The dawn over Val-Engrenage had nothing of the golden clarity of Dorne. Here, the sun didn't rise; it infiltrated painfully through a layer of gray mist, a mix of river fog and industrial exhalations.
Ellaria Sand tightened her shawl around her shoulders. She wasn't cold, but an internal chill hadn't left her since they crossed the gates of the "Industrial Zone." Jem, the lieutenant with the steel leg, led the way, walking with rhythmic efficiency, while Tony brought up the rear, chatting calmly with a foreman.
It wasn't a city. It was an organism devouring the earth to build itself a shell.
Their first stop was the "Cement Works." Ellaria had expected masons carving stones, chisel in hand, a noble and ancient art. What she saw was an insult to the very nature of rock.
Huge crushers, powered by monstrous waterwheels, smashed limestone blocks with a constant thunderous noise. White dust floated everywhere, covering the workers like ghosts. They poured the powder into rotary kilns, iron tubes long as dragons, rotating slowly over infernal braziers.
"It is liquid stone," explained Tony, his voice piercing the din effortlessly. "We do not seek form within the stone. We impose form upon the stone. Once dry, it is as hard as the granite of Casterly Rock."
Ellaria watched men pour gray mud into wooden molds. A few hours later, it was said, this would become walls, beams, roads. It was terrifying. In Dorne, one adapted to the desert. Here, they forced the world to become geometric. It was brute power, without elegance, but of an efficiency that gave her vertigo. If Tony decided to build a fortress tomorrow, it would be standing before the next moon. Harrenhal had taken forty years to rise from the earth. Val-Engrenage could spit one out a year.
They continued to the "Carpentry." Here again, craftsmanship was dead. There were no woodcarvers. There were circular saws, screaming and strident, bucking century-old tree trunks into standardized planks in seconds. Sawdust flew like a golden snowstorm. It was the methodical massacre of a forest, transformed into resources.
But the real shock, the one that made Ellaria physically recoil, was the "Foundry."
The heat hit them fifty meters from the entrance. It was a hellmouth opened upon the world. The Blast Furnace stood like a black tower, roaring, spitting sparks toward the smoky roof.
She saw men, protected by thick leather aprons and smoked goggles, pierce the bottom of the furnace.
A river of liquid light burst forth. Molten steel, white and blinding, flowed into channels dug into the ground. The heat was such that Ellaria felt her skin tighten. Obara, beside her, had her hand on the guard of her spear, eyes wide, as if facing a living dragon.
And the noise... A hydraulic steam hammer, tall as two men, slammed down on red ingots with a cadence that shook the ground beneath their feet. *BAM. BAM. BAM.*
It wasn't the musical tinkling of a village blacksmith's hammer. It was the sound of war. Not a war of men, but a war of titans.
Ellaria looked at Tony. He was there, in the middle of this hell of fire and noise, his face lit by the glow of molten steel. He did not seem to sweat. He watched the metal flow with the satisfaction of a gardener watching water irrigate his plants.
"This," he said, pointing to the river of fire, "is the blood of civilization. With this, we make plows. We make rails. We make beams. Weapons if needed."
"And swords?" she asked, her voice barely audible.
Tony looked at her. "Swords, of course. With this, we make worlds."
Ellaria shivered despite the furnace. She realized then that the Lannisters, the Baratheons, and even her own lover, were playing a children's game. They fought for thrones of cold iron. Tony Stark possessed the very source of iron and fire. He did not seek to sit on the throne. He was melting the throne down to make something else. Why did everyone seem not to care?
-----------------------------------------
If the foundry was hell, the next hangar was the temple of a religion Oberyn Martell refused to understand, but which fascinated him despite himself.
The noise here was different. No crashing, but a rhythmic, powerful hissing. *Chuff... Hiss... Chuff... Hiss...*
They entered the great machine hall. The air was hot, humid, smelling of oil and steam.
"Prince Oberyn," said Tony, stopping before a structure of black metal and polished brass that occupied the center of the room. An immense wheel, taller than a rider, turned with hypnotic regularity, moved by a steel arm that went back and forth, pushed by an invisible force.
Oberyn approached. He had studied at the Citadel. He knew the principles of the windmill, the watermill. But this... this had no visible natural source. There was no river under the building. No wind. Just a firebox where black coal burned.
"Fire," whispered Oberyn, realizing the impossible. "You use fire to create movement."
"Steam, precisely," corrected Tony, patting the burning cylinder. "Water boils, expands, pushes the piston. The piston pushes the rod. The wheel turns. As long as there is coal and water, it never stops. It does not tire. It does not sleep. It does not ask for wages."
Oberyn looked at the machine. It was a domesticated dragon, locked in an iron cage, forced to turn a millstone for eternity. The power contained in this regular movement was terrifying. A horse died of exhaustion. A man broke. This thing... it was eternal as long as one fed it.
They continued to the textile workshop. This is where Oberyn's intellectual horror made total sense.
He saw rows of machines, clattering and fast, connected to the central steam engine by leather belts running along the ceiling. Hundreds of spindles turned at the same time, pulling thread, weaving it.
There were no master weavers here. Just young women, and even a few children, watching the machines, retying a broken thread here and there. The machine did the work. The human was only a servant.
"How many?" asked Oberyn, watching rolls of fabric pile up at an absurd speed. "How many men does this replace?"
"A single one of these machines does the work of fifty weavers," Tony replied coldly. "And the fabric is more consistent. Cheaper. This means the peasant in Dorne will be able to buy decent clothes for the price of a loaf of bread."
"It means fifty weavers starve," retorted Oberyn.
"It means fifty weavers can do something else," said Tony. "Like learning to build these machines."
Finally, Tony led them to a smaller machine, but one that chilled the scholar in Oberyn to the bone. A "Printing Press."
He watched a sheet of white paper be swallowed by inked rollers and emerge on the other side, covered in perfect black text. *Clack-clack-clack.* One page per second.
Oberyn took a sheet. It was a page from the manual of "Elementary Mechanics."
"The Citadel takes forever to copy a book," said Oberyn, the sheet trembling slightly in his hand.
"I can print an entire small lordly library in a month," said Tony. "Knowledge is no longer a treasure, Oberyn. It is a river. And we want to open the floodgates."
Oberyn Martell felt suddenly very old, and very small. He had spent his life accumulating secrets, believing himself superior through his intelligence. Before this press, he realized his world, the world of jealous maesters and well-kept secrets, was dead. It had been killed by gears and cheap ink. This boy hadn't just built a city. He had built the tomb of the Citadel.
------------------------------------------
The visit was coming to an end, and the silence of the Martell family was heavy. Even Obara, usually so vocal in her disdain, was mute, crushed by the enormity of what she had seen. Nymeria walked like she was in a dream, her fingers brushing the brick walls as if they were gold.
Tony led them to the last building. It was different. No chimney, no deafening noise. Just a clean, pungent smell.
"The Laboratory," announced Tony, opening the door.
The interior was a temple of glass and light. Immaculate worktables, complex alembics, rows of colored vials.
"Here is where we interrogate matter," said Tony. He removed his jacket, revealing his arms, as if to prove there were no sleight-of-hand tricks.
"Lady Obara," he said. "Give me your dagger."
Obara hesitated, looked at her father, then handed over her blade. It was well-made Dornish steel.
"Steel," said Tony. "Iron and carbon."
He approached a large beaker filled with a sapphire-blue liquid.
"Watch closely. This is not magic. It is exchange."
He plunged Obara's blade into the blue liquid.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, under the wide eyes of the Dornishmen, the blade began to change. The gray of the steel disappeared, covered by a reddish, rough substance. The blue color of the liquid faded, turning greenish.
Tony withdrew the blade. It was no longer steel. It appeared to be made of pure copper.
"What did you do?" breathed Nymeria, fascinated. "Did you transmute it?"
"Iron took the place of copper in the water," explained Tony, wiping the blade which revealed a reddish shine. "A simple reaction. Iron is chemically stronger; it chases out the copper. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed."
He returned the blade—ruined as a weapon, but become an object of science—to a horrified Obara. She held it by the fingertips, as if it were cursed.
"But that is just a carnival trick," said Tony, heading to the back of the room where a strange machine awaited him. It was a stack of metal discs and damp cloth, connected by copper wires. "The real question is: where does the energy of this fight between metals go?"
He took the two copper wires coming from the pile.
"Prince Oberyn, you asked me what I could offer Nymeria. You think I want to teach her to read books."
He connected the wires to a small glass bell jar resting on a wooden base. Inside, a charcoal filament, thin as a hair, waited.
"I want to teach her to tame lightning."
He closed the circuit.
There was no noise. No explosion. No smoke.
Just light.
Inside the glass, the filament began to glow. First red, then orange, then an incandescent white. A pure, stable light, blinding in the dimness of the laboratory. A light without fire. A light that did not flicker.
The shock was physical.
Ellaria brought her hands to her mouth, backing away until she hit a table. Oberyn froze, his eyes fixed on this captive star, his rational mind screaming in the face of the impossible.
But it was Obara who broke.
The warrior, she who feared neither man nor beast, looked at this unnatural thing, this cold light that burned without consuming, and her reality fractured.
"NO!" she screamed, backing away violently, knocking over a stool. She unsheathed her spear in a panicked motion, pointing it at the bulb as if it were a demon.
"SORCERER!" she cried, her voice broken by pure terror. "It is sorcery! It is cursed! Turn it off! Turn it off by the Seven Hells!"
She was shaking all over, the atavistic terror of the unknown taking over her martial discipline. It was an abomination. Fire belonged to the gods, or to dragons. Not to a glass jar.
Tony did not move. He did not cut the light. His face was lit by the raw glow of the bulb, casting hard shadows upon him. He looked like a god judging mortals.
"It is not sorcery, Lady Obara," he said, his voice calm but implacable. "It is electricity. It is the same force that makes your heart beat and splits the sky during a storm. And I put it in a bottle."
He turned to Oberyn, who was pale as a corpse, eyes riveted on the light.
"You see, Prince? This is the knowledge I offer you. Not books. This."
Tony disconnected the wire. The bulb went out, plunging the room into a sudden darkness that seemed even deeper than before.
"If Nymeria stays," Tony said in the dark, "she will know how to do that. She will know it is not magic, but electrons. And she will know something else."
Tony relit a classic oil lamp, the flame now appearing dull and primitive.
"She will know how to use this energy to separate salt from water. She will know how to build factories that drink the sea and spit out fresh water."
He approached Oberyn, who was still in shock.
"Give me your daughter for ten years, Oberyn. And I promise you she will return with the power to transform the desert of Dorne into a garden. Refuse... and you will remain in the dark, praying to gods who will never answer you, while the rest of the world lights up without you."
Oberyn looked at Tony, then at his daughter Nymeria. Nymeria was not looking at her father. She was looking at the extinguished bulb with a devouring hunger. She had seen God, and she wanted to know how he worked.
Obara sobbed softly in a corner, broken by the vision of the impossible.
The Prince of Dorne understood then that he had lost. He could not fight against the sun in a bottle.