128: Chapter 128 The Bottom of the Stargazing Tower

Night fell. The West Wing of The Citadel. The bottom of the Observatory Tower.

Archmaester Marwyn's laboratory.

The place was less of a room and more of a lair crammed to its absolute limits with books and star charts. The Walls were covered with hand-drawn star charts, anatomical diagrams of Dragon Clan bones, and maps detailing the distribution of The Old Gods' weirwood roots.

On the star charts, the orbits of every star were marked in alternating red and blue ink. Bundles of yellowed manuscripts were piled on the bookshelves, some left half-open, with dragonglass fragments pressing down on the pages as paperweights.

Scattered across the floor were shattered dragonglass samples and several extinguished glass candles, their wicks burnt black.

The air was thick with a mixture of dragonglass dust and old parchment—a scent that would never be found in any respectable laboratory in The Citadel.

Archmaester Marwyn stood behind a table piled high with star charts.

He was around fifty years old, with a rugged face, and wore a valyrian steel collar—engraved with dragon runes of Old Valyria, gleaming with a dull silver light under the Dragonglass Lamp.

The edges of the collar showed faint signs of wear, left behind by years of constant use. His fingers were as rough as a blacksmith's; he looked less like a maester and more like a mercenary, with several old scars across his knuckles.

He was currently shaving a new glass candle with a dagger, the wax shavings piling up on the table. The blade of the dagger gleamed coldly under the candlelight.

Drogon pushed open the door.

Marwyn did not look up. He casually stabbed the dagger into the table and, with fingers covered in wax shavings, slid over a cup filled with a deep red liquid.

"Oldtown mead. Not that fake Arbor wine from King's Landing.

Melisandre's raven arrived three days ago—she said you are the successor of the Storm Ancestor Dragon.

Since then, the runes on my Valyrian collar have been burning hot. Sit. Drink."

Drogon took the cup but did not drink.

His dark brown, round pupils swept across the map of the weirwood root distribution on The Wall under the dim light of the Dragonglass Lamp.

The map marked all known weirwood sites across Westeros, with the location of the giant weirwood in the North heavily circled in red ink.

Beside it, a line of handwritten text read—"Roots reach three hundred feet below the foundations of The Wall." The handwriting was scrawled but written with immense force—the tip of the pen had punctured several small indents into the parchment.

"Varys said you could help me enter the secret vault. That relic in the vault—have you seen it?"

Marwyn picked up another cup of mead and downed half of it in one gulp. His voice was raspy and rushed, as if he were running out of time.

"I saw it once. Ten years ago. That night, all the Dragonglass Lamps in the secret vault went out on their own.

I thought a rat had knocked over a lampstand. Then I heard the sound of pages turning—something was flipping pages in the deepest part of the vault. It wasn't a human hand; the pages were turning on their own. I lit a glass candle and walked all the way to the end—and I saw that thing.

It is no ordinary relic. It is a book. The cover is made of weirwood bark, and so are the inner pages. The words on the pages weren't written—they grew out of it.

Every time a page turns, the words emerge from the bark on their own, then slowly fade away before new ones appear. It is still writing. It has been writing for eight thousand years, and it is still not finished."

Late at night. The third underground level of the Observatory Tower. The entrance to the secret vault.

The door to the secret vault was not located in any of The Citadel's towers.

It was on the third underground level of the Observatory Tower—a circular archway forged of valyrian steel.

The steel ripples on the door shimmered with dark silver waves under the Dragonglass Lamp—ripples identical to the patterns on a valyrian steel blade, formed after countless folds and hammerings.

There was no keyhole on the door, only a weirwood handle that had been worn incredibly smooth.

The wooden grain of the handle gleamed faintly white in the darkness, feeling as though it were coated in a very thin layer of patina.

Marwyn gripped the handle with his right hand and pressed his left hand against his collar.

The dragon runes on his collar glowed faintly in the darkness, dark silver light flowing along its edges—not lighting up all at once, but section by section, as if an invisible hand were lighting the runes one by one.

A very low hum echoed from within the door, like some ancient Seal being temporarily awakened and then suppressed.

The door slowly swung inward, the hinges making an incredibly heavy grinding sound.

A cold draft from deep underground rushed out of the crack in the door, carrying the scent of old book pages and damp tree roots—not a musty smell, but the scent of living roots.

Behind the door was a spiral stone staircase extending downward.

Every ten steps along The Walls of the stone staircase, a Dragonglass Lamp, long extinguished, was embedded.

The dragonglass fragments in the lampstands had dimmed to only the faintest residual glow, looking like dying grey stars in the darkness.

Drogon took out a dragonglass fragment harvested from the Dragonstone veins from his leather pouch, injecting a trace of extremely faint Bloodline energy.

The dragonglass lit up on its own in the darkness, its cold, ghostly blue light illuminating the spiral stone staircase.

As the beam of light swept across the stone steps, he noticed that every step was carved with runes of The Old Gods—not Old Valyrian, but even older, tree-like runes composed of lines rather than letters.

The carvings of the lines were very shallow but perfectly preserved. Those tree-like runes reflected faintly under the blue dragonglass light, looking like countless tiny rootlets spreading across the stone steps.

Marwyn walked ahead, his voice reflecting hollow echoes off the underground stone steps.

"The secret vault has seven levels in total.

The top three levels are those allowed by The Citadel's Conclave of Maesters—piled high with banned Dragon Clan genealogy codices and Valyrian magic book Incomplete Manuals.

The middle three levels lock away far more dangerous things—incomplete prophecy tablets excavated from the tomb of Azor Ahai, and the wildfire recipe manuscripts of Rossart, the pyromancer once favored by The Mad King.

The bottommost level—only I and two other dead men have ever entered. That book is on the bottommost level. The woman who calls herself Saara is also down there."

"A woman? Why is there a woman on the bottommost level of the secret vault?"

"No ordinary woman. She was already there when I first met her. She said she had been in the vault for sixty years. I didn't believe her. Then, using the tree-tongue of The Old Gods, she recited the weather on the day I was born. It was accurate down to the very hour the rain stopped."

The seventh level of the secret vault. The deepest chamber.

This was no stone chamber. It was a domed space naturally formed by weirwood roots.

Huge weirwood root Systems penetrated the rock walls from deep below The Citadel's foundations, their rootlets weaving into a dense net in mid-air.

Water droplets that had never evaporated for thousands of years clung to the branches of the root net, each droplet enveloping an extremely faint residual energy of The Old Gods—the droplets gleaming with a very pale, milky white shimmer under the light of the Dragonglass Lamp.

In the center of the root net, a thick book bound entirely in weirwood bark floated in mid-air—not held up by magic, but naturally cradled and suspended by the rootlets, like a fruit held aloft by a tree canopy.

The pages turned on their own without any wind.

Every few moments, another page would flip.

The writing on the pages emerged as they turned and slowly faded after they flipped, only for new writing to reappear—it was the blood of The Old Gods writing itself upon the bark fibers.

Every stroke was incredibly thin and faint, glowing with a very weak dark red fluorescence. The writing seeped out from inside the bark fibers, condensing into words on the surface, lingering for a few breaths, and then being absorbed back by the bark, repeating in an endless cycle.

Beneath the root net, an old woman sat cross-legged on the gnarled roots.

She wore a long-faded grey robe, the style of which did not belong to any known order or religion—no maester's collar, no Cultivator's belt, and no embroidered seven-pointed star.

Her hair was completely white, yet her skin was not saggy, and her eyes were a very pale greyish-white—not blind, but a natural degradation of pupillary pigment from a long lack of sunlight, with a very thin ring of old grey-green still remaining at the edge of her irises.

A blank parchment booklet was spread across her lap, and in her hand she held a weirwood charcoal pencil with a charred tip. The sound of the charcoal pencil scratching across the parchment was extremely soft and faint.

Saara did not look up.

Her voice was raspy and calm, carrying a self-muttering rhythm characteristic of someone who had spent too long alone in the vault.

"Marwyn. You have brought a Dragon inside.

The Dragon carries the scent of the storm—when the Storm Ancestor Dragon was executed six thousand years ago, The Old Gods were present.

It was erased to protect the Evolution fragment. You are its successor."

Marwyn added in an extremely soft whisper behind Drogon.

"Saara. She says she is the 'Speaker' of The Old Gods.

The Old Gods have no written words, only tree-tongue. She is the one who translates tree-tongue into human language.

She has been translating in this vault for sixty years. That book—she calls it the forbidden book of evolution. She says The Old Gods began writing it eight thousand years ago."

Drogon walked under the root net. He gently pressed his palm against the weirwood roots.

A slow, ancient pulse that did not belong to the Dragon Clan Bloodline traveled from the roots into his palm—it was a remnant of The Old Gods' will.

It was even less personal than the will of the Storm Ancestor Dragon.

There was no anger, no trial, no memory of the storms from thousands of years ago. There was only a silent, hibernation-like waiting. The rhythm of the pulse was incredibly slow, each rise and fall spanning several seconds.

He looked up at the floating book. The pages had just turned to a fading record.

Before the ancient symbols on that page vanished, they were captured and translated by the System.

The writing flashed in the air like a dying firefly—dark red strokes rose from the bark fibers, glowing for a few breaths before slowly sinking back into the bark.

A System pop-up appeared.

"the forbidden book of evolution - Incomplete Chapter Translation — Observation Subject: No. 000-01 (Storm Devourer).

Observation Time: First Era, Spacetime Calendar Year 4400. Observation Content: This Dragon Clan individual has completed Elementary Fusion with the Evolution fragment. Following the Fusion, its Bloodline form is gradually transitioning from the Storm Ancestor Dragon to the Evolution Ancestor Dragon.

Estimated time for the transition to complete is approximately three thousand years. Note: This individual has been locked onto by the Heavenly Dao Arbitration Tribunal. The Old Gods cannot interfere. They can only record."

"Content emerging on the next page — Observation Subject: No. 000-03 (King of the Others).

Observation Time: Age of Heroes, end of the war between the First Men and the Children of the Forest.

Observation Content: In the name of The Old Gods, the Children of the Forest plunged an obsidian dagger into the heart of a First Men captive, transforming him into the first Other.

During the transformation process, the original objective was not to create an army of the undead—but to use the Others as a vessel to preserve another possibility of Evolution within the ice. The experiment has spiraled out of control. The King of the Others has broken free from the control of the Children of the Forest.

The Old Gods bear full responsibility for this incident."

The Night King is not the vanguard of the Abyss Demon Realm.

The Night King was created by The Old Gods and the Children of the Forest—using obsidian and a First Men captive.

He spiraled out of control. The Old Gods confessed their guilt in this book. Using the blood in their own veins, they have been writing this history for eight thousand years.

Saara finally looked up. Her greyish-white pupils met Drogon's vertical slits—she did not need light to perceive the presence of a Dragon.

Her voice remained raspy, but it carried an extremely subtle weight.

"You have read the passage about the Night King.

That is one of the earliest observation records.

The Old Gods created the Others to preserve another possibility of the Evolution fragment within the ice—because the way the Dragon Clan Bloodline preserved the Evolution fragment was too blazing, making it too easy for the Tribunal to detect.

The Old Gods wanted to use ice to hide Evolution. But ice could not hide it. After the Others spiraled out of control, The Old Gods spent eight thousand years trying to make amends for this mistake. This book—is the record of those amends."