章 99: Arianne 6
293AC
She gazed out of the window down into the streets of Sunspear. They had finally begun to return to normal in the last two weeks.
While the city had not been hardest hit by the great storm, that dubious honor falling to those along the Brimstone, who even now would still be in the process of repairing their houses towns and castles, the whole of Drone had felt it's touch, as rain poured from the sky for days.
She could remember rain once before in her life when she was little, up in the Dornish Marches. But that had been a short, winter rain, nothing like what was already being called the greatest storm in memory. It was as if the sky had pulled the seal from a Billion Gallon Jug, and poured a wet night that lasted for days over the whole of the Kingdom of Dorne. The rain had fallen in sheets so thick that one could not see a foot before their face, and the wind had screeched through the hollow places of the city, driving water sideways and flooding many homes, especially in the lower district.
To Arianne at least, it had seemed a bleak nightmare, a wailing shrieking black doom that seemed like something out of myth or legend. She was terrified, for it felt the world was ending around her, and she was powerless to stop it. It was only later that she learned that Sunspear, for all the ruin it wrought there, was spared the worst of the storm by the desert between her and its epicenter.
Hellholt castle and the city around it had been flooded by the Brimstone, which swelled at its banks until it had swallowed almost all the settlements around it. Even now the streets of Sunspear were choked by refugees fleeing that and the flooding of the Greenblood which was less severe but nonetheless damaged many of the towns along its banks. Thankfully they were beginning to trickle back to their homes, but many would be returning to ruined harvests and leveled homes.
Castle Sunspear itself had suffered only minor damages, some small flooding in the dungeons which had to be pumped out, lest it take to moldering, and a fair amount of damage to some of the towers wooden rooves. At first, Arianne had thought that they had been lucky, that nothing had been truly lost to their family beyond repair.
Then that cursed letter from Dragonstone had arrived and told her of the fate of her prince. That he had been sailing after a murderous pirate from the Iron Islands, Euron Greyjoy, and that he had seemingly pursued the monster straight into the gullet of this greatest of storms.
It was not a guarantee of death, not precisely. No wreckage of his maiden fleet had been found along the coast, and all reckoned that he had been on the open ocean when he had been struck. He would not have been smashed against the rocks. Even now a month later not even driftwood had been found along the shore.
But she had lived through the storm on land, and she could only imagine how much greater its fury must have been upon the ocean. She had cried for her prince, cried until her tears had dried up for he was surely dead. Her chance for freedom, her chance to escape her father's plotting, lost by a cruel trick of fate.
And so, bereft of that, she had thrown herself into her city instead, gone out with the palace guards and helped with repairs, overseen the rebuilding of the marketplace, had her men replace shattered beams and broken doors. Her father was doing the same, all across Dorne, riding with a host of his vassals to restore the damage, but she wasn't with him, so she would do all she could for her city instead. What she couldn't do herself, she delegated to her siblings and her cousins, those in Sunspear at least. They were given their own detachments of the guard and sent to restore what was broken, or even improve it where they could. When they had seen their rulers at work, the people too had risen to help, new construction rose from the flooded and tramples regions of the lower district, and a fourth ring even began to form outside of the city walls as the refugees began to arrive, stone was quarried and bricks were baked from the desert clay to support the new houses, though much of it still ended up becoming a shanty town, running out all the way to the docks.
Indeed, the very land of Dorne seemed to mirror their struggle, all across the region flowers bloomed for the first time in years, the parched soil soaked by the waters which had seemed so devastating just the week before now gave birth to more plants than Arianne had seen in her life, it was a bittersweet thing though, for whole Dorne was now begging to find footing for its rebirth, her own future seemed to be grinding to a dour halt.
Even as she now looked over the city, rebuilt as it was, perhaps a bit taller and prouder than before, she could only feel a sort of melancholy for her achievement. Her eyes traced the contours of the winding walls down through the streets, down into the rapidly growing town of stone and wood which had sprung up on the docks, and out over the open ocean which had given birth to the monster. As her gaze ended on the water though, she felt her heart leap into her throat.
There were tall white sails on the horizon.
週次パワーステータス
-- 推薦
ランキング 
-- 推薦
チケット