Chapter 22.2- The Seadragon's Roar

We moved on after a few minutes, and the rest of our patrol was relatively incident-free. We finished one pass across our course and started another pass, a bit forward. We didn’t come across any settlements. A few fishing boats had suffered our boredom and we’d ended up filling a few cliff face caverns with flames to be safe and then went about the rest of our day flying and thinking. Igneel did the flying, I did the thinking. The Stepstones would need multiple things to get them off the ground. The first was a good survey. I had to know what I was working with. We were burning forests so wood would be scarce but I just had to hope there would be some deposit of iron or gold or silver. Even copper would be worth the effort. Just something that would make the next steps easier.

I didn’t want to turn the islands into a mining civilization by any means. In ten years, even if we found gold in Lannister numbers, my goal would still be for digging shit out of the ground to make a small part of the islands’ economy. The backbone would be trade. And that was another powder keg about to explode. There would be consequences for what we did in Tyrosh, I had no doubts. We had bloodied their nose, but we hadn’t knocked them out of the fight by any means. And then thy had the two other whores to help their stupidity. They would attack at some point and I’d have to deal with that. And then while dealing with that I had to make sure we left enough of the cities standing that they would still be able too trade with Westeros.

Would be a bit embarrassing to take the Stepstones woh the intention of controlling the trade only for no trade to end up taking place because we crippled the most viable trading partners on the other end. Thee was still Pentos, but they were only a single city. Braavos had easier routes into the Westerosi markets they could rely on and the Slaver bay cities only really traded in flesh— a trade that I would not countenance, and neither would most of my fellow Westerosi. Volantis was….well, Volantis. The three whores needed to stand. I needed to beat them, and then with the same hand raise them up again because their continued existence would be necessary for making this place viable.

And even if I somehow managed to do that, there was the problem of how I would enforce the trade tolls and the like. Sure, the Velaryon navy would be able to handle patrolling but things like administration, port control, all that, would need capable, learned people. Driftmark did not have so many that I could just take them from there and have the city remain standing. Whatever I felt for the Stepstones, I would not cripple Corlys Velaryon’s legacy to prop it up. That meant I had to get the people from somewhere.