The Seadragon's Roar (Laenor Velaryon SI)

Pre-Chapter A/N: More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Experimenting with two chapters a week, we'll see how long I can keep this up for. 

The plan was to bleed Tyrosh, but not to capture it. The writ we had received from Viserys to wage war in the Stepstones had been very specific—granting us authority to do whatever necessary to secure peace in the region, but prohibiting us from attacks, even reprisals, on powers within mainland Essos. All we were going to do, then, was attack Tyrosh's fleet and argue that that was not an attack on Tyrosh itself. Besides, if we were being completely honest, we had no chance of taking the city. Even bleeding the fleet was a tall ask, and we were going to have to engage in more than a little bit of subterfuge. 

First of all, the ships were intentionally harmed a fair bit by their own crew. The damage was all superficial and unlikely to impair proper function, but it would hopefully draw the Tyroshi fleet out to give battle rather than trying to retreat into their harbor where they would be harder to reach. The second subterfuge came from Igneel and I. At dawn, we had left the fleet with little fanfare, flying into the clouds to hide and wait. The Tyrosh had ordered an attack with the hopes of killing whatever dragon Corlys had with him, and once they noticed that there was no dragon with the fleet, instead of being suspicious and wondering where I was, they would just assume that their attack had succeeded and that was why Corlys was attacking with odds so terrible—he was heartbroken and seeking revenge. 

It was a snake's plan. Feign weakness, draw out the enemy, and strike with unrelenting brutality once they took the bait. And from so far above, I could see them beginning to take the bait. It was almost beautiful, the efficiency that the Tyroshi men moved with. They were like a collection of ants from this far up and they moved with an order and discipline that only ants could truly match. 

They crewed the ships and pushed them out of harbor, aiming to give Corlys battle. Corlys' fleet was sailing towards the center, to the Tyroshi command ship, and instead of disengaging to protect himself, the Tyroshi commander clearly saw nothing wrong with being used as bait, having his fleet that was previously arrayed in a simple straight line curve inwards at the edges, aiming to encircle Corlys and trap him thoroughly. From here I could see that, all things being equal, there was no chance Corlys would manage to leave this alive. But that had been the point, all things weren't equal here, and once I felt that the Tyroshi had committed to the battle as fully as they could—Corlys was only mere minutes away from being in engaging range of their command-ship—I pulled at Igneel's saddle. 

He growled, more than tired of the waiting and enthusiastic to bring fire to our enemies. We dove straight down like a missile of scale and flame. I watched as no one noticed us until at the very last second, Igneel spread his wings to slow down. The men beneath looked up with a scream on their lips and that was the last they ever saw. 

"Dracarys!" 

I screamed the High Valyrian word as we came to a stop, and Igneel wasted no time in heeding my orders, bathing the ships in blue flames as we passed by on our flight path. "Dragon!" I heard quite a few of the men scream in fear, but it was too late for them. Much too late. The arrows they tried to aim in my direction never even made it close as constant beats of Igneel's wings knocked everything that even thought about coming close to me astray before it could try. We banked to the left, making a straight strafing run where we set the whole back half of ships along the left flank alight. 

Just as Corlys had predicted, the commander had easily figured out that there was no way for him to either retreat or attack me effectively. So he went with the third best option and ordered for his ships to accelerate their plans to attack the Velaryon fleet. We'd seen this coming, of course. A dragon was not the most precise of weapons so if they succeeded in confusing their ships with my father's enough then I would be more or less handicapped from doing anything for the rest of the battle. 

Luckily, this was nothing we hadn't prepared for, and so the second the Tyroshi speed began to accelerate, Corlys moved even faster. Moving with his collection of caravels meant that there was no fleet that could catch Corlys' in the open sea, and he used this to smash into the central backbone of the encirclement. With superior firepower and bows made to make ramming a nightmare for your opponent, the clash between the two sides was a quick and bloody one. The Tyroshi lost in no time, and any ship that dared to approach Corlys' slaughter from any of the other sides got the rare honor of dying by dragon fire. 

Igneel and I banked to the side, seeing some of the ships make the wise, if cowardly, choice of trying to retreat back to the harbor. In a single pass of dragon fire, we taught them why that was far from a wise choice. And then we were back at it again. They hadn't anticipated facing a dragon, and it showed. Their scorpions were aimed too low to the ground to have any chance of hitting Igneel and I as we made our semi-irregular patterns. We still varied our flight pattern as much as we could, taking sharp dives and banks whenever we could afford to to avoid getting into bad habits. Bad habits like flying in the same predictable way all the time. An arrow hissed its way past my head as we made one such dive. 

Lucky shot or impossible skill? I wondered as we covered another trio of ships in dragon fire in a single strafing run. Igneel was pacing himself here. We weren't trying to incinerate the ships in one go. While that would have been fearsome and useful, it was less useful than just setting the ships on fire. For one, the fire had a risk of spreading to the other ships, so the other ships had to constantly worry about that. Secondly, the burning ships and their wreckage acted as a natural barrier, hemming in the Tyroshi where I wanted them to be hemmed in and giving them free rein anywhere I did not strike. It was herding them to follow a very predictable set of movements. 

Any captain worth their salt could see that I was practically baiting them to escape East, but the only other choice they had was sitting still and just waiting for me to get on with it, so they just did the only thing they could and began to sail East. The ones who sailed East I ignored while I wrecked havoc on the rest. It was a brutal killing field, the kind of which stories were told as we savaged the Tyroshi fleet within watching distance of those walls of theirs. The magisters were probably watching the whole thing and shitting their pants. Even if they knew that we were not going to turn our forces on the city when we finished—although there was no way for them to be sure of that. They had to realize that this loss was one that could cripple them for the short term and would be very expensive to fix in the long term. 

Tyrosh's fleet was why they did not mind the pirates in the Stepstones. They could afford to guard their trade routes and the disadvantage it placed others in meant it was worth it to them to expend those extra resources. I wondered how that would change now that the fleet was nothing more than driftwood and charcoal. It took an hour more for us to be certain that all the ships were destroyed, and then Corlys Velaryon turned his attention East, beginning to sail. 

I flew after him. I had paced Igneel because the fight with the Tyroshi at their harbor had not been the be-all, end-all of today's plan. Even if we'd destroyed them, that did nothing to help the ships we had lost. That was where the ships that I had allowed to escape would come in. 

If I had expected the Tyroshi ships to present much of a challenge to capture, then I was sorely disappointed. Corlys on his flagship and me flying Igneel had led our own fleet right to them where they had gathered themselves a few miles off the coast and we had parlayed. Rather, Corlys had dictated terms on threat of dragon fire or scorpion bolts and they had accepted them. The men of Tyrosh would leave the ships they crewed and swim to shore. In exchange, we were not going to kill them. This was the solution to losing our naval superiority. 

While the Tyroshi ships were not Velaryon ships made at Hull by some of the best shipwrights in the world using literally otherworldly designs, they were still near the top of the ladder for what was normal in this world. Definitely better than what most pirates could field. And so, enough for us to take to the field until we could receive new fleets from home. 

But then that left us with one remaining problem. We hadn't just lost a fleet. We'd lost the men to crew those ships, and for this one there was no neat workaround. For now, we were establishing skeleton crews for the new ships. They were there to prop up our numbers and act as the expendable shell to our main core of caravels. The caravels had been built so sturdily that we had actually only lost one of them in the attack on Tyrosh, and none at all in the original pirate ambush. That left our numbers at a neat three and twenty (23). Adding seven and twenty (27) Tyroshi ships to that meant we now had fifty ships to our name. That was bigger than all the pirates bar one could reportedly raise individually. So that also meant it was time to go on the offensive. 

— 

I had only just returned from Igneel's ship after having had the men bring a pair of sheep for him to gorge himself on when I was called in for the next war planning session. Speaking of Igneel and his eating, he had to roast his food in his mouth based on being on a ship and all that but he didn't seem to mind it as much as I had expected, so it was fine for the time being. 

I walked into the room to a chorus of applause. "The Shipburner!" I heard Vaemond hail and it took all my willpower to stop myself from facepalming at the silly nickname. That shit better not stick. 

"Well done, my son," Corlys said, and he gestured to the space at his right for me. I moved to stand there, the spot normally reserved for the next most senior Captain under the fleet, and none said a word in opposition. Vaemond, whose position I was taking, just shot me a smile instead. 

"As I was saying, we have the momentum now, but we cannot stop," Corlys began. The entire room seemed to straighten up after he spoke. The celebratory mood that had entered the room with my arrival had left just as quickly. Which was fair, to be honest. We weren't in the same situation that we would have been if the pirates had never attacked—we were in a worse one. We'd just managed to get ourselves close to our intended starting point. There was nothing to celebrate about that. Not when every step we took after this one would be much harder. 

"Daemon and the rest of the fleet will still be sailing towards Bloodstone in a matter of weeks. We are far behind on our effort to control the seas to ensure their safe passage, so this is where desperate measures must come in." 

"What if we didn't control the entire sea?" I found myself blurting out. 

"What?" Corlys turned his eyes to me. 

"We need to give them safe passage to Bloodstone, right? We know what route they'll be taking. Why not establish dominance over a fixed corridor and clear that for them to pass through when they arrive?" I asked. 

"We'd be broadcasting our plans to them if we did that. Anyone with a brain in their skull would see through the plan, and while our numbers are somewhat respectable, we should not court battle with the larger pirate fleets needlessly for the time being," he said. 

"Besides, a small corridor like that one would not be sufficient for our plans because while Daemon takes Bloodstone, we will establish dominance over Grey Gallows," he said with a smirk on his face, moving the figurine of his flagship towards the second most notable of these islands. 

"Grey Gallows? I thought our plan was to constrict the pirates to their islands while Daemon and the Stormlander knights go from Island to Island wiping the scum out?" 

"Yes. That was our plan, but now that we can be certain that our plan has been leaked to the enemy, we must adapt and do what they will not expect us to." 

"We don't have the forces for a landing," Vaemond said. 

"We have a dragon. Besides, the plan is still much the same. We split the pirates' attention by taking Grey Gallows when they surely would have expected us at Bloodstone, and then we move from there," he said. Just like with most things, it was clear that Corlys was not going to be changing his mind on this one, so I nodded along with everyone else while I began thinking of what that would mean for the broader strategy. We had two goals here, completion of which would signify victory in this war: One, total control of the Narrow Sea, the area around the Stepstones in particular. Two, removal of undesirable elements from every single one of these chunks of rock. As long as Corlys' plan was taking us closer to those objectives, then I didn't have any objections. 

So in the end it was decided. When the meeting ended, the fleet would plot a course to clear out the pirates at three of the Islands closest to Bloodstone, and then after that would begin a blockade in the middle of the Stepstones, cutting the Islands into two strict zones and patrolling each zone with the goal of making the pirates so scared that they confine themselves to the land where they would be easiest to face. These pirates were just that, pirates. Basically small folk who got the idea into their heads that the best way they could make it out was turning to crime. So that meant two basic things: one, they weren't very smart, and two, they'd be average fighters at best. 

On land, a strong Stormlander Cavalry would cut through them like a Damascus steel knife through paper. Simple and sweet, just like that. On sea, we had their better when it came to men-at-arms and all that, but even the Velaryon sailors were little better than peasants given positions. They were basically going to be fighting on equal terms with the pirates when it came to that. 

In fact, the pirates were probably better on account of being experienced. Men who had to kill men to earn their keep could not be compared to men who spent their days loading and unloading ships from trade voyages and negotiating with merchants. And yet these were the men that Corlys somehow expected to take an island with. I was already beginning to get the sinking feeling that this plan would require far more from Igneel and I than Corlys had let on during the planning session. 

I didn't mind much, to be honest. War was only a few decades away, and when that time came, I would be thanking myself for getting as much experience as fighting against all sorts of enemies in this war. 

— 

Speaking of enemies, I heard a very familiar horn from the deck of the ship and dressed up in no time. That was a signal for me as well as for the other captains within the fleet that we would be waiting for an hour so I could take to the skies. 

We were going to be facing one of the first pirate ships on our radar today. The pirate known as Bloodwail, famous for cutting off the tongues of his victims before torturing them into releasing screams that were barely held back by the blood pooling in their thoughts. From there, his enemies and friends alike had taken to calling him Bloodwail. And impressively enough, he was one of the more reasonable pirate Kings that called this place home. He ruled his stretch of the sea from a pair of islands that were so close that it was only a few minutes by boat that separated them on one side. Individually, they were nothing to write home about, but together they straddled one of the straightest paths through the Stepstones. That was how he fed fat. 

From Igneel's back, I watched as the pirates scurried about. Unlike the Tyroshi, they were not rushing to face us. Instead, it was clear that they were rushing to flee. A fact that I communicated to the Velaryon fleet by blowing my horn three times. That also alerted the pirates as to my presence, but what was there to really worry about? 

I received a return signal from the fleet and nodded to myself before I tightened my hold on the saddle. 

"Igneel, dive!" I ordered as I prepared myself for another battle. 

A/N: We get to see the pacification of the Stepstones and why it ends up taking a while—if measurably less time than it had taken in canon. Watch and wait, because this is going to be fun. Next five chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.