100AC.
With Norhall reborn and Skagos prospering under new order, Hadrian turned his gaze to the two silent isles that had long lain dormant under his domain—Molksyr to the east, and Skane to the north. No longer did the people of Skagos rely on Hadrian or his former elves or known to the skagosi as hadrians trusted council for every tool, trade, or trinket. In secret and in open guilds, the Skagosi had learned to shape glass with their own hands, to brew whisky of fine northern smoke, and to cut and set jewels from the earth's bounty. Hadrian had taught them what to do. Now they knew how to do it alone. And so, with Skagos strong and self-reliant, Hadrian turned his mind to greater purpose.
Expansion to territory his only in name at least up until now.
Molksyr was a wild place, older than memory and older still than any map drawn by maesters or men. Once, long ago, it had been the seat of House Stane, a harsh and reclusive line who preferred the cry of gulls to the roar of courtly games. But the Stane lords had turned their backs on the island centuries ago, choosing instead to build anew on the eastern cliffs of Skagos, nearer to the trade winds and the whale-roads, where their banners could still catch salt and sky. Their old hall, left to the rot and wind, had been swallowed by forest and forgotten by all save crows.
Now, no banners flew on Molksyr. No hearth burned. No dogs barked in the yard. The trees had come back with a vengeance—twisting birches and black-needled pines, their roots fat with rain and earth, clutching stone and tomb alike in their grip. Moss crawled like velvet across ancient stairwells. Thorns grew fat on the bones of sheep left long ago. Molksyr had grown quiet—but not dead.
The first to arrive were Hadrian's wardens—grim-faced men in gray and green, cloaks clasped with tokens of bone and obsidian. They brought with them surveyors, scribes, and stone-readers, trained in the old ways, the careful ways, learned beneath the vaulted halls of Norhall. They scoured the shoreline and combed the woods, careful not to break what they did not understand.
They found no people. No trace of fire or feast. But the signs were good. The southern shores teemed with fish, and a kelp as thick as a man's wrist grew in waving gardens beneath the tide. Further inland, they spoke of rich black earth where mushrooms sprang in fairy rings, and of warm cliffs that steamed at dawn as if the island breathed through its bones.
Still, there were questions only one man could ask, and answers only he could find.
On a moonless night, Hadrian crossed the narrow sea.
His vessel did not stir the water. No oar touched salt. It moved as if carried by the will of the sea itself, guided by runes etched in glowing relief along its hull—ancient signs, older than Old Valyria, older even than the First Men. He landed at the strand beneath the cliffs and did not speak. His cloak was black as the water and studded with flecks of iron like stars. His staff glowed at the base, humming softly as it kissed the ground.
He walked alone, as was his way. Not to claim, not to conquer, but to listen.
Hadrian moved through forest and fog, through ancient glades where moonlight danced on dew-wet leaves. He walked where the land told him to walk. He laid his hand to stone and heard what it remembered. He whispered to the earth, and the earth answered.
It was on the third night, in the high hills to the island's north, that he found what he was looking for. The ground here was dark and slick with minerals, and the wind whistled a different song. He peeled back moss and brush with a whispered word, and beneath it, the earth split like fruit. A shallow crevasse yawned wide, and within it gleamed a vein of iron—but not the dull red sort that rusted in the breath of air. No, this metal was black as crowfeather, but when touched, it shimmered faintly green, and sang beneath the skin, a low and humming chord that vibrated in the bones.
And beneath the iron, deeper still, thin lines of gold revealed themselves. They ran in slender threads through the rock, not in clumps or nuggets, but like capillaries, branching and intertwining like the veins of a sleeping dragon, each one glowing faintly with an inner warmth. The stone here was not dead. It pulsed, faintly, as if remembering something it had not known in thousands of years.
Hadrian stood at the edge of the cleft until dawn. He said no words. No spell passed his lips. He only watched, and listened.
When the sun finally rose over the sea, he turned back toward his ship.
"Molksyr shall rise," he said softly, to no one but the wind. "Not for war. Not for pride. But for work."
But Hadrian's gaze did not linger long upon Molksyr, for he was a man—or god, to some—who did not pause to admire what had been won when there remained ground yet unclaimed. The wind shifted again, colder now, curling in from the far north where Skane lay crouched like a beast beneath the fog, waiting.
No sails ever made for Skane. The Skagosi did not speak of it openly, save in drunken murmurs or hushed warnings passed to restless children. In the old tongue, it was called "Ereg nûm," the "Isle of Bones." Its blackened shores had drunk deep of blood long ago, and some said the land itself had been twisted by it—made sour and wrong.
Once, it had been rich with life. Farms terraced the cliffs. Villages clung to the rocks. The people of Skane had worshiped their own gods, carved into whalebone and basalt, strange and smiling things with too many arms.
Then came the Feast.
The old tales said famine gripped the isle first—whether from failed crops or cursed winds, no man living knew. What followed was worse. Madness. Blood. The dead devoured. Neighbor turned on neighbor. Whole families vanished overnight. When Skagosi longboats finally reached its shores, drawn by the smoke and the screaming, they found no survivors. Only chewed bones, fires still smoldering, and one man hanging from a tree, laughing even as he choked.
No one had set foot there since. Not willingly.
But Hadrian did not ask permission of the dead.
He came alone.
No ship cut through the sea. No oars dipped, no sails snapped. One moment the island was empty—and the next, he stood there, cloak black as crow's wing, the wind combing his black-shot hair. The dawn broke behind him, painting the cliffs in soft red and violet, and he walked the ruined paths of Skane with bare feet, his staff ringing softly against the stone.
Salt stung the air. Trees twisted low, as if bowed by old guilt. Houses stood like broken teeth, sagging and swallowed by moss. There was no life—but there were memories, coiled in every stone, thick in the breathless hush.
"I do not come to judge," Hadrian said, placing a hand upon the old gate of a shattered longhouse. "I come to understand."
No ghosts answered. No spirits shrieked from the dark. But the land listened.
For nine days and nine nights, Hadrian remained.
He carved runes into the soil with the toe of his boot. He whispered spells in tongues older than Westeros, older even than Valyria—some of them learned in places far removed from this world, long ago. From the Black Hills of Dakota. The sacred tongues of stone and flame.
He burned cedar in hollowed-out stone. He smoked white sage. He sang old prayers that no one but the wind remembered, prayers for peace, for healing, for the dead who had never been buried.
And on the tenth dawn, the island stirred.
Beneath the ash-covered cliffs to the northeast, a sapphire vein was revealed, jagged and glimmering deep in the bones of the earth, caught in veins of quartz and white stone. No pick had touched it. No man had marked it. But there it was, waiting.
And farther south, where the crags opened like gaping mouths, he found copper, but not the dull green scrap of old coinage. This copper gleamed, rich and bright, like beaten flame. A metal that remembered the sun.
When his work was done, Hadrian came to the ruined village at the island's heart.
There, where once the cannibals had feasted, he raised a single obelisk of stone, shaped not by hand but by will and spell. It stood tall and narrow, its sides smooth as glass, the surface marked only by a single rune—a symbol of silence and memory, neither judgment nor pardon.
At its base, he lit a fire of sweetgrass, cedar, and tobacco. He cast crushed bone into the flame. Then he knelt, and in a voice not heard in centuries, he spoke the ritual taught to him by the elders of a world now lost—the Ghost Dance, in a tongue woven from earth and grief.
The fire did not rise.
It sank.
Into the soil. Into the stone. Into the bones.
The wind stopped. The silence deepened. The land exhaled.
Skane was not made new. But it was no longer damned.
Hadrian stood and turned his eyes back to the sea. Behind him, the obelisk watched like a sentinel.
Ahead, a people waited. A future waited.
The time to settle had come.