Chapter 26: The Genesis Protocol
The victory over Volantis was not an end, but a beginning. It was a declaration to the fractured powers of Essos that a new player had taken the board, one whose moves were not dictated by the rusty gears of tradition or the fleeting passions of greed, but by a new and unnervingly effective calculus of power. In the two years that had passed since the Doom of Valyria, Lysaro had been transformed under the council's rule. Now, with the shadow of the Harpy forced to recede, their city-state, and its new sister-city of Mantarys, stood as a beacon of stability in a world tearing itself apart.
For the council—the five former slaves who were now the Prophet-Regents of a god—it was a time of heady, terrifying realization. They had a functioning government, a booming economy, a fearsome and loyal army, and a populace united by the zealous, fervent belief in the Golden Covenant. They were, by any measure, a nation.
The god observed this from his domain. The faith that flowed from his two cities was a rich and steady river, nourishing the Great Trees of his power. His celestial map glowed with the two bright, interconnected points of light that were his provinces. But the rest of the map was a canvas of darkness and chaotic, flickering embers. The Century of Blood raged on. Cities fell. Dynasties crumbled. Entire peoples were scattered to the winds. To the divine CEO, this was not a tragedy; it was the greatest market opportunity in the history of the world. His model of civilization worked. It was tested, it was resilient, it was profitable. It was time to expand the franchise.
The strategic meeting took place in the capitol townhouse in Lysaro, a building that was now the nerve centre of their burgeoning league. The mood was confident, forward-looking. Lyra, the Prophet of the Mind, stood before the great map of Essos, which now permanently dominated their war room.
"The Volantene threat is neutralized, for now," she began, her voice crisp and analytical. "Our misdirection campaign with the Dothraki has forced them to focus on their landward borders. The other Free Cities see us as a stable, if eccentric, trading partner. We have a window. A window of opportunity to consolidate and expand before the great powers can re-focus their attention on us."
She pointed to the cluster of cities around the Bay of Slavers. "This entire region is politically and morally bankrupt. Old Ghis is a museum piece, its masters squabbling over genealogies while their foundations rot. Yunkai is a nest of infighting merchants. Astapor is a cancer, a city built on the singular, brutal industry of creating the Unsullied, a process that guarantees the hatred of every man they break. These are not strong states. They are hollow gourds, waiting to be cracked open."
"We cracked one," Jorah said, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. "Mantarys is a testament to the fact that these 'Great Masters' are nothing without the slaves they brutalize."
"The Mantaryan Gambit was a success," Lyra affirmed. "It proved our model is replicable. But it was a reactive, ad-hoc operation. If we are to grow, if we are to truly build the foundation for the future our god demands, we cannot act on chance. We need a formal doctrine. A protocol for ideological expansion."
It was then that Kaelen, who had been standing silently, his mind communing with his patron, spoke. He had felt the god's immense, continental-scale ambition, the desire not just to build a sanctuary, but to reshape the world. The whisper he had received was not a hint, but a divine mandate.
He walked to the map and swept his hand across the decaying city-states of Slaver's Bay.
"The god has shown me a vision," he said, his voice imbued with a profound authority that silenced the room. "He showed me the Great Tree in his domain. And it produced not one seed, but hundreds. He showed me the wind carrying these seeds across all of Essos, to every dark and broken corner of this continent. And wherever a seed landed, a new tree of light began to grow, its roots purifying the poisoned soil."
He looked at each of his fellow prophets in turn, his eyes burning with the fire of his god's ambition. "The Mantaryan Gambit was not a one-time victory. It was the first test of our sacred mission. The god has given us a new, great purpose. He calls it the 'Great Harvest.' We are to go forth and plant the seeds of his empire. We will liberate the oppressed, we will cast down the tyrants, and we will unite the freed peoples under the single banner of the Golden Covenant. We will build a new nation from the ashes of the old."
He paused, letting the sheer, breathtaking scale of his words settle. "We will build the Golden Dragon Theocracy."
The declaration transformed them. They were no longer just the rulers of a league of cities; they were the apostles of an expansionist faith, the architects of a divinely ordained empire. Their work over the next year was to turn that divine mandate into a functioning, systematic protocol for conquest. They called it the Genesis Protocol. It was a blueprint for bloodless, ideological revolution, a step-by-step guide to exporting their civilization.
The First Pillar of the Protocol was The Targeting Division. Lyra took command of this, transforming her intelligence network into a sophisticated analytical body. The Serpent's Coil tavern in Meereen, now supplemented by a dozen other listening posts in ports across the region, gathered a constant stream of information. Lyra's agents didn't just look for military weakness; they analyzed economic instability, social unrest, the decadence of the ruling class, and the prevalence of popular resentment. They created a "Ripe for Revolution" index, ranking potential targets. Their first two primary targets were chosen: Astapor, whose entire society was built on the mass production of eunuch slave-soldiers, creating a vast, disciplined, and deeply resentful underclass; and Old Ghis, the ancient, crumbling cradle of the Ghiscari Empire, a city ruled by squabbling, inbred masters who were utterly disconnected from the reality of their own decay.
The Second Pillar was The Covenant Corps. This was Elara's creation, the soft-power arm of their expansion. Recognizing that a liberated city needs builders more than soldiers, she established an academy in Lysaro. The Corps recruited the most promising and faithful individuals from both Lysaro and Mantarys—engineers, healers, teachers, administrators, and judges. They underwent a rigorous education in the principles of the Golden Covenant and the practical skills of civic management. The Covenant Corps would be the force that entered a city after its liberation, the ones who would actually build the new society. They were an army of bureaucrats, doctors, and teachers, the true conquerors of hearts and minds.
The Third Pillar was The Wyrm's Fangs. Jorah's Serpent Guard was reformed and expanded. It was no longer a single entity, but the foundation of a new legionary system. The First Fang, based in Lysaro, was the home guard, the symbol of their power. The Second Fang, stationed in the newly fortified Mantarys, was their expeditionary force. Their doctrine, which Jorah drilled into them relentlessly, was not that of a conquering army. It was "Rapid Intervention and Stabilization." They were not a hammer to crush cities, but a scalpel to excise the tumor of the ruling class with surgical precision.
The Fourth Pillar was The Golden Hoard. This was Hesh's domain, assisted by the ever-trembling Pyat, who was now permanently, and gratefully, relocated to Lysaro. They were the treasury and the ministry of industry. The workshops of the Saris artisans, now expanded and secretly subsidized, produced high-value trade goods—the singing glass, the superior steel, the advanced textiles. Hesh oversaw their production, ensuring quality. Pyat, a genius of finance when properly motivated by fear and security, laundered the immense profits through the Serpent Trading Company's labyrinthine corporate structure. The Golden Hoard would fund the entire Genesis Protocol, from the bribes paid by Lyra's agents to the salaries of the Covenant Corps.
With the four pillars of their new imperial machine in place, it was time to launch the first operation. The chosen target was Old Ghis. Astapor was a greater prize, but its military, the Unsullied, presented a unique challenge that required more preparation. Old Ghis was softer, its decay more advanced. It would be the perfect place to field-test the protocol.
The assault on Old Ghis began not with a declaration of war, but with a whisper. Tarek, his cover as a successful wine merchant now unimpeachable, established a new branch of the Serpent Trading Company in the ancient city. He found a populace simmering with resentment. The Great Masters of Ghis, who traced their lineage back thousands of years, were arrogant, cruel, and utterly incompetent. They spent their days in pointless rivalries and their nights in decadent pursuits, while their city crumbled around them.
Tarek's agents began to distribute the pamphlets of the Covenant. They spoke to the city's guards, who were poorly paid and held in contempt by their masters. They spoke to the merchants, who were being crushed by arbitrary taxes. They spoke to the vast slave population, offering them a vision of a world where their worth was not determined by their chains. The seed of revolution was planted.
Simultaneously, Lyra's economic warfare began. She discovered the Ghiscari masters' wealth was tied up in their vast copper mines. The Serpent Trading Company flooded the eastern markets with cheap, high-quality copper from a new source they had acquired in the Basilisk Isles, crashing the price and gutting the Ghiscari economy. The masters, their incomes slashed, responded by increasing the brutality of their overseers and cutting the slaves' meager rations, further fueling the fires of rebellion.
With the city destabilized, it was time for Jorah's scalpel. His target was the council of the Great Masters themselves. They were protected by a core of loyal, highly-paid bodyguards. Jorah did not attack them. Instead, his agents, using the immense wealth of the Golden Hoard, simply bought them. They approached the captain of the guard and offered him a fortune and a new life in the Summer Isles in exchange for a single act of dereliction. On a specific night, he and his men would simply fail to show up for their duty at the council chambers.
That night, the leaders of the Ghiscari slave rebellion, armed with Saris steel and fueled by the promise of the Covenant, stormed the masters' pyramids. With the elite guard mysteriously absent, the household guards, who had already been swayed by the Covenant's pamphlets, put up only a token resistance. The rebellion was swift, bloody, and shockingly successful. The ancient houses of Old Ghis fell in a single night.
The city was free, but it was in chaos. As the sun rose on a new day of bloody, uncertain freedom, a small fleet of ships bearing the banner of the Serpent appeared in the harbour. It was the "humanitarian mission" from Lysaro.
The climax of the operation was not a battle, but a negotiation. Kaelen and Elara met with the triumphant but overwhelmed rebel leaders. They brought not soldiers, but the first graduating class of the Covenant Corps.
"You have won your city," Kaelen said to the rebel leader, a scarred former gladiator. "But you have inherited a ruin. You have no laws, no administrators, no engineers, no healers. We offer you these. We offer you the Golden Covenant as a blueprint to build a new and better Ghis. We offer you a place in our League, as equal partners."
The exhausted rebels, facing the impossible task of building a nation from scratch, saw the offer for what it was: a divine salvation. They accepted.
The faith that surged to the god from the liberation of Old Ghis was vast. It was the revolutionary faith of a second city, proof that the model was sound. It was the belief of his followers, whose power and competence had reached a new zenith. They were no longer just a church; they were a movement, an ideological contagion spreading across the failing states of Essos.
In his domain, the god watched as a third Great Tree of Light sprang from the ground of his celestial map, its location corresponding with the ancient city of Ghis. Its roots immediately began to spread, intertwining with those of Lysaro and Mantarys, forming a single, powerful, tri-city foundation. He watched his great tree produce a shower of new, diamond-like seeds, and he knew that each one represented a city waiting to be harvested: Astapor, Yunkai, and beyond.
He had given his followers the final, ultimate whisper: the divine mandate for empire. The Genesis Protocol was active. The Great Harvest had begun in earnest. The Century of Blood was a time of endings for the old world, but for the Golden Dragon Theocracy, it was the glorious, violent, and unstoppable dawn of a new age.