Game of Thrones: Viserys the Three-Headed Dragon.

Chapter 204 Priest
In the darkness, the only light is the lanterns of visitors.

Visitors rarely appeared, and they only brought silent bacon as hard as a board, bread crawling with worms, and ice-cold water.

The jailer was as thin as a scarecrow, with a rat-like face, nameless, silent, and seemingly deaf. His face was full of hostility, but it never changed.

The straw on the floor reeked of urine. There were no windows, no beds, not even a slop bucket.

There was no sunrise or moonset here, and he could not see anything. His feet were bound with iron chains, and he could not even make a mark on the wall.

With his eyes open or closed, nothing made a difference. In the darkness, he slept and woke up, woke up and slept again, until he could no longer tell the difference between sleeping and waking. He would dream when he was asleep. He seemed to hear the faint sound of the wind whimpering and the crashing of the waves in the darkness, as if the gods were calling him to wake up and fight. In his confusion, he seemed to hear the Drowned God in the depths of the ocean announcing to him: "Aeren, my most dedicated servant, you must tell the Ironborn that the Crow's Eye is not my chosen one, not the true king. The Seastone throne should belong to...belongs to..."

When he was awake, there was nothing to do but think. Aeron Damphair prayed all day long, whether he was asleep or awake, even in his dreams during the fever nights.

His God was testing him. He had to be strong and truly sincere.

He had hoped that Victarion would win the kingsmoot, but the chieftains and captains had spurned the Iron Captain, and Asha, Balon's favorite daughter, whom the Drowned God had blessed with wisdom and courage, had cursed her with a woman's body. He realized that the Seastone Seat belonged to neither Victarion nor Asha.

They should unite, and if Victarion can marry Asha, they can rule the Iron Islands together as king and queen, and that would bring about Euron's downfall.

After leaving the Kingsmoot, Aeron realized from the sound of the waves that the Drowned God must have planned this, so he was full of fighting spirit. He promised Victarion: "The captains and chiefs nominated Euron, but he is a heretic. I will go to Great Wyk, Harlow, Oakmont, and even Pyke. Go to every town and every village to preach. Let everyone hear the voice of the Drowned God, and those who do not worship the God will never sit on the Seastone Seat!"

He called the Kingsmoot to choose the true king, but he must undo the mistakes of those cowardly and foolish men, swayed by the Crow's Eye's gold and lies, who made terrible mistakes in their drunkenness and recklessness.

However, before he could carry out his plan, Euron's crew of dumb bastards caught him on a rocky beach. The dumb bastards had been watching him, waiting for him, and there on the deserted rocky beach, they covered his mouth with a hand and hit him hard on the back of the head, knocking him unconscious.

When he opened his eyes again, he was trapped in darkness.

At first, the only sound in the darkness was his breathing, until one day he realized he had been transferred to a ship.

It's Serenity!

In the dead silence, Aeron realized this.

On this day, when the mute left, the lights fell into darkness, and the world once again became a damp darkness filled with the smell of mold and excrement.

However, just as Aeron fell asleep, Euron came to visit him in person.

Aeron woke from his dream and saw his nightmare brother Euron standing beside him, holding a lantern. He watched Euron hang the lantern on the wall and fill two cups with wine. He heard him say, "Drink with me, brother."

Euron was wearing a black scale armor, as black as smoke, covering his entire body, but it looked light and fluttery on him, like a piece of fine silk. The edges of the scales were red gold, and they shone with Euron's movements. The various patterns on the scales were clearly visible, and the steel was etched with threads, runes, and mysterious symbols.

Valyrian steel. Aeron knew it at a glance. No one in the Seven Kingdoms could own a set of Valyrian steel in such good condition. Even four hundred years ago, before the fall of Valyria, such a set of armor would have been enough to buy a kingdom. Euron was not lying. He had indeed been to Valyria.

His shoulder cape was scarlet as blood, and his eyepatch was also red leather.

"Why am I here?" Aeron demanded, emboldened by the thought that his god was with him. "Where are we sailing to?"

"South, to the Arbor, to Oldtown, to conquer, to plunder," Euron laughed. "To serve the gods."

He is mad, Aeron thought. “I should be in the Iron Islands,” he said.

"Should?" Euron disagreed. "How dare you tell the king you should? You should be wherever the king wants you to be."

"What do you want from me?"

“What do you have to ask of me?” Euron sneered. “If you had not intended to preach against my rule, priest, you could have continued to serve the Drowned God in the Isles.”

Aeron said forcefully, “Let me go. I command you in the name of the Drowned God.”

"Drink with me. I command you in the name of the king." Euron grabbed Aeron's messy black hair, pulled his head back, and poured the wine glass into his mouth. What flowed into his mouth was not wine, but something thick and sticky, like fruit pulp, and the taste changed with every swallow. Sometimes it was bitter, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet. There was also a taste like rot. He wanted to vomit, but Euron held tighter and poured more. "Very good, drink it, priest. It is sweeter than your sea water, and the truth in it is more real than your delusional oracle."

"Curse you, Euron!"

Euron smiled. "If the curse worked, I would love to see it. But I'm sorry, brother. If I plucked out every tongue that cursed me, they would cover the entire ship."

Aeron spat at the other man.

But Euron didn't care at all. He just looked down at him as if he was a god: "Your gods will come to you tonight, at least some of them will come. Let's see how much more real the truth I give you is than your delusional oracle, brother."

As he fell into sleep again in his dark captivity, Aeron heard someone ask, "Do you know what's under the sea, brother?"

He looked up and saw his long dead brother Ur.

As children, Ur and Aeron had a close relationship. They were both abused by their brother Euron. The two often played games together, such as the finger dance. During one finger dance, Aeron threw an axe that cut off half of Ur's palm.

The Duke of Cologne's remarried wife, Lady Piper, the children's stepmother, brought her own bachelor, who insisted on sewing Ur's severed fingers back. The traditional treatment method was to bake them over fire or soak them in sea water to heal the wound. As a result of the suturing, Ur's wound became seriously infected, and his arm was amputated, but it was too late. Ur died of the infection at the age of fourteen.

At this moment, Aeron saw his brother Ur standing there, with one hand black and swollen, emitting a rotten stench.

“There is the Drowned God,” Aeron answered half-heartedly. “There is the Drowned God waiting for me in the Water Palace at the bottom of the sea.”

Ur shook his head. "Only worms. Only worms are waiting for you at the bottom of the sea, Aeron."

Wuer laughed, his cheeks peeling off, revealing his hidden eyes. They were blood-red, dark, and terrifying.

It's Euron.

Euron finally showed his bloody eyes openly, wearing agate black scale armor from head to toe, sitting on a mountain of burnt black skulls. Scarlet blood flowed from under him and dripped on the skulls under him. Above his head was a dazzling blood-red starry sky, and behind him was a huge black vortex.

"The weeping stars foretell the end," he said to Euron, "The end has come to the last moment. The world will be broken and rebuilt. In the tombs and the abyss of the charnel house, new gods will be born." Euron raised his hand, and a black stone tablet rose from the ground and stood beside him. He waved his hand, and countless sea monsters, demons, sphinxes and even dragons came to his command and crawled in front of him. "Kneel down, brother," the Crow's Eye ordered, "I am your king and your god. Worship me and pray to me, and I will raise you as my priest."

"Never. The ungodly will never sit on the Seastone Seat."

"Oh, why do I need that black and hard stone seat? Brother, take a closer look at where I am sitting."

Aeron looked up. The mountain of skulls was gone, the blood-red sky and black vortex above were still there, but beneath Euron was a dark throne, huge, tall, twisted, made of countless corpses and blades, dripping with blood.

The bodies of the gods hung on the blades. The Father, the Mother, the Maiden, the Warrior, the Crone, the Blacksmith, even the Stranger, and with them were other foreign gods: the High Shepherd and the Black Goat, the Three-Headed God and the Pale Child Bakalon, the Lord of Light and the God of the Moon. The Drowned God was among them, his body bloated and green, half eaten by crabs, rotting with the other gods, his hair and beard dripping with seawater.

Aeron woke up screaming in terror, urine running down his thighs.

He told himself that it was only a dream, an illusion caused by the black, rotten wine.

The Drowned God's priest was not mentally strong enough. If he had looked more carefully, he would have seen more. If he had looked more carefully, he would have found that the bodies of the gods all had human faces, and the face on the Drowned God's body belonged to him. Aeron Damphair.

A few days later, a woman brought food to Aeron instead of the mute.

She was young, plump and beautiful, wearing the clothes of a noblewoman from the Green Land. In the candlelight, Aeron felt that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and she seemed familiar to him. But he couldn't remember where he had seen her.

"Woman, have I seen you before?" he asked.

"Ah?" The woman was surprised. "This is the first time the king allowed me to come."

He shook his head: "I am a man who worships God. I command you to let me go."

"I can't do that. But I brought you food. Porridge and honey."

As the woman fed him, he asked, "Who are you and where is the boat going?"

"Faria Flowers, I will become King Euron's concubine, and then you and I will become relatives."

He suddenly realized that something was familiar. This woman gave him a vague feeling of a "girl" in a nightmare. Even though the Seven Gods were pagans, Aeron knew that she was definitely not a "girl", but just a mortal.

He looked at her. "Run. He will hurt you. He will kill you."

The woman smiled. "Foolish. He won't. I am his beloved, his concubine. He loves me, gives me gifts, silks and jewels. He gives me everything I want." Her face was sweet, and she placed a hand on her belly, stroking down her robe. "I am also pregnant with his child. I will give him sons, many sons."

"He has a son." Aeron was horrified. What exactly did Euron want to do?
"Bastards and bastards, King Euron himself told me that my son would come before them. He swore an oath, by your Drowned God."

Aeron felt sorry for her. Euron was not a follower of the Drowned God, he was blaspheming! He said, "You must bring a message to my brother. It's not Euron, it's Victarion. Do you know who he is?"

The woman stepped back. "Yes. But I cannot take word from him. He is in the Shield Islands fighting for the king against the Targaryens and the Tyrells, and we are on our way to Oldtown."

Aeron could barely make out the rest of her words. Victarion had fought against the Targaryen king, Euron, who was dealing him a terrible death. Had he died? In dragonfire?

This must be a test from the Drowned God. The priest suddenly thought. This is a lesson. Don't put your hope on others. Only the Drowned God can save him, only faith can save him.

However, the salvation of the Drowned God did not come. After an unknown amount of time, the Crow's Eye came again with a lantern in hand: "Are you still praying to false gods, priest? Can your god save you?"

"The dead never die, they will rise again, even more powerful."

"Ah," Euron laughed. "Do you believe that such a thing could happen to you, my brother? If I drown you, you will probably become nothing more than a drowned ghost. The gods are all lies, and this one you believe in is particularly ridiculous. A pale, humanoid freak, with broken and swollen limbs, flying hair, and a cheek torn by fish. What idiot would you have to be to believe in such a god?"

"He is your god too!" the priest was furious. "He will punish you after your death, Crow's Eye. You will become a sea maggot, crawling on the seafloor, feeding on feces, and will never be reborn. Kill me now if you dare, murder your own blood and bear the curse. I have had enough of your nonsense."

"What good would it do to kill you? As a fellow descendant of Quellen Greyjoy, can't you share the joy of victory with me?"

"Victory? Do you know what you are doing? You can't hold the Shield Islands even with a sea monster. Victarion is no fool for you to tease. And you are heading to the Redwyne Strait to die. The Redwyne fleet will shatter your dreams. Whispering Bay is your grave."

"Haha, hahaha." Euron laughed until his eyes sparkled with tears, but his pupils were full of coldness and evil. "What are the Shield Islands? What is Victarion? What is the Redwyne Fleet? It seems that you have seen the truth, but you still can't open your eyes. You are still as stupid as before, my silly brother."

"Let me go!" Aeron commanded in his most terrible voice, "or you will suffer the wrath of the Drowned God!"

"What is the Drowned God?" said Euron, picking up a stone bottle. "Look at you, roaring so loudly. You must be thirsty. Come, have another glass of wizard's wine, and see the truth of the world more clearly."

"No!" He turned his head and tried to resist.

But Euron pulled his hair back and poured the evil liquid into his mouth. "You must drink it."

Although he tried his best to grit his teeth, he still drank it down driven by the instinct that he was about to choke to death.

The second dream was even worse.

He saw the Ironborn ships drifting in the blood-red ocean filled with countless corpses. He saw his brother Euron sitting on a black stone throne standing under the blood-red starry sky and in the huge whirlpool of the blood-red ocean. But at this moment, Euron was no longer a human, but more like a squid, a freak bred by a deep-sea sea monster, with a face full of tumbling tentacles and ten long arms twisting and wriggling. Beside him stood a shadow in the shape of a woman, tall, long, and terrifying, with pale flames tumbling in her hands.

Aeron also dreamed of the sea, of the sea water, and that the sea water poured into his mouth. But what followed was not the gift of going to the Drowned God's water palace, but the fear that even the most pious Drowned God could feel. The sea water drowned him, but it only brought suffocation and blood.

He tossed and turned in a terrifying nightmare, and spent countless hours not sure whether he was dreaming or awake.

Until one day, a mute came with a lantern, but in his other hand there was not food, but keys.

The light was blinding, and Aeron didn't dare to think what it meant. Something had changed, something had happened.

(End of this chapter)