Jon wakes up to sound of talking. Voices in grating and foreign accent broke his haze of deep sleep and opening his eyes and seeing just black all around him, made him think that he gone blind from the torture of Tattered Prince. However the world of darkness that few days ago would have made him afraid, now felt nothing but minor inconvenience. Though the world of darkness in front of him soon started to change, as different colours like white, and the shades of grey started to blend in his now canvas of night. It was as if someone had removed the pigments of colours itself from his life but he knew what it truly was, Cerebral achromatopsia. A rare condition where person starts to see world in just black and white due to damage to damage in brain's visual cortex, something he had suffered for countless days in that ship.
"Do you truly want that weak boy, Nea? He won't survive a moon here. He'll be a weight on your shoulders, a thorn in your path to freedom." A man's voice thick in accent and scorn sounds all around the room.
Jon tries to raise his head to place where sound came from but the small movement turns into a mistake as pain emerges from all over his body, from toes to skull. When the throbbing finally settled, he looks around and finds himself huddled in the corner of a cramped, iron cage. Around him lay shapes of men and women both in miserable conditions just like him. Their eyes hollow and bruised, with nothing but dry and stretched skin full of marks.
He had been hearing the talk between them for some time without understanding, but now as the words came into focus, he began remembering all things he had suffered. Being the subject of torture for days he had forgotten count off, from nails beings hammered into his finger bones, to whips on wound scabs and hammer to his chest and back. And then… the silence of the cold sea, a presence in that darkness of freezing water that struck a bargain with him. His breath turns uneven remembering the experience as he pushes himself upright on instincts to escape.
Outside the cage he notices two shadows watching him. A man of average height, unremarkable if not for the cruel and merchant like smile on his face, and beside him a woman with a built of a warrior. Even while robbed of colour from his eyes, he could note the beauty she had but also the warrior she looked to be, with arms thick as any tree branch and hair bound tight to her scalp.
The man seeing him stirring. "There, the weakling has finally woken after days of sleep. Since he can move his own legs now, and you so adamant on buying him, you can take him, Nea."
The woman, Nea, does not not answer in words, her only reply being the incline of her head in a slow and deliberate motion like a predator confirming its choice of prey. Hearing the confirmation of deal, the cage door opens, and rough hands seizes Jon, dragging him from the filth filled stone floor. His stomach twisting on seeing the waste lying all across the floor before coming to a startling realization, as he felt his body… it felt small and light.
The uncomfortable fat that his predecessor had been carrying for years was now simply gone, as if the bargain he had gone through had stripped off excess meat of his bones. Before he could process the loss, the men hauled him upright before tossing him through the open door, where he lands in a heap at the woman, Nea's, feet. She towers over him, watching with endless patience as he tries to stand.
The man's tone in light voice starts again, this time laced in a sweet and final appeal. "You know I value your life, don't you Nea. So I'll ask one last time, do you truly want a half-dead boy like him? You think he'll live through all the hell the things that the Thousandand the Shadow Council will put him through? There are men in here from Toad Island, from Dothraki, even Ghis. Strong ones, born with blood to the fight. So why take this… this useless thing?"
Nea says nothing, her silence streching thin for a long moment as she continues to eye him, studying Jon with eyes that seemed to see through anything. When she finally spoke, her voice was a low and cold in a straight finallity, "Issa kostōba."[1]
The man's eyes, hearing her words narrows to slits, "Lo ziry qringaomagon ao gīmigon. Skoros jāhor massigon naejot ao, dont ao?"[2]
Valyrian, High Valyrian. Jon instantly recognizes the familiarity in the language. The language that his predecessor had dismissed as useless. Meanwhile Nea gives a sharp and decisive nod, as if the man's argument had no effect on him. She then helps him rise off the ground and then guides him out of slave house with a surprisingly gentle push, holding his shoulders.
"That was High Valyrian, wasn't it?" Jon starts the conversation. His voice now sounding like a stranger even to his own ears. He looks at the chains on his wrists, then at Nea, "Am I your slave?"
A faint, wintry curl touches her lips, gone before he could be sure he'd seen it. "Yes it was and no you are not my slave." She removes clothing of her neck, showing a thick bronze collar around her throat, revealing deep finger marks pressed into the skin by its side. "I am a slave myself."
Jon shudders seeing deep marks of fingers and nails all around her neck and going to sensitive regions downwards understanding things she might have gone through. While Nea leads him through twisting narrow streets. Low buildings of stone and timber pressed together while many hairy men and women walked around with collars around them. The air smelt terrible all around the city with pungent smell of fish and whale oil as he finally asks, "Where am I?"
Nea doesn't answer walking silently all the while to the outskirts of the settlement. Finally after reaching a cave whose entrance was shaped like a jaw. Where she finally stops and turns to look him in the eye. "You are in Ib, boy. And you are a slave-fighter now, property of Lady Lysaphos Irryis, of the Shadow Council."
Her footsteps echoes as she starts descending into the cavern's deep throat. "Now," she calls over her shoulder, the sound echoing in the dark, "tell me your name."
He freezes hearing her words. Jon Targaryen, was dead. That life nothing more than lie, a little boy living under the weight of crimes committed not by him but his parents. Edric., dead too. That man from another world had died long before. Only the stubborn core of his values, his sharp memories, his refusal to bend to a another person's will, only that remained.
Suddenly his brain reacts, binging something forth he had forgotten being almost unconscious when thrown in the sea. The pact is sealed. A new heritage is granted. You now carry the lineage of Ar-Pharazôn. He hopes you survive.
His body immediately comes to halt as memories come back and he notices the name from the message, the blood of a race who terrified the forces of the great Dark Lord Sauron with their might alone, with him now carrying the lineage of one of the most powerful king in Tolkien verse, Ar-Pharazôn, the Golden King, the proudest and most powerful King of Second Age. The name struck him like a hammer, shaking all his body. A conqueror, from a far more grand and mighty world.
Nea turns around hearing no movements behind her and seeing the boy standing locked in his place, her brow knitting in confusion. "Is it so hard to remember your name? Or have they finally broken you so you cannot even name yourself?"
He swallows deep and starts, whispering the first word that came to his mind seeing the name of the King, a name that felt too grand and terrible for the thin and bruised body he now inhabited.
"A****ar."
"What?" Nea asks loudly, unable to hear the whisper from his tongue.
Jon lifts his gaze, meeting her eyes without flinching. The new name now an act of rebellion, and promise to himself. "My name is Aratar[3]."
[1] Translation--He is strong
[2] Translation--If he fail you know what will happen to you, dont you?
[3] Aratar means The Supreme One