POVs: Various Driftspire Citizens
Timeframe: 282–284 AC
Location: Driftspire, Northern Fingers, Vale of Arryn
I. Carlan Waters, Fisherman (282 AC → 284 AC)
The sea hadn't changed much. It still moaned through the rocks at night, still swallowed men when it liked, and still stank like rotting hope. But the dock that was new.
Carlan had been pulling nets from this coast since he was twelve, back when Driftspire had one rotten pier and two usable boats. Now?
Now there were stone jetties, four of them, stretching into the surf like fingers of a giant god. Crane lifts hauled crates of fish and salt and rope onto wagons. A harbormaster shouted names from a ledger. Sailors from Gulltown, Sisterton even Tyrosh bartered loudly in a dozen tongues.
"Bloody hell," he muttered, pulling up a net with silver writhing in it. "It's not Driftspire no more. It's a city in the making."
He glanced at the harbor tower: guards in black and blue cloaks stood watch with crossbows, their helms bearing the rising sun over the wave. Lord Longlight's new sigil.
"Man's got salt in his bones," Carlan said to his son, who helped tie the net. "Built all this from drawings and dust. I seen it. Two winters ago this was a cliff and a goat path."
II. Tella, Innkeeper's Daughter (Late 283 AC)
The road to the central market was clean. Clean! No piss puddles, no dung carts clogging the way. Paved in stone hexagonal bricks laid in patterns like a mosaic. Her uncle called it "Andal vanity." But Tella liked it.
She carried a basket of oranges past a small group of travelers gawking at the public fountain, where fresh water flowed flowed! without the use of buckets or wells.
"Strangers," she whispered to her brother. "From Braavos, maybe. One of them was asking where to buy glass panes."
They passed the district of food vendors, where stalls sold fried fish, dried seaweed cakes, foreign olives, and even rare Myrish cheese. A patrol of mounted guards trotted by riders with fine saddles and disciplined movements. People moved aside.
And then like a sudden wind—a knight rode through.
A real knight. Banner flowing. Steel shining. A sworn sword of House Longlight.
Children ran behind him like shadows. Old men nodded grimly.
"Two dozen of them now," her father had whispered one night. "Sworn to a lord who used to be no one."
Tella didn't care about what he used to be. He built roads, brought markets, and most importantly hired bakers who used proper ovens.
To her, that made him better than half the Vale.
III. Garren of the Hill, Carter (Mid 283 AC)
They'd finished the Steel District that spring.
It wasn't made of steel, not exactly just named for the smiths, the forges, and the great foundry where Lord Alester's engineers melted ore with something they called airflow combustion. Garren didn't know what it meant. He just hauled the coal.
Every house in the district had proper sewage channels, wide storm drains, and covered stone gutters. The stink that usually clung to cities? Gone.
"Don't smell like King's Landing, do it?" he said to his mule, patting its neck.
Even nobles from Gulltown had come to see the roadworks straight roads with gutters and signage, with raised stone walkways for foot traffic and lantern poles installed at corners.
Garren remembered the dirt trail that used to run through these hills. Mud up to the knee in spring. Rats in autumn. Wolves in winter.
Now? Riders patrolled twice a day, and the wolves had moved on.
IV. Old Edda, Candle Seller (Late 284 AC)
Edda had sold beeswax candles in Driftspire for thirty-two years. She'd seen lords come and go. All of them wanted taxes. Most never looked at the cobbles beneath their boots.
But Lord Alester? He walked the streets every fortnight, spoke to shopkeepers, carried a small book where he wrote things down. Not words meant for lords. Measurements. Numbers. Ideas.
He'd bought one of her candles once. Held it to the light. Asked her about wick strength and smoke.
"Like he was buying a sword," she told a neighbor.
Now her candle stall stood in the Market Spine, a stone lined boulevard that bisected the town and led directly to the port. Each block had waste bins, benches, and hanging lanterns. Her stall even had a copper drainage pipe, set beneath her feet.
The little luxuries of thought.
Sometimes she caught glimpses of his knights. Two dozen, they said now. Clean armor. Disciplined. She remembered when Driftspire had six drunk guards and a dog.
The town had swelled. Nearly twenty thousand souls, people said. Merchants. Dockhands. Craftsmen. Fishermen. Even artists. The town even had a theatre now. Not a great one but still, a stage.
Her old bones feared it sometimes. Things that rose too fast had further to fall.
But her heart?
Her heart called it home.
V. Ser Dagon Coldwater, Knight in Service (284 AC)
He'd taken Alester's coin because the pay was good, the food better, and the armor gods help him was fitted. Not borrowed from some cousin's cousin. Real iron. Blackened. Emblazoned with a rising sun.
He liked the lord, though he'd never admit it.
Smart. Didn't shout. Didn't swagger. Gave orders like a man writing poetry. Precise. Clear.
And he knew what he was building.
"You see those sewer grates?" he told a new recruit. "They're not just holes. There's a system. Flow direction. Gates. Flood vents. If there's ever siege or plague, Driftspire won't fall like the rest."
They had barracks now. Training yards. A watch rotation based on harbor tide schedules. He'd served in Gulltown, Redfort, and even Old Anchor. But never a place where order was written into the stones.
The keep itself? Driftspire Tower had grown rebuilt and reinforced with cement. Real cement. He didn't know what it was made of, but it set like dragonbone and held better than any mortar he'd known.
People laughed when they called it the "Stone That Moves".
But that was what Driftspire had become.
A town built not by war. Not by gold.
But by will.
Arc Two preview:
A stranger entered the harbor from across the Shivering Sea his sails torn, his skin pale, eyes hollow. He whispered of ruins in the north, of a salt road once lost, and a night blue weapon seen in a dream.
By then, Driftspire had become a name whispered across the Vale, across the Narrow Sea, and in time perhaps even in King's Landing.
And all the while, in the great stone chamber beneath the tower, a spear wrapped in cloth pulsed faintly in the dark, untouched by time, waiting.