to pass the wall in strength."
"I would not recommend putting that suggestion to lord stark."
I chuckled.
"So far I have avoided making him outright hate me, and I would rather prefer that remain the same when we leave. A king can be feared or he can be loved and he can rule effectively in either case. He cannot do so if he's hated, however."
"That has the air of a quote behind it."
"Nah, just something I made up just now. It's very much true, however."
I turned back to gaze out over the city.
"It is best for any ruler if his subjects love him. Morons and cynics will say that fear is stronger, but they are fools. People will go above and beyond for men they love, whereas if they merely fear their ruler, their loyalty will evaporate the moment any reason to fear him is gone."
The contrast between how the men who loved Daemon Blackfyre and Eddard Stark had reacted after their deaths compared to how no one cared about the memory of Tywin and Daeron was proof enough of that.
No one except his family had truly loved Daeron the second, and when he was gone no one had rallied behind Aerys the bookworm or Maekar the Kinslayer. He and his son Egg had been forced to fight for loyalty.
As for Tywin… He was a man who was feared more than he was hated. But he WAS truly hated, along with all his children, and thus his house would likely go down the path of extinction in the near future(or maybe only Tyrion would survive if the tv show was any indication.) as all would abandon them due to hating the golden lion.
That would not be my legacy. I would be loved, feared and respected by my people. My smallfolk would love me, the Lords would respect me, and the Ironborn would fear me.
Pissing off Stark by suggesting I allow giants back into the North wasn't gonna happen.
It was not a hill I was planning on dying on. Unlike the right of the first night, or taxation.
"I must say, your grace. You have changed a lot since putting on that crown."
"Anyone who is not changed when they claim imperium, is a fool Humfrey. It shows they do not take their new duties seriously. When you don a crown, you HAVE to change. Elsewise you'll get killed or never get anything done. Imagine if instead of crushing the revolts against me, I had instead tried to negotiate with the rebels. I might have tried that in my youth. And I would have looked like a fool and a weakling."
"I am a man who love and prefer peace Humfrey. I have always been one. But there are times when there is time for the sword when a dialog isn't welcome. When you crush a man, and he bends his knee, you must help him back unto his feet, else wise no man will ever bend to you again. If he defies you, you must give him fire and steel."
"You're full good quotes today, your grace."
I chuckled.
"Mayhaps I should write a book for kings. A guide for my successors to good rulership."
That… wasn't a bad idea actually. I could write a governing version of Sun Tsu's art of war.
It was something to think about at least.
---
It was a warm day in general, but the heat from where Rickon was lying was as if he was leaning up against the glasshouse.
He was currently lying on a beam in the Dragonstable his father had made for the king. Below him lay a dragon.
Of all the tales his father and the old folk had told him, the ones he'd always liked the most were the stories of monsters.
It wasn't that he didn't like a good story about a warrior and great men, but he'd never really cared about all that boring stuff, of who was who in the north. Unless he'd meet them before, he just couldn't remember who had what sigil.
The stories he really loved though, were the ones with monsters in them. Giants who ate the flesh of men and rode the great and terrifying mammoth. The others and their pale spiders. The thing came in the night at the wall.
And of course, Dragons.
Dragon stories were amongst his favorites. So when he had heard that the king himself would visit with a dragon, he had so excited.
The moment the feast welcoming the king was over, he had gone out to see the dragon.
He had expected it to be incredible, scary and awesome. He hadn't expected it to be so beautiful.
The beast was massive, towering over the largest of bulls and horses, tall as several buildings in wintertown. Massive batlike wings, teeth longer than his forearm, and a hide of silver scales.
And when it took flight, it was like a flying torch of silver.
And it was incredible.
His grandfather had forbidden him from seeing the dragon without guards, and he didn't get to see it more than once a day for a brief moment. Not that he let that stop him.
It was easy to get in and out of Winterfell with the stable being directly up against the wall. At least if you had some familiarity with climbing, which he did. He and his brother had grown up climbing every single corner of this castle to their mother's despair.
It had been easy for him to get out to the outer walls then a short jump down to the stable roof and in through one of the openings near the top.
From there it had just been a couple of tumbles down to a beam, then he lied down and waited for the dragon to return.
When it had returned the first time, it had come back with a dead white bear in its jaws. He had watched in silence, fascinated as it breathed fire on the carcass and ripped the cooked meat apart.
The bear was many, many times larger than he was, and the dragon crunched its skull between its teeth the same way he would bite down on an apple.
It was mesmerizing.
Ever since he had sneaked to watch it each day, to take in its marvel. He wondered how it would be like to fly upon it's back as it took flight.
If had been braver he might have asked the king for a ride.
He liked the king. He was sociable, quick to tell tales and he joked when he spoke, completely unlike his father. He had also killed a lot of those evil Ironmen, which was always good. It was proper for a king to put those evil Ironborn in their place.
His grandfather, however, did not like the king. At all.
He really didn't get why either.
He had overheard him and father complaining about how the king was decadent(whatever that meant) with his clothing, but frankly, he wasn't dressed that much more differently than Lord Manderly, and grandfather had nothing but praise for him.
It was weird. Still, Grandfather did not insult him the way he generally did with men he didn't like. Actually, he didn't act much like how he usually did ever since the king came.
Usually, he would welcome guests with open arms and a smile, or tell them to leave with a sword across his knees.
Now he was just quiet, didn't speak much unless spoken to, and spent way more time alone with the king than he ever did with anyone else(And unlike his private talks with lord Manderly, he didn't have a smile afterward either.
It was like his usual passion was all gone.
Father was also not fond of the king, but unlike grandfather, he was generally not a warm person in general, so the change wasn't as easy to spot.
Rickon was pulled out of his mix of wondering about family and mesmerizing over the dragon when he heard voices coming from outside the building.
The got louder as they got closer and he scooted closer to the center of the pillar.
One of the voices was the king and the other was… his grandfather?
Well, that wasn't good. But then again he had remained unseen here for days, with none of the visiting villagers having seen him.
"-begin the draining sometime in the next few years. I refuse to build a road directly through the neck. That's begging for an under traveled road."
"As you say, your grace. The crannogmen who live by the coast will not be pleased though, I can tell you that."
"They'll come around eventually. If I can drain the neck, they'll sit on a pretty massive piece of very fertile land. This would be a start on that."
Finally, they came into the barn.
"I still say we don't need to fly. The spot isn't far from here, just a day's ride. I could get some 50 riders to guard us and-"
"We fly stark." The king interrupted him, though not harshly.
"Now, when we arrive we can-"
The sound of a drawn sword sounded loud and clear.
"Humfrey?"
"There is someone up on the beams your grace. An assassin most like."
Crap. Crap, crap crap.
"That so?"
The sound of movement. Something large. The dragon's head rose up over the beam. His breath caught as a pair of silver orbs stared down upon him.
"I would recommend dropping your weapon assassin. I'll give you five seconds to yield before Quicksilver drags you down here. One."
"WAIT." He squealed as he got to his feet.
"Rickon?!" His grandfather exclaimed in a worried tone. That lasted for one brief moment before it became rage.
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING BOY, GET DOWN HERE, NOW!!!"
This was going to be bad, he could feel it.
"Maybe we should get the boy a ladder to get-" the king's voice stopped as he got moving.
He jumped down on a lower beam before quickly descending along one of the standing beams.
The king looked impressed. The knight looked awkward with his sword like he wasn't sure whether to hold it ready or not.
Grandfather looked furious.
"And I stand corrected." The king said somewhat bemused.
His grandfather was anything but amused.
He swallowed. This was gonna suck.
---
Out of its many provinces, only the grand duchy of Sothoryos ever enjoyed "special laws" unique to it. It alone amongst all of the Kingdom's continental and island holdings carried the label of "Colony".
The reason for this was the extremely volatile position of the grand duchy.
Despite being the largest single province of the nation by a wide margin, Sothoryos was also the least populated(at least by Westerosi) province in the entire kingdom. The local brindlemen who bent before the Iron Throne provided the vast majority of the land's accounted population. Even with these included, the duchy only had 3 million subjects of the crown in 150 AC.
Constant disease, attack by hostile brindled men, and the extremely hostile local fauna led to a very unstable province, where martial law and forced quarantine was commonplace.
It was not before the year 172, over a hundred years into the Duchy's history that Westerosi maesters finally began to make headway against the continent's diseases, especially against the Red Death, the most devastating diseases on the planet.
Extract from "The Empire from the West" by Daemona Von Riften.